The handwriting has been on the wall for decades. I was writing about it and teaching courses about it more than 20 years ago. The university today is a moral cesspool. It chews up its students and spits them out. Every graduate program kin the humanities should bear a sign "enter at your own risk - graduate education in the humanities destroys lives."
When I was a department head I strongly encouraged my colleagues to embrace our adjuncts and include them in externally funded research projects. No takers. Zero concern.
That said, there is life outside of academia - and maybe even life within it it beyond the tenure track - for enterprising young scholars. First the very painful business of letting go of your dreams. Then the very difficult but ultimately rewarding process of building new, more realistic dreams for the present situation and pursuing them without looking up, many hours every single day.
The first rule: if anyone offers you an adjunct job, laugh in his or her face.
49
The job landscape is bleak for the majority of Americans. Redefining employment to part-time or contract positions to not include retirement benefits and healthcare for the majority of workers for the benefit of those at the top has completed eroded our way of life. The question is will we have the societal and political will to do anything about it? Are we even able to do this without "revolution" now that the money interests have completely taken over the political system. It is particularly sad that the universities now mirror the corporations in their pursuit of more and more money for the few. Capitalism on steroids is ugly and unjust.
35
Something missing here: all the negatives of being an adjunct apply regardless of discipline, meaning high-demand fields like STEM go begging for instructors while the humanities are saturated. Even if someone would prefer teaching, the financial sacrifice is often too great, and so the fields that most need high-quality instructors often have too few, and those often mediocre.
And it wasn't just the economy at fault: it was the fiscal austerity that accompanied and followed the tax cuts of '01 and '03.
The dumbing of America is a long-term political goal for a certain portion of the ideological spectrum.
32
The system is broken. Blaming tenured professors is not fair. We don't create the positions, chairs are constantly asking for tenure-track positions and working to make sure our colleagues attain job security. Many tenured professors mentor and recommend TAs for scarce jobs. We strongly discourage students from going to graduate school. Some do not retire because tenure-track no one will be hired for their positions. University trustees and presidents are the people responsible engineering this caste system. Their goal is to cut costs in the area of teaching salaries. And salaries are lower for those of us who are not US Americans or European descent, women, working in the humanities, etc. The article does not distinguish humanities from the darlings of most presidents - STEM professors. The big problem is the inflation of ADMINISTRATIVE positions, all earning in the six-figure range, with lots of perks and support staff. The administrative positions roster at my university looks like a corporation's staff directory. At least once a month there is an email announcing a Vice - blank of -blank, a Senior Assistant Vice Provost for blank, etc. Too many to count. Look at the board members of many private universities, you will find people like Larry Fink, so it's clear where this is headed.
57
The answer is to go into a career where you actually have job security and a living wage. After 11 years of teaching at a college full-time, the school decided I should become an adjunct: teach the same full load, have the same office hours, and do the same committee work — all at half the pay and no longer any benefits. I left, went to nursing school, started working at more money than I had ever made before, had job security and as much job flexibility as I wanted, AND had many opportunities to Teach!! Best decision I ever made, and I never looked back.
47
It's an ongoing battle between visionaries and bean-counters, cultural progressives and philistines, innovators and luddites. The forces of stagnation and anti-intellectualism have succeeded in turning university administrations into slave overseers... professors are directed to raise a new generation of academic serfs (adjunct professors) instead of battalions of revolutionary thinkers. Real innovation is dangerous. If new ideas from young PhDs are too radical (whether in English, philosophy, agriculture, or computer science), they have to be carefully controlled; real innovation might be a challenge to the gospel of tax cuts.
17
I used to think if a small investment was good then a bigger investment was better. Didn't matter if it was gold, equities, real estate, sex, more is better. Maybe that doesn't apply to advanced degrees in 2020.
When we break the buck on advanced degrees we depress the pool of those willing to spend a dollar to get back less than a dollar of long term gain.
How does it work in Denmark? Tuition is zero to the student up to the masters level, yet assistant faculty get $10,000 or more per month.
5
We have a shortage of doctors, specifically in many under served areas of the country and a looming shortage of teachers.
What is preventing the Democratic controlled House (Congress) from enacting bills that would provide tuition free education to these highly educated professionals from becoming doctors, and high school administrators (Principals)?
What it took the Republicans in Congress 55+ unsuccessful tries to gut the Affordable Care Act during President Obama's time, but the Democrat controlled House of Representatives does not have the time and wherewithal to help these gifted souls?
Shame on you, the Democratic (un)Representatives.
1
Big Ed is like the agriculture or healthcare industry : huge expense subsidized by tax payers and funded by debt of its consumers.
Do we need one more 'definitive dissertation' on Shakespeare? that is a cipher to those who pay for it?
Universities and colleges need to justify their existence just like everyone else in a world that provides unparalleled free access to knowledge that was the sole purview of a few 'priests' who add 'color' and little else.
And, pupils who respond with plausible dissimilarities culled from Spark Notes?
It's called the internet. I mean which student or PhD is really going to make a difference to the store of human knowledge with another take on Moby Dick?
Things that worked yesterday (Columbia has 8MM books in the Library ) have little relevance today.
