121–130 of 242 posts
Universities are in trouble. I know of three that are unable to hire for senior and middle positions. They've been advertising for months. Here (UK), Brexit is partly to blame, along with post Cov19 fatigue, and aging population with many retiring. As I've said in other comments, the main problem is that academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling as good people…
Here 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.
Teachers are not waiting. I know of several who retired mid-year. That NEVER used to happen. Covid didn't break their back--shitty parents did. Covid just ran the parental shittiness meter up to max. And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now have multiple students who actually had a parent die . In a normal year, that would be rare and that child would get lots of counseling. With Covid--it's too comm…
This is extremely unlikely and if you know multiple teachers with this condition you just have really bad luck.
Only about 60k COVID deaths are 30-49 [0] with another 200k for 50-64. This is about 25% of COVID deaths in the US.
There’s 50M school kids between k-12 [1] so the odds of a kid having a parent who died is really low: 1:50M/60k2 for typical age range of school age kids or 1:50M/260k2 if you lump in the older age group, but I think that age group is less likely.
So if you’re a teacher and teach 7 classes of 30 students your odds of having a single kid with a parent who died is 50% so certainly not “practically all teachers.”
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372#PK12-enroll...
In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.
The salaries suck but this is the UK. If you’re in the correct social class to be an academic you should have your own independent means, and use your academic salary as nothing more than rent for the townhouse you’re staying in while away from your country estate. /s (Somehow this is both sarcasm and the literal situation of people I know.)
Hilariously, it turns out that was always the case. The profs with the fancy houses were never doing it on their university salaries; they were doing it on family money. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues resigned and left because he couldn't afford to pay rent for him and his partner in Oxford on a postdoc salary. Plus ça change...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>unable to hire for senior and middle positions As usual with these claims, chances are it's due to the fact that these positions don't pay enough to be competitive.
Maybe, but UK universities don't have much headroom. They can't raise their student fees past the government set level; the government funding per student has decreased; only the oldest institutions have massive endowments; and they don't spend crazy amounts on sport, admin or pampering students. Some of them can try to squeeze their student base a bit more (increase accommodation prices, reduce subsidies in the food…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong. In the UK the universities collectively are part of USS, the biggest private pension fund in the UK The annoying thing is that this was in rude health until the university management controlled board decided to take a pension valuation during the middle of COVID. The driving factor is that 10 years or so ago the university sector was deregulated such that universities are no longer capped in terms of the numbe…
>> As a result they are no longer willing to cross-subsidize each others pension funds. >> universities are no longer capped in terms of the number of students they can take >> Some form of bureaucracy
I'm surprised it took them so long to get fed up, reaching the mid-career level. I realized doing my PhD that all of academia is a toxic house of cards built on cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to students of at least an interesting (if not particularly well-paid) career. If it took you until mid-career to realize this . . . you weren't observant and I don't r…
A bit over-egged, but there is not denying there are a raft of problems in academia. On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.
At some point, this nonsense has to stop. Both in the UK and the US. 1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough to pay them back either. 2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon fundi…
> Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are university professors and it was frankly embarrassing how many of them could not be bothered to learn to adapt to online teaching. There was endless complaining about basic things that anyone who works in an office doing meeting with remote teams has to learn. There are entire industries based around prov…