(I am not the author)
We know where the money goes:
The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. It pays for the Starbucks our vice-chancellors love so much. It pays for the sushi bars they think will attract a “high caliber” of student. It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they’re terrible at their jobs.
education has become too profit-driven, and ‘college’ sports are a massive part of the failure.
I actually left academics a while ago for similar reasons. I feel like I’ve been robbed of the ability to create a better future, all because everything is for-profit.
What hourly wage would be a fair and proper wage?
Ive always wondered why dissilusioned burnt out academics dont just post an add in wherever and just meet people at a bar or coffee shop or whatever. Basically free form schooling.
Please, correct me if im wrong, but isnt the most common reason people leave teaching is they dont get to just teach how and what they want to teach?
Edit: fyi i never went to post secondary. Always wanted to and is still a dream at 43. I realized im probably thinking of just lectures
My experience from an R1 university (research focused) is that most of the professors didn’t primarily want to teach, but instead to focus on research, while teaching was what they did to make their salary. They were usually happy to teach a few courses, and especially upper level courses focused on their area of expertise, but the main goal was getting funding to pursue research, and that usually comes from (or is distributed through) some public institution.
It wasn’t so much about the money so much as the enshitification of the services we provided. They basically treated people like cattle, and I didn’t like it. They often cut programs that actually taught meaningful technical knowledge and skills. The tipping point was how my last Uni dealt with the pandemic. The bare minimum quality of online courses was one issue, but a bigger issue is that most courses were still required in person. I did the math and figured that by opening at full capacity that some students would die as a statistical probability based on age demographics and trends in outbreaks for the area at that time, and it was a special kind of soul-shredding to participate in a system that indirectly murders the youth who would lead us to a better future.
But maybe I’m just a wuss, idk.
Free Form Schooling, at least in the USA, lacks federal accreditation and therefor students would not have access to federal aid including Pell Grant, Subsidized Loans, and Unsubsidized Loans. So the students would have expenses with no income or they would have to pay high taxes on income during their schooling. If you’re interested in trying a local college for an Associates to get your feet wet, then fill out the FAFSA online and you’ll see roughly what aid you qualify for, usually enough to get by depending on the rates of the schools you chose.
Thanks for the reply I dont really know much about accreditation so that is a new thing to think about.
I was asking about pay not as an insinuation(¿?) that had anything to do with why you left, i was just curious what you feel is an appropriate wage for teaching in your opinion.
I wonder what it would take, probably some kind of administered association. Like if someone formed an independent educators union that could then detail what a member must do to prove they qualify for teaching. Then charge what you want for running your own classes as you see fit without the need for a campus. Like i love learning but cant do online or self directed learning. Ive only ever been in classes with 30+ kids so i figure there are other models to try.
Once upon a time people had teachers brought to them and formal schooling wasnt much of a thing outside military institutions or great empires (though many exceptions did exist im sure)
Im not sure what an ideal class size is, but if you can cut down the hours needed to pass a course, people would probably be willing to pay per course directly to the person teaching and everyone would have a better experience
And in this modern world, being able to retrain to new things seems really important given expecting to work a job for 25 years then retire from it seems like something that is getting almost impossible to find if it isnt already
To me, and my rose coloured glasses it seems like an obvious choice if the institutions of learning stopped actually caring about the learning
And things like uber show us we can massively reorganize how we spend time on both sides of supply and demand
Uber is incredibly unethical with how they treat their “contractors” as well as their customers, and that sort of thing is exactly my concern relating to my previous position. An ethical upright institution would be ideal, but decentralizing it might not be any better or worse as a means of achieving that.
Um. Okay.
Im really confused why you are focusing on that part of it. It doesnt need to be unethical, its just profitable and lacks a lot of oversight.
But even if you want to nitpick, uber is still better than the system it has disrupted. Do you to derail this to go on an adventure in the moral and ethical bankruptcy that is the taxi industry???
I feel like a lot of cab companies had more qualified drivers who earned better wages and benefits before Uber reduced their market share.
A university is just a college that stopped caring about its students.
as someone who went to a small lib arts school, and then to a R1 university for my grad degree… this is exactly the truth.
I was actively told multiple times how students didn’t matter, to stop caring, to stop prepping for teaching classes, and to just focus on applying for grants and polishing my research.
Of course politicians and rich people don’t want an educated population, those might actually notice who is exploiting them.
My university is looking at a 10 percent enrollment drop right now. We’ve been losing anywhere from 3-7 percent of our students every year since I started working here. They won’t hire new faculty. They won’t fill teaching lines when professors retire or move. They won’t raise adjunct pay. They won’t give their overworked staff a raise, even when they work just as many nights and weekends as we do. They cut programs. They close down entire schools. The money just disappears into a black hole.
If the university is looking at a 10 percent enrollment drop, how can they do any of those latter things? When your ability to stay open is decided by a combination of your competitors and hyper-capitalists who will take away your accreditation for not being predatory enough, how is any institution supposed to survive?
I can’t speak to the author’s institution, but what we’ve seen at our institution is that the black hole the money disappears to is corporate profits. Our Student Information System increased its prices 30% last year. To change would be years of retraining every single office on campus, and a multi-million dollar bill we can’t afford. The food service company’s prices are higher. The printer company’s prices are higher. Fucking VMWare and Meraki are trying to fuck us over a barrel with some crazy price increases. When greed and capitalism run rampant, everyone suffers, inversely proportional to how cutthroat and predatory your institution is.
