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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

#81

Post by rdtsc »

dnautics wrote: post #69
rdtsc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students need 6 figure loans to graduate. > Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoen…

>As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed". False dichotomy. There are plenty of things that fit in between "rapacious megacorporations" and "government cronies". Like, for example, unsubsidized nonprofit educational institutes. Yo…

> You know, like you might have found in the 19th - first half of the 20th century.

19th century? So it is easier to imagine going back to 19th century than a system with an accessible public university system without student loans.

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

#82

Post by AnimalMuppet »

DennisP wrote: post #11
soup10 wrote: 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.

Coursera + the CLEP exams = real, tested learning, and college credit on the cheap. (Not that you can get a full degree just on the basis of CLEP tests, unfortunately...)

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

#83

Post by Jtsummers »

jmckib wrote: post #76
Jtsummers wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My primary issue with school vouchers is the poor state of private schools, at least here in GA (outside of the major cities like Atlanta and Savannah). The Catholic schools are decent to good, but often are only K-8. There are few private secular schools. The rest of the private schools are very conservative "Christian Academy" types whose education leaves their students complete morons in some fields (math, science…

I bet that if we switched to vouchers then you'd see a lot of new private schools catering to a wider audience. It also might be reasonable to exclude private schools with religious instruction from the voucher program.

I'd like to be that optimistic, and maybe it'd happen, but the politics around here would make it unlikely.

Also, wrt the exclusion of religious schools, that'd be a non-starter in the southern states at least. It'd probably make more sense to mandate some minimum curricula or require that inspectors be able to attend the school unannounced if the school is receiving public moneys via vouchers. There'd likely be a tantrum about religious oppression, but, really, man and dinosaurs, contrary to the teachings at many of the churches and Christian academies around here, really didn't live together [1].

[1] Ok, in the conventional sense of dinosaurs, not the XKCD sense of birds as living dinosaurs. http://xkcd.com/1211/

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

#84

Post by bilbo0s »

tammer wrote: post #17
soup10 wrote: 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...

Just to point out what may not be so obvious... a lot of the administrative and non instructional staff are not what many of us would consider to be "management".

For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically... it is the department for all of the IT people at the University. It is enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that is just one of the operations level bureaucracies that the University needs. There is Facilities. There is Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.

These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. Be that as it may, honest people CAN debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the cost rises being discussed.

[Edited for grammar]

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

#85

Post by bmm6o »

__xtrimsky wrote: post #48
jrochkind1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of university teachers being paid per hour, rather than per-class (adjunct) or salaried. How do they account for time spent in course preparation, grading, and communicating with students out of classes? I am also not familiar with for-profit universities though, which it sounds like maybe yours was? I am still sort of thinking that something got misunderstood on the way from the family member sneaki…

The teachers are being paid by the hour, but it does not account for grading or anything done out of the class. This might be one of the reasons it is so expensive. If a teacher has one class that lasts 8 hours, and is paid 100$ /hr, he will end up with 800$, even if he has to spend 10 extra hours grading everyone. My university was for profit, as I said it's a french based university. The director owns multiple Lamb…

It seems very misleading to say that they are being paid $X/hour if the denominator is supposed to represent the number of class hours rather than the number of hours worked actually spent working. Everyone will assume the latter, so you should be explicit about that.

As everyone who has done any teaching knows, the time spent standing in front of a class is just a small part of the total required time.

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

#86

Post by aidenn0 »

soup10 wrote: post #4

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

It's going to pay for things that the state used to pay for.

The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.

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

#88

Post by Retric »

nkurz wrote: post #44
jjoonathan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a look at CMU's financials and it definitely looks like the money is going towards salaries. They don't offer a breakdown between the different kinds of salaries, naturally. Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information? https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...

Here are numbers for Duke and Barnard. I have no idea if they are representative, but they have respectively 10% and 5% of their total budget going to administration. The Barnard link has quite a depth of information. Duke: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-... Barnard: https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_boo...

That's not really true. Duke includes finical aid as a cost but that's not actual spending. So from the chart, 10/.76 = ~13% is administrative costs.

Though the Text says out of 90k in spending $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries which puts just salary's for administration at 15.5 not including their share of the building etc.

So, a reasonable estimate ~25-40% of each dollar actually spent goes to administration depending on where you draw the line. AKA is a dean Administration or Faculty.

PS: Not that facility get to actually spend anywhere close to 100% of there time on teaching.

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

#89

Post by CurtMonash »

There's a deeply-established credentialing systems that would blend very well with MOOCs and the like. That said, it's not the US undergrad one, and there's a worldwide belief that US university credentials are a big deal.

I don't know what things are like now, but in my grandfather's day European universities had a very different credentialing system from US undergrad institutions. In lieu of course credit, course-based grades, etc., they simply had a battery of (oral) examinations at the end.

US grad schools can be much like that. In essence, there were no course requirements for a PhD in mathematics at Harvard, but rather a three-day Qualifying Examination, a Minor Thesis (don't ask), and a traditional dissertation. Much the same was true of a physics PhD at Princeton then (the 1970s), except that there was an experiment in the mix (even for theoreticians). And in the Princeton math department, the joke was that students were asked the first day "Does anybody wish to submit his thesis?", and the record was 3 months.

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

#90

Post by dustcoin »

esrauch wrote: post #52
jdreaver wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such little regulation? Harsh capitalism? Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. Most university students go to public schools. Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government. Harsh capitalism would be harsh on the universities who cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for…

Is it actually better for students that they can't default on their loans? I usually hear it the opposite way, that even after bankruptcy proceedings you still have your student loan debt following you around.

Students do default on student loans, even though they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. 14.7% of students who started repayment in 2010 defaulted within 3 years. (Source: http://www2.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/defaultmanagement/cdr.html)

If the government did not guarantee and subsidize the loans, interest rates would be higher and/or banks would be more careful which students they lent to.

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