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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

#91

Post by jpulec »

bilbo0s wrote: post #84
tammer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enormo…

I worked at DoIT before graduating and moving out to the Bay Area. And your characterization regarding its bureaucracy and efficiency are pretty spot on.

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

#92

Post by x0054 »

It is stunning that a public school teacher apparently makes almost 2x what a college teacher makes, at least in California. Mind you, I am not arguing that school teachers should make less, collage profs should make more. This is amazing though, were is the money going.

Anecdotally, I think a lot of the money is spent on outside services through a corrupt bidding process. Back in 2008 I used to run a document scanning company. We did large contracts for the state of California and the Four Seasons Hotel chain. We had glowing recommendations from all of our customers, including a lot of large businesses in San Diego. So, foolishly, we thought we could toss our hat into the ring when UCSD started looking for a company to do their document management. Our bid was (based on what we could find out) roughly 1/2 of the winning bid. We had all the required bonds, same quality, faster turnaround time, and we offered more services. We didn't get the job. So UCSD paid twice as much for the same document scanning service, meanwhile some poor adjunkt professor is eating cat food! Great!

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

#93

Post by vacri »

liveoneggs wrote: post #57
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…

what, exactly, is better than lectures and exams?

I don't know about US grading schemes, but here in Australia, pretty much every course has some form of assignments or series thereof. The assignments can be a small or substantial part of the final mark, or even the total final mark, depending on the kind of course.

I suspect the same is true in US tertiary institutions, and that railing against exams is just a tired old trope. It's hard to believe that it would be the general standard in the US to have the entirety of the final mark attributable to exams. But, like I said, I'm not familiar with their curricula.

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

#95

Post by jessaustin »

This is a direct and entirely predictable result of the publicly-administered, nondischargeable-through-bankruptcy student loans. We can't have everyone going to college and also have all colleges be nice workplaces. Society has recently taken the former option, but one can imagine that decision changing.

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

#96

Post by School-Cotton »

cheepin wrote: post #6
soup10 wrote: post #4

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

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

Isn't "research" mainly professor and grad student salaries? What's the difference?

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

#97

Post by sitkack »

x0054 wrote: post #92

It is stunning that a public school teacher apparently makes almost 2x what a college teacher makes, at least in California. Mind you, I am not arguing that school teachers should make less, collage profs should make more. This is amazing though, were is the money going. Anecdotally, I think a lot of the money is spent on outside services through a corrupt bidding process. Back in 2008 I used to run a document scanni…

All of those bids and the result along with the findings should be public, as in published.

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

#98

Post by sitkack »

bradleyjg wrote: post #53
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...

There's a bunch of relevant data in this paper, albeit from 2008 (starting on 21): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2153122 Here's a summary of the conclusions A recent study by two professors of economics attempts to arrive at the ideal ratio of tenured and tenure-track faculty to administrators in order to operate effectively. Analyzing data from 137 public universities from 1987 through 2008, the…

Put the administrators on a living wage and send them home.

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

#99

Post by worldpeace »

All of these brilliant people have driven their institutions into the ground chasing rankings and fads like diversity and prestige buildings. Universities have taken on mountains of debt, and just like the portfolios of those university trained traders on Wall Street that destroyed the world a few years ago, they are very susceptible to unthinkable events like young people no longer finding college worth the money. It will only take a small decrease in enrollment rates for the wheels to come off. Bankruptcy is all but guaranteed.

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

#100

Post by sitkack »

dccoolgai wrote: post #43
DennisP wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what wil…

So we could have a startup that administers 3 day quals and hands out a degree based on passing our rigorous tests? Like passing the bar but from a private firm giving a certification, the education is on your own.
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