This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
21–30 of 242 posts
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#22At 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 funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.
3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows post-covid.
4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending Uni.
5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly unsustainable.
6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials/gen-X with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for different purposes.
Don't even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.
7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.
8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears to be rapidly changing.
9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn't worth it, especially with rapid CoL rises.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#23This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
Or China will take over advanced manufacturing.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#24This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
No post body was provided.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#25Can anyone show me statistical evidence that this "great resignation" is anything more than a story made up by the media?
The BLS's records of the labor force participation rate alone are pretty intense. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Graphs with zoomed in Y axes make eyeballing often misleading. Consider the data:
2000-2016: -4.3% LFPR
2016-2020: +1% LFPR
Current: 0.2% below what we were in September 2015 (while currently in a sharply increasing trend)
The graph is eye popping, but the numbers themselves don't seem particularly exceptional.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#26Can anyone show me statistical evidence that this "great resignation" is anything more than a story made up by the media?
Maybe you should put forward an affirmative argument of non-existence or continuity with the past, etc. Otherwise, you are just asserting formless skepticism -- with no evidence.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#27At 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…
> 7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.
Two years of home lecturing that by all accounts has resulted in close to two years of lost progress if my observation of teachers complaining about ill-prepared students is anything to go by.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#28Universities 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…
What does "senior and middle positions" mean? Are you talking about something that has the potential to be a tenured position, non-tenured academic positions, or non-academic positions?
By senior I mean "senior or associate professors and lecturers" like
myself, and by middle I mean postdoc full lecturers with at least
5-10 years. I don't know what to say about the word "tenured" because
it's meaning seems very different in the UK than it is used in USA.
In the US I get the idea people think "tenure" makes you impossible
fire. Yet here I know of two full professors with over 20 years
service, scores of publications and teaching awards in their pockets
who were "let go" (forced quit). I know many more who are planning to
quit, and there seems a dearth of replacements to step into their
shoes.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#29I'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.
Re: Has the ‘great resignation’ hit academia?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's some data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART I'm not gonna claim anything here but do agree what firms / business are mostly complaining about is key employees changing jobs more so than leaving the workforce entirely.
In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have. Don't know. I haven't really seen that myself though. [ADDED: That's not really true in healthcare. I had two primary care doctors retire on me over the course of a year.] Certainly I've seen a fair bit of motion among fairly senior employees between companies but I don't know how it compares to the baseline. What…
> In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have.
Mother was working as a teacher for over 40 years. A real teacher by calling. Kids loved her, always got the most flowers and chocolades etc.
Unfortunately she had to retire prematurely because the work conditions became terrible.
Goverment wants you to do more and more for the same pay. On top of that ppl quit and you have to fill in for them too. Slowly the situation will resemble retail sector.
Healthcare and Education are the two sections we should NEVER be cheap on.
Unfortunately our rulers dont see that.