Prof. from Norway here. While it sounds like the situation in the US and UK is worse than our own, I’m seriously considering moving to industry after 20 years in academia. Mainly fed up by ever growing admin, and stupid financial oversight regulations, and the general workload… and many other things that isn’t wise to complain about publicly.
Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
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Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#102For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities? Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and come up with course materials.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#103For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities? Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and come up with course materials.
Yes! Absolutely!
In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested. Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find people who have a software engineering background and are looking to teach.
Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#104Here in the US, I expect a lot of K-12 teachers to be leaving the field. The additional demands created by Covid were the last straw for many. Their employment contracts are such that they have to give months of notice, so I expect all to be quiet until August, then panic everywhere as slots can't be filled.
My sister got a masters in education and taught for 5 years in the NYC school system, hating every moment of it. A big SaaS company took a risk on her and hired her as a salesperson. She is crushing it, working from home, and occasionally reminiscing about the night and day difference in well-being between working at schools vs a real company.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#105It’s difficult for me to feel bad for these institutions. They jacked up tuitions and caused an entire generation of people to carry lifetime of crippling debt.
It's not like universities are just lining their pockets. I'm a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college with a high tuition, and we struggle to pay professors fair wages (when compared to peer institutions, which doesn't even account for differences in cost of living, and we're in an HCOL city).
I do not fully understand the economics of higher education—they're complex and often opaque—but a few things to keep in mind:
1. Tuition seems absurd, but very few students pay the sticker price. At my institution, average cost after aid is 39% of average cost before aid, and less than some of the private K-12 schools in this city. 2. "These institutions" are not a monolith. See above—especially when it comes to prestigious schools, many students aren't paying close to sticker price. 3. Families and students expect much more from colleges than they did a few decades ago, both in terms of facilities and staffing. I don't know if anyone's done a study of student wellness center staff sizes, but I wouldn't be surprised if they doubled over the past two years. 4. The sciences (and things like conservatories) are particularly expensive because of equipment/lab costs. Someone has to pay for all this. I think more should come from the corporate America (not sure how), which benefits greatly from these programs, but I'd venture to guess most comes from tuition and government grants.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the training and a reasonable chance at an acceptable offer if I went on the academic job market, but I bailed out and went into industry instead of trying my hand on it. To my mind, it doesn't make sense to try to break into and establish yourself in such a competitive field with all of the problems of academia. I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the field, which didn't encourage me to back…
Interesting. Are you in STEM or some other field? As an outsider I'm curious if this is specific to some fields or the same across academia
CS/EE, so yeah, the blight affects all areas, even the ones you'd
imagine were "safer".
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#107I left academia for a software company, not midway my career but at the early start. The decision is easy when you have mouths to feed, wages don’t keep up, and I can earn double my salary doing the fun part of my work (ML+optimization+data/energy modelling in civil engineering space) literally the next day. I was working with all kinds of companies to help them get started with this kind of work. Instead of sending…
What you mention as “the fun part” does sound pretty interesting. Sounds like you’re contracting/consulting? Any advice on finding assignments in the field? (For someone with a DS + non-civil engineering background)
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#108I'll leave for sure, but for other reasons than in CS. In CS people leave because they get better salaries and have better job prospects outside academia. In my area, people leave because of lack of career prospects, almost no tenure-track positions, favoritism and corruption. But the decisive reason for me is that our small & poor European country has switched to the new "Pan S" for open science publications. This may seem like a good idea at first, isn't it great that every publication for a funding authority needs to be open access? Well, the problem is that in my area there are at most two good and free open access journals. At most. Every top journal is run by traditional publishers, and funding authorities have explicitly stated they will discourage and limit payment of open access fees. Ironically, the better the journal, the higher the open access fees, and the less it is possible to get funding for them.
As nice as open access sounds in theory, in practice this new "Plan S" policy will mean that bullshitters who game the system and shouldn't even be in academia will win big time and can spit out one crappy publication after another. I've met people in my profession who literally said "Who cares if its false? It's another publication in your CV!" The difference between fringe journals and the top journals is unbelievably high in my discipline, people used to even count bad publications negatively, and a few publications in top journals used to give you a tenure-track position. To give you an idea of the difference, the former have acceptance rates of about 100%, the latter have acceptance rates of less than 5%. Now the top journals won't even count any longer at all in evaluations by our funding authority. There is so much crap published nowadays, they should limit the allowed number of publications/year; instead they are going for the opposite, a large number of publications in fringe and even self-published open access journals. Some of my colleagues are already literally starting their own journals.
I admit that there are many disciplines where open access works better, but not in mine. Maybe "Plan S" will have great and noble effects in 20-30 years from now, but for the generation in-between it's a complete disaster for anyone interested in quality. For me that's the decisive reason to leave.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#109For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities? Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and come up with course materials.
Definitely consider it! Financially, you'll barely break even in the beginning after accounting for commuting and how much work it is to set up a course initially, but emotionally it's very rewarding. As a nice perk, sometimes students (usually the smartest ones) will ask you if you have projects for them to dig deeper, so you've got a great talent pool at your hand.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#110It’s difficult for me to feel bad for these institutions. They jacked up tuitions and caused an entire generation of people to carry lifetime of crippling debt.
It's not like universities are just lining their pockets. I'm a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college with a high tuition, and we struggle to pay professors fair wages (when compared to peer institutions, which doesn't even account for differences in cost of living, and we're in an HCOL city). I do not fully understand the economics of higher education—they're complex and often opaque—but a few things…
Here’s my counter argument: public high schools do it for far less. Outside of maybe 40 research institutes in the US, the rest offer about the same education as a good public high school. It’s really not unheard of to hear college grads say they got better education at their high schools vs college. Secondly, these schools are TAX EXEMPT. They use endowments to basically buy buildings all the time. A great example of this is NYU. Really a mediocre school but happens to be the biggest real estate player in one of the most expensive markets in the world.