When tenure never comes • Hacker News Board

Re: When tenure never comes

#121

Post by intended » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 6:05 AM UTC

cpitman wrote: post #85

pascalxus wrote: post #61

Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?

The belief that everyone should go to college. What the government spends on public schools has actually gone up over the decades, but a move to everyone going to college means that funding per student has dropped. Edit: Link to source: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...

This is a more accurate response than most on this issue.

To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style.

Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream.

The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools.

This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.)

The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.

Re: When tenure never comes

#122

Post by luckluckgoosed » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 6:13 AM UTC

protomyth wrote: post #98

dharmon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be appalled at how much overhead universities take out of research grants (from NSF, DARPA, NIH, etc.) to maintain these administrations (along with legitimate uses, like paying utility bills). 40-50% is not uncommon.

How in the heck do they get away with that? Each grant we have has an indirect rate that you cannot exceed and its not 40-50%.

Probably just people not understanding what an indirect rate means. They think it means the % of the grant that the university takes.

So when they hear an indirect rate of 65%, they think the university is taking 2/3 the money. When in fact, it's about 1/3 due to how it's calculated.

Re: When tenure never comes

#123

Post by luckluckgoosed » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 6:16 AM UTC

cstejerean wrote: post #63

pascalxus wrote: post #61

Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?

Facilities and administrators. Schools get ranked based on their facilities and the types of programs and activities they offer so they keep outspending each other in this area to remain competitive. It's a tragedy.

That's part of it. The other part is for private universities, they are admitting more and more lower income students. Each low income student receives tuition waiver, and often a living stipend. So it's a double whammy on the budget.

Re: When tenure never comes

#124

Post by jerryhuang100 » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:00 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #120

jerryhuang100 wrote: post #66

It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated" . It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles…

As a recent comment pointed out - the issue isn't solved by dividing the pie, but by increasing the size of it. These arguments lead to one historically known outcome.

"increasing the size of (pie)"

this is relatively vague as if u do read the article, there are more and more adjunct and temp faculty positions at universities, not more tenure-track positions. besides, the pie of r&d grants in term of nih or nsf budgets did not grow much in the past decade. also i dont see there is major possibility for anothe UC system or ivy league to be duplicated in the next decade or so - it takes much longer time to build an oven for a bigger pie.

Re: When tenure never comes

#125

Post by jerryhuang100 » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:05 AM UTC

maverick_iceman wrote: post #113

jerryhuang100 wrote: post #66

It's interesting to see this story on the front page at the same time with another one titled "We Should Not Accept Scientific Results That Have Not Been Repeated" . It's easy to solve both problems (killing two birds with one stone?) by implementing protocols of purging scientists with track records of non-repeatable results from "personal opinions" and fraudulent scholars gaming publishing systems, including titles…

The point of the Nautilus article was repeatability is a must before a scientific result is accepted. However pressure to publish new results often lead to scientists losing motivation in doing replicating studies. It's a bug in the scientific ecosystem, particularly in the allocation of rewards. A significant number of experiments will always fail to replicate for various random reasons. That doesn't mean the concer…

one or two publications without repeatable results might be acceptable - maybe he or she is just out of luck or some how choose the wrong hypothesis. but if there are five or six non-repeatable papers in the publication laundry list, esp some used for degrees, promotions to tenured positions, or grant applications, this makes him or her looks like fraud with a track record of publishing "personal opinions."

Re: When tenure never comes

#126

Post by nzjrs » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:50 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #86

bachmeier wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you work in industry, your job is to do what you're told. When you do research, your job is to learn new things and tell others about them, no matter who doesn't like those results. If you're studying earthquakes in Oklahoma, the oil companies won't like it. If you're studying evolution, certain segments of the population won't like it. Tenure is one way of protecting academic freedom. You seem to be thinking of…

This makes sense, but are we not at a time where you can simply do all of those things and people won't crucify you? > When you work in industry, your job is to do what you're told. You are told to publish, are you not? It's the same principle except your job has extra steps. I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D. The industry does R&D as well and they do crazy R&D without tenure. I've…

I think your inherent bias knowing only about your field is distorting your r&d expectations.