PhDs in anything need to justify their ROI
8
All those high paid administrators need administrative assistants, who are paid far, far better than any adjunct and often need nothing beyind an associate's degree.
Even higher ed doesn't care about higher ed.
29
If anyone is still reading.....
Here is an example of adminstrative bloat. Ontario publishes a "sunshine list," all public employees who make over $100K. (Very contentious, long story) All Canadian universities are public, so university salaries are put on this list.
I chose one person at random -- well, actually, not at random. This morning, all university staff and faculty got an email from this VP's office telling us we should pat one another on the back for UofT being such a great uni. Seriously. All for $273K/year. Note in particular her progression from prof to admin person, something people in these comments have noted happening frequently, as admin make more than profs. (Again, this information is all public; I am not sharing something that is private or privileged.)
https://www.ontariosunshinelist.com/people/bmrxnh
13
Adjuncts, why do you complain and complain about your sad lot in life, yet keep doing your ridiculously low paying jobs year after year? Quit! Do something else. No one is holding a gun to your head and telling you that you have to teach a single course as an adjunct. As everyone points out, your chances of achieving a tenure track position are almost nil. So quit. You are brilliant, creative, probably an excellent writer, and there are many decent jobs in the real world that could use your talents. It takes effort and flexibility to switch career goals, but it's not impossible.
23
This is great news! My son is now a junior at a decent SUNY school with 3.9 gpa majoring in philosophy. I told him not to go into the field, for job security. Did he listen?. I know where this career is going! Straight to the toilet as the academic institutions became the cartels of education. No different than the paper mills.
6
As a tenure-track faculty, I don't see why we need the tenure track at all. Too many people do nothing, zippo, nada, after getting tenure. The argument is that only with tenure do people say risky things. I don't buy it.
Adjuncts and teaching-stream faculty are way better teachers than tenure-track faculty. I don't want students to be disadvantaged because of Sanders' stupid rule and be taught by people who don't want to be there and who put in the minimal possible effort.
Yes, teachers should be treated better. No, expanding tenure or requiring research-focused professors to do something they are horrible at - teaching - is not the solution. Abolish the tenure track.
10
Under there conditions, the modern-day professor has become just another breed of stressed-out business traveler who has traded all freedom for a modicum of security and a handful of luxuries. There is no reason to pursue a PhD. just to wind up in an MBA lifestyle.
6
I spent 10 years as a post doc chasing a tenure track job teaching evolution. Finally landed a job and left for industry three years later at four times the pay. I regret that I had not abandoned the search sooner. In my experience most of those tenured old timers spend their time and energy sniping at their fellow faculty members (one the down sides of speak-your-mind-without-consequence tenure). These stories of investing 10 years getting a degree and not finding a tenured job are sad but also pathetic. Society does not owe you a job no matter the scale of your investment in your skills. Move on.
NB
14
Not new. My uncle was absolutely brilliant, acknowledged by all, but after WWII the WASP faculties for humanities at major schools (his was Berkeley) did their darndest to keep out the surge of Jews and brown poor-born folk who managed to get degrees on the GI bill from achieving graduate degrees. In his field, Berkeley didn't give out a single Phd for 5 years in the early 1950's. Any even if you got one and were an accomplished genius, there were no jobs. As late as 1960 there was a joke, true, that there was only one Jewish humanities professor at Columbia University and he had a WASP name (Lionel). He owed his job to the orders of the university President. The head of the English dept visited Lionel Trilling to unabashedly beg him not to encourage any more Jews to come to Columbia.
9
Just keep dumbing the whole thing down and making way for more trumps! Meanwhile, pay the football coach and the college president millions. Oh, and be sure to build dorms that rival luxury hotels to justify all that student debt! Why not just get rid of the humanities departments, most of the young people today are only interested in a business degree.
9
The real reason we have failed to find ET is because they emphathized the social sciences and humanities.
1
Doctorates take eight years or longer to complete? In the humanities? I can't imagine anyone checking out of life that long for the sake of tenuous employment at double-wide prices. At some point, if you're really as smart as you think, you'll realize it's time to leave those pikers behind and get a real job. It may not be one where you can expound on the failures of capitalism or the promises of social equity, but it will put food on the table, provide better comfort, and just might teach you something about intelligent choices.
13
I was a grad student in English at University of Michigan from 1977-78. Got an MA but wanted to go on get a Ph.d and teach university.
Then, a lightbulb went off. No way, not even then. It was obvious at that time to anyone who bothered to look outside of the grad school bubble, that tenure track teaching positions were few and far between, there were alot of smart people, and a ph.d was another 4-6 years of low paid work after which you might get more low paid work teaching at armpit community college, if you were lucky. I didn’t want to drive a taxi cab in AnnArbor spouting Ezra Pound when I was in my 40’s.
I’m 65, never looked back, had a wonderful career in insurance, still read poetry from time to time and never regretted my decision. All young people today have to do is look at the stats and realize they will never gain steady university teaching employment with an English Ph.d. I did and it was a lot harder to dig out stats then, than it is today.
The article almost makes these budding scholars seem like victims. And, of course, Bernie will fix this, too. I just think they are lazy or stupid or have trust funds. The universities will be happy to take your money, college professors will be happy to encourage you, because most have never worked outside of academia.
