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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. HN really IS the reddit of a few years ago... You can have your opinion, but if you can't behave in public, please bury your ad-hominem s___ in someone else's backyard.

It's not really an ad hominem. I took it more as the reasoning in "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets."

Ok. It sounded pretty harsh over here.

Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.

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

#222

I think this is a natural result of having so many kids that have no idea of what to do in life. Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one of those kids w…

Passion is a weird thing. If a prospective adjunct walks up to you and says "I'm passionate about teaching in higher education," or "I derive what I judge to be a large amount of utility from the prospect of teaching in higher education," is it bad resource allocation for him or her to enter that market, because you think that if they had had a different set of inputs (information) earlier in their life, they may have become passionate about something else, or had a different weighting on their utility function? Who are we to say our ideas for what they should do are better?

By all means, we as a society should discourage people who don't know what they want to do from taking post-graduate education as a default choice, and we should discourage people who don't derive utility from teaching from being in the adjunct labor market. But I think that the majority of people in the adjunct labor market would actually say quotes like the ones above - they're not just "kids" without agency or passion for the work. And they would probably find it demeaning for the top post here to deign to "help" them to choose "rewarding... career choices." I'm pretty sure they've already chosen.

If we're going to spread information, let's focus on spreading transparency about hiring practices at universities to the students and grant-givers who fund their budgets.

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

#223
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" School vouchers are a great alternative to public schools http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher

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…

Wow, most other places in the US it is the opposite. Private schools are considered superior. They have to be, because there is otherwise no reason to both pay property taxes and also pay tution.

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

#224
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Barnard is a special case for the following reasons: 0) It is one of Columbia University's affiliated undergraduate schools, so facilities/athletics/administration/some budgets are tightly coupled to the mothership, which has approximately more money than god and subsidizes many things 1) It is in NYC, so the cost structure is not representative of the rest of America 2)) It is a Women's college, which probably chang…

Points 0 and 1 are (mostly) correct, though I don't think point 2 really has any appreciable impact on the costs.

To clarify one thing: Columbia doesn't exactly "subsidize" Barnard - in fact, Barnard maintains its own independent endowment and board of trustees. Columbia and Barnard "partner" together to provide a number of joint services (for example, Columbia students majoring in theater take their classes at Barnard, and vice versa for some other departments, but many departments exist independently at each school). Barnard retains its own independent administration for most positions; there is very little sharing of administrative roles.

Student organizations are joint-funded through student fees, and almost all are open to both Columbia and Barnard students. In fact, there was some debate a few years back about the Barnard group overseeing student organizations not contributing its fair share towards Greek life[0], which was soon rectified. It is important that fund transfers between (e.g) Columbia College and Barnard are generally not considered internal transfers the way (e.g.) Columbia College and SEAS (the engineering school) would be.

This is not unlike the situation at certain other schools like Harvard and MIT, which sometimes allow cross-enrollment, or other schools which pool resources for student activities. The main difference is that Barnard professors are awarded tenure from Columbia University, not from Barnard (which cannot grant tenure independently).

That said, I agree that Barnard's expenses are not indicative, but that's more because they share many resources with another school (Columbia) and reap efficiencies that way, not because Columbia "subsidizes" their costs. Columbia saves a lot of money from these partnerships as well, and I doubt that they would keep the current setup if they didn't feel that they benefited from it financially as well.

[0] http://columbiaspectator.com/2011/04/26/inter-greek-council-...

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

#225

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…

Government (university) administrators can be (forced to be) heartless capitalists too, you know.

or maybe capitalism isn't the only "heartless" economic system. Central planning bureaucrats have been responsible for far more suffering globally than any capitalist ever has.

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

#226
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure this is the defense you want to muster? Universities are basically where liberalism/progressivism comes from. It is where it is in its strongest power. Government money everywhere; tuition, research grants, special projects, tax breaks. Administrative staff benevolently administrating massive diversity programs of every kind. 90%+ of the staff are progressives/liberals. Not being progressive/liberal can…

>It is the very beating heart of the anti-"capitalist" regime, the blueprint by which they would remake the rest of the world. I have never heard any self-proclaimed socialist ever utter these words. Do you get your entire concept of the Left from right-wing strawmen?

It's obviously true that, say, UC Berkley has more socialists per captia than the public at large.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one side we have wealth consolidating much faster than the economy is growing, and on the other side we have the military industrial complex sucking up any increase in taxation to bloat its own oppressive bureaucracy, to say nothing of the resolving door between them. I can't help but get the feeling that a dystopia is congealing around us with no way out politically. A lot of intellectuals have foreseen the ills…

Well, I think if we want to start thinking about these, it needs to become publicly acceptable to say that capitalism is an evil vampire squid trying to suck your blood rather than a cuddly huggable teddy-bear that solves all your problems. See: this entire thread, in which the solution to corporatization of the university is almost automatically assumed to be adding more capitalism .

That's because every variant of Marxism that's been tried in the world has led to widespread violence and misery. People are understandably reluctant to try it again.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well. Teacher wages approaching subsistence level is just the next step in the McDonaldization of education. Even the teachers are just another brick in the wall.

Funny, because teachers were the titular bricks in the wall of the original song.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government (university) administrators can be (forced to be) heartless capitalists too, you know.

or maybe capitalism isn't the only "heartless" economic system. Central planning bureaucrats have been responsible for far more suffering globally than any capitalist ever has.

fair point - how about we call bad people bad people for doing bad things, whatever their political misconceptions?

There are plenty of examples of humans being mean to each other in pretty much every setting. America's allergic reaction to public healthcare is an example of a systemic/cultural cause of significant unnecessary suffering[1]. Sure historically communists have done much worse, and indeed still are in North Korea, but that's not much of a target to beat.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/17/nhs-health

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Taxes.

The problem with that is that eventually you run out of other people's money. See: Europe
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