Can you imagine a private sector narrative that could give rise to CRISPR? That's the sort of blue sky r&d that tenure is designed to protect - basic science r&d is impossible to value.

Re: When tenure never comes

#127

Post by arghnoname » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:53 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #103

bachmeier wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"are we not at a time where you can simply do all of those things and people won't crucify you?" Are you in the US? I'd say it's pretty clear you can get crucified for stating an unpopular opinion. "I'd also like to point out colleges aren't the end all be all of R&D." And they shouldn't be. They should primarily do work that the private sector is not willing to fund. "I think this is a much more complete answer then…

Let me be clear for others who come across this because I'm completely sure that since you've been a student and now work in the system you know where I am coming from as a student. Surely there will be people who read this who have not had the 'pleasure' of being graced with the "bad kind" of tenured professor. In my college experience, which has only been one year, I've met a few types of professors. There is the k…

The confusion here is that you seem to think tenure has something to do with teaching. For a research university, tenure mostly (but not entirely) is a reward for research (and grant-getting) excellence.

It's a quirk of our system that excellent world-class researchers are obligated to teach basic materials to undergraduates, and sadly not all of them are very good at it. Further, while poor grading reviews don't help someone seeking tenure, a poor publishing record and no grants will kill it. The incentive is to prioritize research at all costs. One of the best researchers I know is also one of the worst rated instructors in course evaluations I've seen.

This quirk is why coursework from non-research universities might on average be better in your standard topics. For 101 stuff, you're better off being taught the material from someone who is a great instructor but isn't on the research frontier than the other way around.

Re: When tenure never comes

#128

Post by arghnoname » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:58 AM UTC

audleman wrote: post #108

gravypod wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was a job in research and development? I know people in private companies that do this. If your work is so crazy that it is completely inexplicable to another person and you cannot articulate it's value, then how are you going to find people to help you? This seems like a really really uncommon situation. In my college, there are professors who are in a nontenured position who do this sort of work. The…

> I thought that was a job in research and development? The type of research R&D shops perform is (reasonably) constrained by the profit motive. There is value to society by empowering individuals to pursue topics in a broader sphere. Even economic benefits, though I philosophically disagree that for an idea to have merit it needs to be profitable. Just a random example; modern cryptography comes from "the mathematic…

In fact, as I heard it the fact that number theory was completely academic as far as anyone knew and was not at all applicable was a point of pride for some of its theorists. Crypto changed all that of course.

Re: When tenure never comes

#129

Post by Retric » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 8:36 AM UTC

eximius wrote: post #51

Many people have pointed to an overpopulation being the root cause for this, but I believe that ignores the increasingly inflating administrative staff at universities. That is, it is also a budget problem. The budget for the increase in professor staff is being diverted into additional administrative positions that do... something, apparently. I'm not convinced that the administrative bloat is worth a fraction of wh…

Exponential growth is never the answer. Over 20+ years at 1:5 teacher ratio so one could teach well over 20+ PHD's and 1 gets to replace them.

Actual ratio seems to be around ~1:50 based on openings.

Re: When tenure never comes

#130

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 8:47 AM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #20

ptero wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, though, I think most grad programs should take more than their replacement rate. There should be a (sizeable) outflow to non-academic jobs in a healthy system. This also requires not having an institutional "tenure or failure" mentality, which is, sadly, not uncommon in many science grad schools.

Yes, there should be a sizable outflow to non-academic jobs, but that implies that the demand is there, and that the jobs hey sufficiently well to make up for the opportunity cost of not earning for eight years or more. These conditions do not really exist for a lot of fields. How many jobs outside academia are there where a PhD in medieval history is an advantage?

It's those transferrable skills, yo. In general, a liberal arts PhD will be able to work independently with little supervision, plan a course of work and make headway without much feedback. In general, they can also communicate effectively through text.

I totally get that people don't want to leave their speciality, but the PhD will normally give students a bunch of skills that are hard (but not impossible) to get elsewhere.

I have a psychology PhD, and now work at a tech company (I always loved stats, and discovered coding during the PhD due to laziness, so may not be a typical case).