What about figuring out for yourself what your going to do after the thesis is written, you are 30 years old and spent your 20’s buried in books and esoterica?
15
Let's not forget the purgatory of post doctoral indentured servitude before the ignominy of settling for a lecturer position.
Here's the thing though. Academics need to stop whining about this. The writing has been on the wall since at least 2008. This isn't anything new.
For people, who are highly educated and who knew exactly what they were getting into, to complain about a perceived lack of upward mobility in academia is laughable. Anyone who gets a PhD who thinks that it's a zero sum game between having an tenure track academic position, or being unemployed should have their diplomas revoked.
If you've got PhD, you have a skill set that is valuable in other fields. Use those critical thinking skills you developed and find something else to do.
17
2 of the dirtiest secrets of acadsemia are:
1. the often petty politics played by memebers of a faculty
2. the adjunct crisis: where your reward for a long struggle to achieve intellectual heft is rewarded with 4 courses taught @ pay of $3 k ea: less than poverty wages.
Makes sense for an anti intellectual society like ours....
18
This trend is not limited to America. Generally, a Ph.D. does not prepare you for the real world or a real job. It is theory, pure and simple. That is why it is hard to get a real job. Catch 22.
5
The exact same person who told me, 20 years ago, that there will be plenty of jobs because everyone is retiring, now wants to make a human rights claim against anyone who tells him he should retire before he turns 70.
So... yeah.
12
The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market.
Exactly, and 95% of them "do as we say not as we do" Liberals
4
Some programs need to die, and prospective students should shun them.
3
This is the wealthiest country on the planet, remember that.
5
Well to the labor market my fellow Americans. We owe you as much as you owe us.
2
It seems to me that in the early 1980s or so the American academe discovered itself as a corporation. Since then the tuition and fees have gone up and up. The students have become cash cows for colleges and universities. This is especially true of international students, who pay many times more in tuition. Heck, they are even willing to admit foreign students with such GRE scores as combined verbal and quantitative of 400 or so (old scale). This is not a made up example; it really happened where I was.
9
We have so many deans and assistant deans and associate deans and associate vice provosts and bla bla bla at the school where I teach it's dizzying. Even worse: most are failed academics who could not get tenure and became instead career administrators. They are so clueless they would not recognize a good idea if it hit them on the head.
18
Wow. What a great article. This is the first time that I’ve seen such a well written, incisive and detailed explanation of the genesis and history of how today’s PhD problem came to be. The one thing missing is that I assume that as the millenials started to arrive on campus, all it took was a calculator to figure out when the bubble would pass through, and common sense would tell the university that if they hired enough tenure track professors to handle the millenial load, they would be stuck with those people after the bubble had passed. Thus, not just cheaper to hire adjuncts, but easier to get rid of them when they were no longer needed.
The information about the federal law making it illegal to force retirement at age 70 was a factor I didn’t think about before. And boy, do I see it in force locally. My experience is with a French department that hasn’t hired a new tenure track professor in years. Well, maybe one. And no one retires, either. Half the faculty are just plain old. They leave when they die, or become to sick to work anymore. A friend of mine’s husband is 81 years old and still working as a full time Architecture professor. 81 years old!! Not emeritus, full time!! I know he loves his job, but it’s a spot that has been long denied someone younger. Now I know why.
And guess what? I am friends with several graduate students. Trust me, no one sits down with them and tells them they won’t get a job when they graduate. To me, that is criminal. What a waste.
13
I’m a former tenure-track faculty member in a biomedical field. I left for a job in biotech and haven’t looked back.
I agree that the system is messed up and very much NOT serving younger people.
But let me address CURRENT sessionals/adjuncts.
“Here is the deal: you are in a system that is so messed up that it is not using your great skills. And, yes, you do have many excellent skills that would be highly valued in other areas. So examine your life - realistically, you probably have about a 0% (1%?) chance of getting a tenure-track position. And is your life really moving forward? The answer is probably no. So look to other parts of society that will value your skills. The world needs your help and you have a lot to give. Take some time - yeah, I know you really do have time - to figure out some other options. Get a life coach/career coach or something. Life can be better.”
6
How many english Ph.ds do we need?
If you chose to do a Ph.D in a humanities field, there's much fewer job opportunities as there is for STEM Ph.Ds because there's isn't as high of a demand for them.
4
Why don’t the folks start affordable colleges?
6
Its not "the market", its the politicians.
Demanding universities run "like a business", they ruin the game.
Its unconscionable de-funding of education by the Feds, states following suit.
In another avatar of like-a-business-ness, politicians opine on the waste of time that is majors like English, history, sociology; one commenting such students should be shot, the rest characterizing them as worthless.
Or the cancerous growth of administrators. What is this, a bank? Administrators knowing they offer little value grab work where they can, which means shushing faculty. Who cares what teachers think about teaching? What specialists think about their specialty?
Imagine these miserable people are right: nothing matters but business and money. You take risks, you have the brilliant ideas, you get the cash...all of it.
Then explain Big Pharma, the least humane cash cow. Dependent on government research, unwilling to support universities or professors.
What do you expect from a society that spent decades devaluing educators and at a President's behest considers openly them are parasites, traitors?
