Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by __xtrimsky » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 2:22 AM UTC

bmm6o wrote: post #85

__xtrimsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes I do understand it, but it's the way they were giving out contracts at the school. I've seen one of them. It just says something like. You will be paid xxx$/h. Your course A has 40 hours. Your course B has 60 hours.

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

#132

Post by ihnorton » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

pjmorris wrote: post #64

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…

> 'cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries' It dawned on me this week that Y Combinator itself is structured more like this 'dying lecture/exam model', set in a physical place where 'students' and 'instructors' can interact directly rather than being intermediated by some app, screen or paper. If there is any group in any place who would be more likely to disrupt education by the applica…

Indeed. Proximity facilitates our communication and judgement faculties in a way that is hard to replicate online (although it is a very interesting problem to contemplate). Is it possible to replicate the experience of following a professor out of a classroom and getting a summer research position from the ensuing conversation? The subtle cues and trust-building of both direct and group conversation? Video chat helps, but it's not the same. One small aspect: it seems easier to "turn off" a digital interaction.

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

#133

Post by grondilu » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 2:35 AM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #62

programmarchy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. Perhaps the silver lining is that it could incentivize educators to opt-out of the state education system in favor of more entrepreneurial avenues? Like, private tutoring, teaching online classes, workshops, apprenticeships, etc.

A lot of good educators do this. And that's part of the problem. Private tutoring and online classes don't reach the masses of students. I mean, if we want to deliberately exclude the majority of the population from being able to receive an education, then sure, let's go this way.

If you think college teachers should be well paid, it means you think college education is worth a lot. If you think it's worth a lot, then it means it is expensive. If it is expensive, it makes sense that lots of people can't afford it. You can't pay teachers a lot if you have them teach poor people. Otherwise where is the money supposed to come from?

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

#134

Post by Aqueous » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 2:53 AM UTC

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…

Yes. I worked for a university briefly as a staff member. Our university sung far and wide about how it just raised $400 million for its endowment in its most recent fundraising campaign, and yet, it couldn't afford to pay me more than a $25,000 salary in the IT department. How on earth is this possible? It's probably in all the unseen costs they pay out in contracts to subcontractors. But another clue might be this: during the time of my employment, there were several ongoing, large construction projects.

Universities are obsessed with the rankings of US News. And for some reason, they feel that campus renewal and renovation construction projects are the secret to mastering them. So instead of paying a decent wage to the people who actually comprise the "college experience" for their students, they pay outsized amounts to further improve their already glittering campus so that it looks better on the 15 minute admissions tour that prospective students take.

Somewhere the priorities are out of whack. I think if universities stopped spending so much money gaming the rankings, they might realize that paying their staff more and paying their faculty more would translate into a better, more involved college experience for their students. And that, in turn, would make their students evangelize to other prospective students about how much they love their college...

Improve the product, not the marketing.

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

#135

Post by Double_Cast » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:01 AM UTC

jckt wrote: post #111

soup10 wrote: post #4

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

I think another problem (though probably minor compared to the bloated bureaucracies everyone else is mentioning) is that the teaching quality doesn't matter as much to students these days. This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788 I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems…

> Wealth does not pass three generations.

- Chinese proverb

(Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y.

[1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...

[2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html

tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything.

I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.

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

#136

Post by Zigurd » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:15 AM UTC

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…

In my day, campus police were unarmed and called on actual police to work actual crimes, versus random disorder that did not rise to the level of crime.

Are today's college students such thugs that we need fully equipped police departments on campuses? Police departments are usually the second most expensive part of a municipal budget. How many of the "neccessary" bureaucracies did we do without a generation ago?

Universities below the elite level are headed for a massive crash. They better start the rethink soon.

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

#137

Post by rst » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:18 AM UTC

nugget wrote: post #124

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…

I saw examples like this over and over when I worked with Government, and it's ultimately what pushed me to embrace libertarianism. Government usually has great intentions, but those intentions are often overwhelmed by the perverse micro incentives of the human beings, driven by basic human nature, who run everything at the ground level.

Last I checked, most colleges were private institutions, and the public ones (state schools and community colleges) tended, in general, to be a lot more frugal (and cheaper, and more cost-effective) than private ones.

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

#138

Post by kaonashi » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:29 AM UTC

nugget wrote: post #124

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…

I saw examples like this over and over when I worked with Government, and it's ultimately what pushed me to embrace libertarianism. Government usually has great intentions, but those intentions are often overwhelmed by the perverse micro incentives of the human beings, driven by basic human nature, who run everything at the ground level.

Any sufficiently sized human institution has those problems.

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

#139

Post by scrabble » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:31 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #108

jpulec wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at another Big Ten IT division. The amount of productive work per salary dollar would shock anyone in the start-up or corporate sector. Staff would roll in from 9:00 to 10:00AM, surf the web or fool around with some toys for a couple of hours, take a 90 minute lunch, go to a few meetings, and be out the door at 4:30 or 5:00PM. A lot of these people making 6 figures or close to it in a town where that is a VE…

I worked in the IT department of a college while I was a student and this matches my experience of the full time staff. They couldn't even be terminated because they were unionized employees. I recall one terrible employee in particular who just sat at his desk and watched Star Trek Next Gen episodes all day, working his way through the series. What a waste of money.

The student employees weren't much better, because it wasn't ever established what their behavior should be. I remember a lot of time spent torrenting, watching movies, and playing games -- occasionally breaking to reimage a computer.

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

#140

Post by glesica » Sat, Jun 21, 2014, 3:31 AM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #136

bilbo0s wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In my day, campus police were unarmed and called on actual police to work actual crimes, versus random disorder that did not rise to the level of crime. Are today's college students such thugs that we need fully equipped police departments on campuses? Police departments are usually the second most expensive part of a municipal budget. How many of the "neccessary" bureaucracies did we do without a generation ago? Uni…

As far as I know, most state universities have real police departments. The officers are effectively state police officers. I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but it is at least 20 or so years, if not quite a bit more.

Safety is a big issue, especially for parents (who pay many of the bills), so universities view law enforcement and safety spending as a competitive advantage.

It is also the case that many universities are located in small, rural communities that might not have the police resources to handle the campus population (for instance, I went to a school that had about as many students as there were non-student residents of the town).