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Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

guernicamag.com

11–20 of 278 posts

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#11
post #4

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#12
post #5

Teachers would probably have bigger problems. According to clay christensen , the guy behind "the innovator's dillema" , more than 50% of colleges will go bankrupt soon(until 2020/2024).

I found that pretty startling, so I googled and found this article:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-colleges-...

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#13

The education meat grinder destroys adjuncts, it saddles many students with crushing, non-self-liquidating debt and it outpaces inflation faster than any other major cost category: http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/April/130430/6C71... A bad product, the employees and customers are treated poorly, and prices are skyrocketing. Hmmm.

It begs the question "where the hell is my tuition going?"

I was taking at a private "degree mill" part time classes at $180 per credit hour. The school required 7 students to teach a 4 credit class during normal hours. So at the minimum number of students the school was just making enough money for overhead... Most clases were 10-15 students. It was a private school, so tuition covered almost all their bills, no state funding.

Now ask where sutdents in State Funded Colleges money is going when there are 50 students (and more!) in a class? Where the hell is the undergrad tuition money going if the school only pays "minimum wage" for adjunct or grad school staff?? Where is State and Federal dinging going if Undergrads are paying more than their share of the university bills? It's not gping to TEACHING... And it's not going to "student contact" professors either, and its not "healthcare" or "retirement"... There's a giant money hole in the system.

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides teacher's salaries.

I thought sports were mainly profit centers.

Not exactly true:

http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#15
This doesn't invalidate the OP's message in a meaningful way, but if you're interested in the opening anecdote, a reporter from Slate delved deep into the circumstances of Ms. Vojtko and found a more complex story than one just of woe: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/20...

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#16
Good point on how the pay problem for adjunct faculty is intertwined with the "everyone gets a trophy" problem for students:

> “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#17
post #4

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

It's very clear where it's going. The number of administrative staff at colleges and universities have skyrocketed in the past 30 years.

Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top.

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#18
>“The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”

So it is unusual now, but it is going to become more common in the future?

> So adjuncting is decidedly not a middle-class job. But it does sound like one, probably because, before the adjunct bubble, it was.

..."Professor" sounds like a middle-class job. I'm not in academia, but when I was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded like a grad student on a stipend.

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#19
At my computer science university (private university with HQ based in France) in downtown San Francisco, teachers were paid between 100$ and 300$ / hr, which I find decent.

100$ was mostly for teachers with not much experience, mostly students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers.

Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

#20
Slightly ironic, but Guernica Magazine has a "jobs" page on their site: http://www.guernicamag.com/jobs/

If you click through, you'll find that all of their positions are unpaid. It seems that magazine editor is no longer a middle-class job, either. You have to be rich enough to be able to work for free.

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