Shrink administrations. Give professors control of their departments. Remove politicians from campus and Boards of Trustees. Make business pay for what they receive and share the profits.
Things will get better fast.
Pay your adjuncts. Give them security, maybe an office that wasn't a broom closet. Perhaps allow them to speak openly to those blessed with tenure.
10
I'm a recovering academic.
I was addicted to education but became greatly impaired as a lecturer with the knowledge that my TAs made more money and had better benefits than I did.
9
Many institutions of higher education are animals that eat their young.
4
What this article neglects to admit is that tenure (the root of all academic evil) is an outdated concept that does nothing but turn professors into the most whiny, entitled childish people you’ll ever meet. Anyone else out there have a guaranteed job for life no matter how you perform, can’t be managed or how you behave?
The whole academic model is ridiculous. It operates on a 14th century version of how things should work.
The article also neglects to mention that most adjuncts have real world jobs and teach classes where their real world knowledge adds a fresh perspective and will match anything you can find in the academy.
It should also be noted that I’ve never met someone who is an adjunct who does it for the money. They do it mostly as a way to give back. Sorry professors but you believe that your’s is he only “business”( a word they hate) that isn’t going to be disrupted. It’s already happening and it has only just begun.
9
And for these unemployed or underemployed Ph.D.'s the situation is even grimmer for white males as departments filled with old, white men look to diversify. Having encouraged undergraduates to apply to their programs many of these old geezers who no longer like teaching young people should ride off into the sunset of their cushy retirements. Let them have continued access to offices and other support services for their research but get them off the fulltime payroll so the next generation can contribute to the profession.
4
Just another example of our winner-take-all society
2
Professors don't hire and fire. University officials do.
This article pulls the generational and economic strings of people who see higher education from outside. I completely agree, personally that labor expointation is wrong. But this ``tenure-envy'' is mostly journalistic copy. Hey! Who am I to put journalists out of a job!
5
If you don’t research the career prospects before investing your money and time into the training there is only one person to blame for the end result and it ain’t Uncle Sam.
4
Don't cry
Don't raise your eye
It's only teenage wasteland
- fifty years later
2
The Baby boomers in academia ought to retire. Their generation has brought enough ruin to this country and to the mellenials in particular. Time to step aside.
2
So, dear undergrad reading all this, or parent of said undergrad, should anyone today consider a humanities Ph.D?
Of course you should, provided the following conditions are met:
1) You will not pay a penny, because you will have a fellowship/teaching deal that covers your tuition and living expenses through the completion of your dissertation
2) You have ZERO expectation of an academic career. Of course you will apply for jobs for a year or three, but you don't really expect to get one.
3) You will not be psychologically crushed by the fact that you will then need to leave the Ivory Tower, FOREVER.
4) You have a plan for how you will earn your non-academic living, whether on Wall Street or as a plumber, thereafter.
5
Since none of this is secret, and those contemplating PhD programs are presumably not stupid, why do they persist in marching over the cliff?
4
We need more people writing like Shakespeare and fewer people teaching Shakespeare.
10
The real crisis is that all of these PhDs (and MAs and BAs) have absolutely nothing to say and are nearly universally unremarkable.
Sure, your thesis on the “intersection” of criss-crossing roads of irrelevant virtue signaling has currency in the self-gratifying circles of academia, but mercifully society is not yet at the point where it pays for such facile fraud.
Speaking from ample experience, a non-STEM higher degree from Columbia or NYU is an exceptionally accurate indicator for how incredibly mediocre, un-innovative, delusional and powerfully self-absorbed a person is. A real hallmark of our increasingly corrupted gilded age and over privileged class.
7
Guess who the big biggest offenders of student loan debt are, see https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/upshot/student-debt-big-culprit-graduate-school.html
You guessed it masters and PhD candidates. Easy access to educational loans created an over supply of useless degrees, but people don’t see the connection. They will exacerbate the problem by making tuition free.
3
8 years to get a PHD? Why not get an MD in only 4 Years. Sure a MD residency is hard, low paying work; but many post PHDs are lucky just to get a low paying Post Doc.
6
With a PhD in English you too can be a part-time adjunct instructor at a community college moonlighting as a barista a Starbucks.
5
Hey, man, I lived this in 1978, when my Harvard PhD in history translated into NO JOB. Oh well, I sold my soul to Corporate America and lived happily ever after. Sic transit gloria mundi, and all that stuff .
6
I don't understand why all non-tenure/tenure-track teachers don't form a union, and simply refuse to work for this system which exploits them.
Additionally, PhD students should be forced to pick up a business degree along the way. You could easily cram the content of an MBA into one year.
That way they would have something to fall back on--a plan B--in case plan A doesn't work out.
3
There is a dirty little secret...a motivated student has access to the best education for free... colleges are a failing industry. That is why tenure track positions are in decline, and the smart people are in the administration to rake in the cash while the opportunity exists...
4
My ex-husband with a PhD in philosophy from a top-5 university was a college of arts and sciences dean at a middling university in Saint Louis. His arrogance and ruthlessness towards his adjunct professors and graduate student workers is sickening in retrospect. It bothered me at the time and I told him so. He loved all the expensive executive perks (paid travel, free journal subscriptions, entertainment expense account for “fund-raising”) but didn’t have an empathetic bone his body towards those working for peanuts. And such a “progressive” too who wanted to “change the world”. Over the decade we were together he became enamored with “executive leadership”. I told him I fell in love with a philosopher but ended up with a common bureaucrat.