We know where the money goes:
The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. It pays for the Starbucks our vice-chancellors love so much. It pays for the sushi bars they think will attract a “high caliber” of student. It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they’re terrible at their jobs.
Maybe their institution is doing things different, but we haven’t been able to hire a new athletic director in two years. Our facilities are literally falling apart. They leak when it rains, and we can’t control the heat in them. We got skipped over for hosting major tournaments in almost all of our sports this year as a result. At an athletics heavy school. We have no financial aid director. Most don’t apply because they know the situation, the ones who do laugh at our offer. I think the only upper admin person who gets six figures is the president, who currently donates her entire paycheck back to the institution.
I don’t know. Maybe things really are different between the author’s institution and mine, but I feel like I hear these sorts of complaints from faculty here, too. Sometimes it feels like faculty live in a magic bubble where you can throw a book at a software vendor and get them to not charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars more than last year. Where “Well if the staff would stop eating avocado toast then everything would be fine”. We’re all in this together. Capitalist parasites will use any division to sow discord, and you’d think people working at an educational institution would be less likely to fall for it, not more. But man, the faculty-staff rivalry is wild.
The rest, though, the author and I definitely agree on.
Universities aren’t institutions of knowledge anymore. They’re assets. They’re revenue streams. If they’re not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.
…yeah. This…keeps me up at night. All I can do is keep trying to keep the systems running. Keep our 40 year old SIS running, as efficiently as we can. Tie our sad raft of cobbled-together software packages together. Upper admin has ideas for new programs, and they’re even things that I feel like would make the world a better place, but…will it be enough? Or is it just delaying the inevitable? Because it’s as the author says - Americans have never really supported public education, and it feels like that’s worse now than ever. I don’t know where we’re going anymore.
I’m still on the train because I’d rather die in the crash than bail and watch helplessly, but some days I wonder.
But is that sushi bar really such a bad idea? Yeah it was dismissed as a pointless luxury with a vague “caliber of student allusion, but this reads like a college that is really struggling. How can any college sustain those kind of enrollment drops? At some point you need to try something different in your desperation to attract more students. Sometimes marketing is more important than anything else.
We had a similar thing with my kids high school. All of us parents were upset at the huge increases of tuition, new coaches, the rebranding, the partnership with a sports academy when ours had been more academic …… then they closed. We found out how much they had been struggling. Some of the changes were desperately trying to reverse enrollment drops, some were desperately trying to court major donors, and some were necessary as staff realized what was happening and left for better opportunities. In hindsight, I can’t really complain, and only wish they had succeeded in turning it around
Yeah, I didn’t address the sushi bar thing for that reason, to be honest. Part of being part of a team is that you have to hope that your other teammates know their area. It sounds ridiculous to us, but maybe admissions saw or thought something different.
That sucks about your kids’ school. It’s terrifying that I feel like this is a more and more common thing.
The problem is that there are solutions (ie. reduce admin salaries) that can be used to offset the issues in an actually meaningful way, and they aren’t taken.
From the article “…My last raise was a chocolate bar.”
That is deeply insulting
Maybe you missed the fact that it was shaped like money. It’s like a raise.
Governments are underfunding education, and in Canada there’s pressure to limit international students who pay big bucks to study here, so there’s a bit of talk of austerity at many public universities in Canada.
When you combine it with the profit incentive of private universities and their administration acting like CEOs, and all the contracting out that was done by both public and private that are now screwing them over, paints an awful picture for education in North America.
The one real benefit of the cold war was a focus on education.
most of the usa infrastructure, physical, intellectual, etc was built as a product of the cold war.
and we started viciously neglecting it in the 1980s, as the end of that war was becoming obvious
deleted by creator
Sorry guys, I thought I was adding to the thread here, but after seeing people who actually live it, I had to delete my post as misguided
I wonder if adjunct professors aren’t even called professors. My ex and all of her colleges were getting paid in the 80k range at cal state la, which publishes their salaries online.
The big thing is adjuncts are not tenure track and not even be full time. People I know in the field talk about it like a dead end, so I think of it similarly to outsourcing in my own field.
However the author stated they were tenured, so he’s in an unusually good position, making the criticisms all the stronger
Wanted remote work, got it for less money and more work. Makes $54k. School enrollment is going down, and he says they won’t hire more staff. Finally says Americans have never supported public education.
Holy fuck what a long winded, winding pontificating piece. Complete with a bunch of short one sentence paragraphs. Not worth the read, unless you want the emotions. If you want the attacks on capitalism just go to the end.
I dated a uni prof for a long time and they work waay too much. Every night, every weekend, much of the summer. They then get paid peanuts.
It’s less than minimum wage and many of the consumables they pay for themselves.
Then the big wigs at the top get too much compensation.
Then the vendors get paid too much to provide piss-poor software and services.
I was a grad student, i saw the writing on the wall and left.
I’d be working 80-100 hr weeks, for about 50-75K, unless I became a superstar academic. And then? Maybe I make 120K. that was going to be my entire life, stuck at a cheap salary, working like a dog, no time for a family or a life or anything else.
I work in IT networking now, I make 120k/yr and do maybe 20-30 hours of a work a week.
I’m just summarizing the article and saying it was shitly written.
