So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??
University administrators, mostly. They outnumber faculty at many universities, and their salaries are rising fast.
Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
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Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#32The 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 sta…
You sound like you're trying to justify a bad decision...
Outside of the top-ranked flagship state schools -- which carry as much prestige as an ivy in some fields (e.g. in CS uiuc, u.w., austin, etc.) -- state schools are actually by far the best bang for the buck around.
For example, $180/cr is actually not far off from what most non-flagship state schools cost. In fact, there are schools in my state that cost within $10 or so of that. Crucially, all these institutions have quite good reputations in the region, no one perceives them as diploma mills, and they all have great CS departments with a sense of continuity.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#33These basal, fundamental flaws in the educational system give me pause to awe, and a gut feeling the US is gonna get trampled many times over by the likes of China within some decades. So little regulation and such harsh capitalism is eating its heart out bit by bit. I guess what keeps America bright at this point is a legacy from the past century, that's slowly eroding, and the brain drain sucked chiefly out of Asia…
I disagree, while there are glaring problems within U.S. educational systems there are two significant factors mitigating how crippling they are long term.
1. Opportunities, there are tons of opportunities in U.S., if you want to learn you will find a way to despite all the flaws.
2. Immigration, there are a lot of highly educated people immigrating into U.S.
Additionally we still cannot anticipate how whole MOOCs business will turn out.
So yes the are problems and they are very bad, but not as crippling as you might expect.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#34These basal, fundamental flaws in the educational system give me pause to awe, and a gut feeling the US is gonna get trampled many times over by the likes of China within some decades. So little regulation and such harsh capitalism is eating its heart out bit by bit. I guess what keeps America bright at this point is a legacy from the past century, that's slowly eroding, and the brain drain sucked chiefly out of Asia…
Such little regulation? What about Common Core, and the long history of ineffective state mandates to "improve" the education system? The education system is highly regulated, and nearly entirely state-run (not counting those few who are able to afford private school tuition on top of school taxes or the time to homeschool). Many, if not most, schools in the U.S. resemble prisons. Top-down. Hierarchical. Rigid. Compu…
Just amazing that you and goldfeld are both right - the US education system is at once inadequately designed, and also being sieged by corporate interests as well. Doesn't hurt that some school administrators don't reasonably respond/engage with parents except those who have lawyers, which parents unfortunately engage without trying to engage the school first.
Ultimately though, I think the sad state of schools in this country is a (big) symptom of society's greater ills. Rampant corporatism, anti-intellectualism, and creeping authoritarianism from a runaway security industrial complex have been happening for decades... and schools are just one aspect of the decay of the social fabric.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#35At 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.
Do you have a source for these numbers? $100/hr is highly suspect for "students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers".
I had a family member working at the school. She knew all the salaries. I was often asking, and getting heart attacks when crappy teachers were getting paid 300$ /hr.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#36So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??
It takes a lot of administrators to figure out how to keep contingent lecturers at just under full time employment.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#37Do college rankings take the percentage of classes taught by tenure track professors into account? US News should dock schools with greater than X% of courses taught by adjuncts.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#38Good 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 Re…
I'd up-vote you twice if I could.
Students may pay for the privilege to receive a higher education, but the real customer is society. The product is competent graduates that will keep society moving forwards.
Once you start asking the opinion of the raw materials in your assembly line, everything goes downhill.
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#39So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??
To the taxpayers. The share of state and federal funding (both direct and through grants) has been declining steadily over the last twenty years. Your student loan debt may be crippling but aren't you glad that you get to pay lower taxes?
Re: Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care
#40So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??
This is anecdotal only. I used to be a full-time college instructor, and I still teach there occasionally part-time and interact with my former colleagues. Since I've left, the college has added a number of full-time staff to media and eLearning (e.g. maintain the LMS, setup video recording and conferencing systems, etc) and, for every dean, there is now an assistant dean to help with administrative workload.
Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.