I later learned through the grapevine that his arrogant attitude and dismissiveness of his female tenured faculty finally resulted in termination from his deanship. Tenure is the only thing that saved him from unemployment. Now he’s teaching low-level classes to the very “not-too-bright” students he dismissed while flying high as a white, oh-so-typical boomer-male dean. I’m far younger than him and can’t wait till that selfish, self-absorbed generation dies off so I can enjoy just a few years free of their suffocating narcissism. It’ll be up to millennials now to clean up their parents’ messy failures in academia and everywhere else. I feel sorry for the next few generations, robbed of everything boomers grabbed for themselves.
3
Agree . 100 percent !!
2
The link to Eliot's The Wasteland at the end is a brilliant touch.
2
Here’s my solution: BABY BOOMERS RETIRE!!!
3
Life sciences ftw
2
Is this any surprise????
We’re an idiot ignoramus country hostile to people who are smart and have longer than theee second attention spans.
Us Ph.D.s have always been pariahs and outcasts in the US, and this is only getting worse, with rising hostility to science and truth.
Even the movie, “Idiocracy” couldn’t predict how bad it has become.
It’s okay; our imminent extinction as a species on this planet will be no loss to the Universe.
3
For those pondering graduate studies, I've found this blog very informative:
https://100rsns.blogspot.com/
It's specifically oriented toward humanities graduate students, but a good many students in STEM, and other fields, have commented also.
2
“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
3
Guess what, there are too many of you! And not all of you have something of import to contribute. Come out into the world of work.
2
PhD but you’re adjunct, non-tenured faculty? No benefits, no tenure, a crazy schedule, you know, but they’ll call you “”Doctor/Professor” and won’t that feel great? Are there any job openings at Macys? I’ve got no work experience, but I do have this PhD...
3
I have a PhD, work in the industry, have better pay than a professor who publishes like rolls of toilet paper. Results with a lot of MAY and SUGGEST, but no concrete useful ideas. Even in hard sciences. I truly despise these guys now. Except they get to hang out doing not much... Luckily my professor warned me never to stay in the academic world.
3
Universities have been corrupted into a prestige-oriented luxury good, with bureaucrats and administrators capturing as much of the value as possible, all while squeezing students and faculty.
End the federal subsidies and the corruption of the accreditors. Let the market discipline the profligate. Americans value education: schools that emphasize great teaching and faculty will always have a future, even if their buildings and amenities aren't as fancy. Look at Purdue: tuition has been flat(!) since 2012. Look at Berea College in Kentucky; students work and attend a world-class liberal arts school for free.
We could have great universities, but instead we have chosen social justice warrior country clubs and corporate-elite status credentials, whatever the cost.
4
College administrators are paid excessively for a reason. As an undergrad, last semester I took the honor thesis with the dean of my school (a Ph.D from Harvard). He is the most excellent professor I have ever had the privilege to meet.
4
I graduated in 2010 with a degree in Political Science, setting my sights on applying for grad programs. My poly sci advisor begged me to reconsider as he knew what future job prospects would look like. He convinced to me to join the Peace Corps (I was already interested but on the fence due to the 2 year commitment). During that time I worked with a small Cameroonian health center and fell in love with medicine. Now I’m in my last year of medical school and looking back, that poly sci advisor saved me from a lot of heartache (though medical school has brought its own level of heartache). He was right that I wasn’t absolutely obsessed with poly sci enough to dedicate my life to a PhD path that could prove quite difficult. I hope that humanities advisors would truly counsel any student who is thinking about going into a PhD program. It is the right path for some, but definitely not for all.
12
Years ago I applied for a job as an admissions counselor at a local state university. I figured that, after fifteen or so years of teaching high school juniors and seniors, and advising them in their college application process, that I might offer a unique fit for the job.
I was told I was unqualified because I did not have a PhD in “Higher Education Administration.”
6
I am an adjunct for a Master's Program at a local university. I took the job, in part, to expand my interactions with people beyond the four walls of my company. I am in tech now but spent too many years in my 20s getting a PhD in Social Anthropology. When I finished, there were no jobs in the area and while some fellow students did well, going to research institutes, finding jobs with NGOs, some also took the long adjunct route to a tenure track position. If I had to do all over again, I may not have toiled in academia for so long. I appreciate the training I received but it didn't make me any more marketable as a professional. I am grateful I don't have to depend on my adjunct salary to support my family and I am equally grateful to see an upcoming cohort of young professionals whose education I can play a small part of. I joined our union and am trying to understand how it works because there are so many other adjuncts that do depend on this work as a main source of income and I see how the university has a definite distinction between its tenured faculty and its adjuncts. What I don't see is how a Master's Certification Program has the return that the university promises. Many have noted the administrative hierarchy that has emerged in higher ed. That overhead, the crazy tuition and the capital builds that universities undertake to be competitive to students are unrealistic and unsustainable.
