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Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

theguardian.com

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Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#71

Post by mmooss »

jvvw wrote: post #51
cherryteastain wrote: post #9

All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university. We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when ear…

When I read the article when it came out, I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford as it's the same at all the universities. It's also been that for a long time - I earned comparable amounts as a DPhil student and post-doc teaching at Oxford and another UK university. More recently I've worked as a tutor for The Open University and the pay for that has felt in a similar ballpark once you take into account all t…

> I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford

Oxford singles itself out as elite, thus "good to be able to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it [the CV]!". They are being held to that standard.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#72

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

oersted1234 wrote: post #66
shermantanktop wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an extremely broad statement. Biology, physics, architecture and history are pretty different professional cultures.

Most UK universities place a lot of value on teaching experience. If you have a PhD degree from Cambridge or Oxford, a decent publication track record and significant teaching experience, you will typically get lectureship (assistant professor) offers straight after you finish your doctoral studies. Some teaching experience will be valued more than having a stellar publication record, especially if you have a good re…

It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience. If you're after a research career, e.g. a research fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an astounding publication record and I don't reckon that having any teaching experience is going to help you with that.

Not least because in academia, either you teach, or you do research. You can't do both.

>> Teaching is a great filter. It makes sure they stay up-to-date, they are technically good and they take pride in their research field.

If that's your experience, that must be something that depends on the field of research and we must be in different fields. In CS, teaching is indeed a good filter- in the sense that it separates the teachers from the researchers. I have the direct experience of my PI, who has not done a day of research after becoming a lecturer. Because there is no time. Teaching takes so much admin work that there's no time left for research. I mean any above-junior academic position takes too much admin work, but teaching really gets the cookie. My experience so far has been that senior academics who still take an active role in research find ways to avoid teaching like the plague. Although you can't really escape it. You'll at least mark some papers in your subject, whether you like it or not (and with TA-ing from PhDs or not).

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#73

Post by BeetleB »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #31

is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary steppi…

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research

Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students.

I did my undergrad at one of those places. Currently the ratio is 1:17. The percentage of classes with under 20 students is 60%.

Because it's low ranked, the pressure to get grants isn't as high. Because each course has fewer students, the professors are much more available. As an example, a professor who had only 3 hours a week for office hours was thought of as "stingy". Most had about 6 hours. They'd combine the OH for all the courses they were teaching, and could easily offer 5+ hours because there are so few students (at times no one would show up).

Only one humanities course was taught by a non-faculty member. Everyone else was tenured, on the tenure track, or a permanent assistant professor (i.e. spousal hire).

The quality of education was pretty good, too. They probably had a lighter load than a top university, but I'm not sure that's bad. I went to a top 3 school for graduate studies, and took some of their undergrad courses while there. It was brutal, and the undergrads were clearly overworked. Worse - most of the work was just busy work. They weren't really working on anything more challenging than the folks in low ranked universities.

Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

If you really want the name recognition, go do a quick MS at a top school thereafter.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#74

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

robocat wrote: post #67
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEmE7IYoLk Summary: colleges are way too selective today at the high end. Boomers got into elite schools far more easily, although there were less schools. It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking order of school "eliteness". But the boomer thing is spot on.

Paraphrased: it used to be easier for boomers to get into say the top 2%? I can only guess that the meaning of elite has changed. Aside: a comment with the word "boomer" in it is usually offensive in my experience. But doing worry, you'll get a different word applied to you when you reach the same age cohort. Disclosure: not a boomer. There are two types of people in the world: those that split the world into two gro…

And the third one that can't be placed in any category, let's not forget.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#75

Post by oersted1234 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #72
oersted1234 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most UK universities place a lot of value on teaching experience. If you have a PhD degree from Cambridge or Oxford, a decent publication track record and significant teaching experience, you will typically get lectureship (assistant professor) offers straight after you finish your doctoral studies. Some teaching experience will be valued more than having a stellar publication record, especially if you have a good re…

It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience. If you're after a research career, e.g. a research fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an astounding publication record and I don't reckon that having any teaching experience…

IMHO, this also applies if you want a research career. At the end of the day, you eventually need a permanent position. Most professors at top UK universities got established in Academia by doing a PhD and getting a lectureship straight after their PhD or sometimes a postdoc. Lectureships demand significant research and teaching and supervision experience.

A high-end fellowship like the ones you mention is also fine if you want to improve your publication track record. In some fields getting a lectureship after your PhD or postdoc might be extremely difficult as the market is too crowded.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#76

Post by cherryteastain »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #69
cherryteastain wrote: post #9

All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn some extra income within the university. We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia. Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn £30-40k as a postdoc when ear…

The article is talking about full-on lectureships, for example, this part-time role, initially advertised as full-time, according to the article: >> One of Oxford’s top colleges, Christ Church, which had an income of £42.6m in 2022-23, is currently advertising a stipendiary lectureship in modern European history for £15,244 to £16,983. For comparison, 15-16k was the range of my PhD stipend at Imperial College London…

To be fair, Imperial is the best paying UK university by far. Postdoc positions at Imperial pay better than Lecturer/Senior Lecturer positions at other universities.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#77

Post by Marsymars »

blibble wrote: post #70
mmooss wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> phd students love doing supervisions, they literally queue up around the block for the teaching experience and the tax free cash Maybe they have no choice and are being exploited. PhD students current and former that I've spoken to definitely think they are being exploited. As examples, look at the comments from actual PhD students and postdocs on this page.

I lived with three of them, they loved doing them

Loving your job isn't mutually exclusive from being exploited. The best job I ever had was in a academic/research-tangential position out of school, but the pay was bad and the effort/reward required for advancement was unreasonable, so I left after a year.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#78

Post by derbOac »

aSanchezStern wrote: post #58
xhkkffbf wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think traditionally it was for people who were unmarried. Hence its connection to the church. So expecting enough to raise a family is a relatively new idea.

Not sure what the timeline on that is, but the University of Washington had housing specifically for PhD students with families in the 60s/70s IIRC

Yes, a lot of public universities have had them. My knowledge of them at the two places I'm familiar with is that they're being phased out. One of them they were literally slated for demolition to make room for some other facilities (sport facilities I think) and another is still there but they opened up to other students and I think there was discussion of replacing them too, although they're still there as far as I know.

My overall sense of universities is that, like a lot of places, they increasingly see people as disposable and don't invest in them as much unless they're unusually financially profitable. Student housing is probably a bit different because people are marrying and having kids at older ages, but in the cases I know of the housing and housing cooperatives were still being used and liked. The subtext of discussions that I recall was that this wasn't enough, that the land needs to be put to use making more money for the university rather than supporting graduate students.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#79

Post by vikramkr »

BeetleB wrote: post #73
insane_dreamer wrote: post #31

is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is that it used to be a temporary steppi…

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…

If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support for education. And being public does not make them immune from going the adjunct all the way route.

Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20 students might not have a more available professor, because they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.

For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

Re: Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-economy terms

#80

Post by BeetleB »

vikramkr wrote: post #79
BeetleB wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this sounds like every university in the US, which uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. I did my undergrad at one of those pla…

If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support f…

> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like.

And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics?

The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into.

Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats directly. Most people don't have that shortlist, though.

> For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

And that's why you look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. It's certainly easy to find universities with as good a faculty/student ratio as what I posted, but with only 20% of the classes having less than 20 students.

Incidentally, if they have dozens of small classes, it's a good sign. A lot of departments will cancel a class if it has less than, say, 8 students.

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