3
@Mimi I wonder just how many jobs there were in Social Anthropology when you decided on that career. The number should have been daunting, unless you thought you were the Einstein of Social Anthropology. Did you really believe that if you managed to get one of these rare jobs, that it would be enough to pay off the student loan in a reasonable amount of time?
Odds are that you were drawn to this field not because of the promise of jobs, but because of your interest in studying your own ethnicity. Did you ever think that that would be worthy of a student loan?
What could your return possibly be?
1
Administrative bloat is only part of the problem. The other Black Hole swallowing a lot of money is Athletics - there are no funds to properly pay adjunct and so-called part-time faculty, so the story goes, but, administrators, coaches, athletic facilities, athletic marketing and staff keep mushrooming unabatedly. Let’s be honest: The US capitalist model of higher education is working, no significant (yet) shortages of instructors or students, why fix it? As long as collective bargaining rights are lacking and unions remain powerless nothing will change.
7
I was surprised there was no mention of PhDs teaching K - 12. Particularly in the sciences. Professors and adjuncts often cite local K - 12 having better hours, benefits, and pay as better than university jobs.
At a time when better teachers are needed across the country, the glut of PhDs can easily be absorbed. However, there is no reason for 6-8 years for preparation.
5
Although the humanities labor market may indeed be "in crisis," a newly minted Ph.D. in a STEM field should have no trouble finding a challenging, high-paying job in any number of sectors -- defense, finance, tech, biotech, communications, automotive, aerospace, government, etc.
4
When I was completing my M.A. a few years ago, my professors specifically advised me against pursuing a PhD in my field due to over saturation. They were quite honest about how difficult it was to be hired on in academia, and this was fairly evident, as I was being taught by former Ivy-League professors at a relatively small, modest, Midwestern school. I'm now watching my former school make cuts in academia as those same Professors struggle to find a way to survive, and it deeply saddens me. My social sciences education taught me how to research, read, and write effectively, skills I'm now realizing many individuals lack. I was fortunate enough to have the foresight and guidance not to move on to a PhD, but I can only imagine the struggle for those who truly love what they're studying and want to continue all the way through.
3
@Fiona You state, "My social sciences education taught me how to research, read, and write effectively, skills I'm now realizing many individuals lack." I found the same thing over 40 years ago.
But then, a funny thing happened. I left teaching HS English and entered the computer field. My progress began slowly but, in the end, I found myself managing Data Center Security for two data centers at a very large domestic bank. Go figure!
2
I'm a tenured full professor who is in sympathy with the overall appraisal of crisis but dismayed by the obviously hostile and condescending tone of this piece. (If Kevin Carey is your best education reporter, perhaps look elsewhere.). All faculty are not corrupt and passive researchers who delight in exploiting our burgeoning class of peon-grad-adjunct laborers. We are privileged to be sure, but also being ground down by deeply anti-union elite institutions (like my own) which divide, conquer, mystify, and corrupt faculty; a flood of non-academic career administrators who have overtaken governance at every level; increasing bureaucratization which saps our mission and our fundamental sense of what we are doing; and, yes, the trauma and ethical despair of working tirelessly with brilliant Ph.D. students who are subjected to horrific conditions on the job market. I do not consider myself "uniquely deserving." Uniquely lucky is more like it. I also do not "enjoy" conducting "research" in the rare time I'm able to attempt to do it without an ongoing awareness of the futility of an enterprise whose future scholars are being snuffed out of existence. This kind of coverage is anti-intellectual and facile. We all deserve better if we wish to preserve specialized knowledge production in the humanities (mind you, the sciences are doing fine, or at least much better).
21
Let’s clarify something: tenure is not a guarantee of job security. At its core, tenure exists to give college faculty the freedom to teach their discipline in an intellectually-honest way and without limitations or fear of retribution. This is crucial in higher education, which is premised on the pursuit of truth, accuracy, and exploration of new knowledge, not all of which might be socially, politically, or economically acceptable. It is one of the reasons why the increasing numbers of adjunct faculty positions are problematic. But tenure does not guarantee a job for life. With declining numbers of students enrolling in humanities programs, many colleges and universities have reduced these programs or eliminated them entirely, and with them, their faculty. Even the American Association of University Professors allows for the termination of tenured faculty when programs are reduced or discontinued for legitimate educational reasons. I have witnessed multiple tenured or tenure-track colleagues lose their jobs in the past five years for this very reason, so even those lucky few who earn tenure should not feel overly secure.
7
Just another example of how that dangerous radical Bernie Sanders wants to make the American system -- in this case academia -- work for the many instead of keeping most of its "goodies" for those at the very top.
I am a former adjunct faculty member who was paid from $2000 to $3000 per course at universities in the San Francisco Bay Area that charge from $47,000 to $50,000 in annual tuition.
At one of these schools the top nine administrators last year received at total of $2.37 million in salaries. The President Emeritus took home $367,241 as his reward for turning the once-prestigious faculty into a crowd of underpaid, overworked adjuncts who raced around from university to university (sometimes up to three a day) trying to earn a subsistence living.
It’s not difficult to imagine how the quality of education is declining at such institutions. Even the most dedicated adjunct faculty members (and they are legion) do not have the time, energy and opportunities for reflection that make for a truly great professor. I was privileged to be taught by many of those in my own undergraduate days decades ago. They were among the great gifts of my life and created in me a person devoted to lifelong learning and intellectual growth.
11
The one issue that I find just a bit erroneous in the article is at the beginning where it links the adjunct crisis to just the humanities. Though the humanities may perhaps have the biggest problem here (and along with the social sciences) as they lack equivalent private sector employments, In my experience it seems the whole range of academic fields is overproduced, including in fields like STEM.
I would be curious as to what academic employment is like in Europe--is there an adjunct crisis / overproduction of grad degrees there too?
4
A key part of this article is this sentence "Yet at no point did universities seem to consider slowing the flow of students into the Ph.D. pipeline." This in itself if not necessarily a problem; the problem is that a vast majority of the students in those programs are also taught that an academic career is the only option (or at least, the only "successful" option) for them. This leads to a glut of highly educated, highly capable people chasing after underpaying jobs in the hopes of success, instead of channeling their education and skills into a myriad of other careers.
5
As someone who has worked in academia and industry in bio/chem areas, I have seen this issue from both sides. While in academia I saw a large number of grad students and post-docs who were there only because they didn't know what else to do. They didn't give a thought to what would come later or if they even liked their field. Universities don't discourage this because they want to keep the numbers up and they need TAs and lab rats. While it's recently started changing, academics would look down on students looking to industry. There is much less teamwork in academia, even within the same lab, which doesn't transition well to industry. The tenure system needs to be changed to renewals, rather than lifetime appointments. I've seem many tenured faculty just wasting space and resources. Universities should limit the number of grad students they accept. Ph.Ds are also not required for many great careers, so the years spent in grad school have to be weighed against the experience/salary acquired while working those years.
6
My son set out to get a PhD in philosophy, which was not as hopeless an idea as it might seem, as moral philosophy will be deeply needed in fields like DNA manipulation, AI and robotics. However, he's wisely shifting his life plan to a Masters and to teaching high school.
That said, I seem to remember reading an article that claimed most of the increase in tuitions was not due to funding cuts but to the swelling ranks of administrative positions, people who get paid very well, but don't actually contribute an iota to the task of educating. When I went to college, professors filled most important admin positions, apart from the registrar, maintenance and admin assistants, so most funding, whether from government or tuition, went to pay people whose primary function was educating. Hence, I had low student loans and my single mom could get me through college on a vet tech salary.
So, what about legislation restricting the use of non-educators in college administrations?
15
Tenured faculty tends to have light teaching loads and relatively high rates of compensation.
If teaching positions are restricted to tenured faculty became law, courses offered would likely decline, as cost per class rose while the pool of students with ability to pay higher tuition declines.
Winners are those lucky fat cats with tenure, losers students and taxpayers who subsidize state campuses.
1
@pedro "Lucky fat cats with tenure"--like my colleagues (at an R1 university) who are 20 years into a career after 8 years of graduate school, making $85,000, teaching 80 students per semester in writing-based courses while being productive, nationally prominent scholars and serving on countless committees.
2
This article is actually just a testament to the genius and unique status of universities and colleges. Unlike most industries, they get to generate, literally, their own labor market. So if you generate vastly more workers/ laborers than you need, then two good things happen: (1) you get to charge ever more people a lot of money to go through your diploma mill, and (2) you guarantee a vast oversupply of laborers and thus put yourself in a position to pay them a pittance and exploit them in every way. When I graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology in 1974, there were about 300 (hard to remember the exact number) Ph.D.'s for every academic job. The joke was on me and my fellow students nationwide. I came to realize that universities are in the business of cranking out graduates with all manner of degrees, and most definitely NOT in the business of controlling the tap so that the supply of laborers matches the job market. That would be against their own economic self-interest. I found a way to make a living despite this situation, but caveat emptor is the name of this game. As a new graduate I also discovered and then followed the wisdom of Thomas Robbins in his book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues where he wrote "It's amazing how many people are laughing when you get away from universities and stop reading newspapers." Almost five decades later: same story.
5
Adjunct/non tenure track of eight years here (I taught over 35 courses on my own while getting my PhD- at $3,200/class).
I would like to highlight where this all leads in terms of actual student outcomes for things like critical thinking, writing skills, reasoning. I’ve been told repeatedly that the “average” at our school is a B+. Didn’t C mean average once upon a time? Paying students want good grades and they don’t like being corrected. If you grade based on actual performance and correct students when they’re wrong- you will hear about it come student evaluations. What this amounts to is deeply anti-intellectual customer service work, as complains will threaten the pittance and precarity left. It’s hard when you love learning and want to transmit that to your students but at the end of the day my / our expertise is subordinated to their “experience” that at my current private, selective liberal arts institution looks a bit like Disneyland with money poured into work out facilities and extensive creature comforts. This produces entitled, low skill graduates and society is not the better for it.
21
@PhD Look no further than all the high school students graduating with 4.0 GPAs - the same in colleges. Perhaps a few percent are truly, "Exceptional" individuals who have actually earned a 4.0.
In high schools, it's parents insisting that their child is, "bright," when they are not and the parent is not in any qualified position to determine that.
From college, I can offer another example. I was in a computer programming language course (COBOL) and we received our graded programs. I had an "A" and a neighbor in the next row had a "B" and complained that, since her program "worked," she deserved an "A."
The professor politely explained although her program, "worked" - i.e. supplied the correct answer based on the input, its format was confusing and difficult to follow. My program, on the other hand, was logically formulated and easy to follow. Being, "easy to follow" was extremely important because, in the business world, a year down the road, someone else would have to support my program and it would be a great help to them and the business if he could follow the logic of my program to make the necessary modifications.
2
@PhD ,
that is why we need to attract 'the talent from abroad' as NIH director Collins so aptly expressed.
1
The NY Times is forever fixated on bad academic job markets. While the Humanities are in crisis, many Business disciplines are thriving - and are rarely reported on in the Times, in the Chronicle, and in other outlets.
What does this mean for prospective students? Often, it means that prospective students do not know we exist, it means that even if they do, this amplified message of crisis, turns gifted applicants from academe to industry, or, it means that gifted students don't know the full array of opportunities for a scholarly career, studying interesting and applied topics - with potential to change the world - studying disciplines that don't quite "fit" their interests or afford promised life opportunities.
More troubling, it means that the persistent shortage of business PhDs continues, resulting in negative externalities that undermine all of academe, as Universities, citing tight labor markets, hire adjuncts for spot coverage in teaching gaps in business courses, undermining the broader idea of tenured faculty teaching and researching difficult business topics.
At some point, the fixation on the crisis in the Humanities needs to be counterbalanced with a celebration of the opportunities afforded by studying more applied disciplines.
The opportunities for a scholarly life of reflection, teaching, and service have not gone away, they are transitioning to different topics, methods, and disciplines, that reflect the broadening demand for knowledge in society.
1
Please do away with tenure, America!
If you want even the humanities to be a marketable product, let the playing field be open.
3
I finished two graduate degrees from a top five public university and one of my favorite instructors in statistics, quit because he would have to be on public assistance to continue to work at the university as a nontenured instructor. This was a brilliant person teaching biostatistics. Yet we pay plumbers and garbage collectors more. What is missing is the long term view. The people who go to the trouble to study post graduate level statistitics are the ones who are the big picture thinkers and society needs these people. Yet, the entire scholastic and economic system is only based on short term rewards.
10
@Roberta That's incredible! Statistics is one of the most demanding disciplines I have ever studied and, surely, there must be great demand in some areas of business and the sciences. So STEM may count for nothing as well?
What is this country coming to? The utilitarianism and concomitant lack of foresight of some in our nation is truly mind-boggling.
1
You'd have to be blind to not have seen this coming. I was a PhD candidate teaching in the UC system during the aughts and witnessed the humanities slide into irrelevancy with the restructuring of programs towards identity politics during those years. I left in 2007 because it was clear the entire humanities branch of academia was on a suicide path and would become a laughing stock, a degradation of intellectual integrity, all reduced to spats based on skin color, the most superficial aspect of what it means to be human. The humanities used to be based on depth and issues like character, now it's just based on shallowness and superficiality, literally. Why this suicide path was not clear to everyone else in academia is a mystery to me. Now everyone's whining about the consequences, but they created it. I have zero empathy for this. They threw critical thinking out the window, now they can sit and ponder the consequences of that.
9
"IN 1995,...They enjoyed professional status, strong job security, relatively good pay (on average), and the freedom to speak their minds."
The author must have meant 1975. There was little job security in the life sciences already in 1995. I recall thousands applying for one tenure-track post. Federal funding of research grants, which pay not only for the needed material but also the salaries of professors, lab techs, post docs and grad students plus overhead, was already low. Where I worked the cut off was at about the 15th percentile for investigator-initiated NIH proposals. Thousands of applications were submitted three times a year. They were still on paper, which filled industrial grade dumpsters in Rockville. Since then NIH has gone paperless, laboratories grew bigger, churning out ever more PhDs, that is grant applicants. Ever more study sections, that is the panels of experts scoring the applications, had to be convened to deal with the ever-growing flood. The experts have had to digest ever more proposals. Today, so many proposals are excellent, an honest judge cannot decide. Even at cut-off an application may not be funded. So many scores are tied that agency admins handpick behind closed doors.
Because of this squeeze at the trough, today's life-sciences professors spend most of their day hunting for money, leaving little time for teaching. If universities bankrolled the research payroll, NIH could fund more grants, and professors would have more time to teach.
4
Being a PhD in a STEM field ...
I'm pretty sour about the whole thing and have come to regard academia as the quintessential "Bright Shining Lie". Moving from adjunct faculty to tenure track means winning the popularity contest and publishing lots - and it doesn't matter whether the papers are any good, as long as they get published, and you can bring in the grant money. I'm way to cynical to be happy with that game.
A fudd is also the kiss of death in the private sector. Unless you are in one of the few positions which actually requires a PhD, you will be regarded as "overqualified" and will not be hired.
My advice is to omit the PhD from your resume and find something else to explain the gap in your life. Me, I tell people I was in "an institution", that I have learned my lesson, have paid my debt to society, want to put it behind me,be a productive member of society, and I don't want to talk about it. They draw their own conclusions and I do not correct them.
Do not lie on your resume. Do not include anything you have not earned. But there is no reason to include everything. Your prospective employer needs to know if you can do the job - but he does not need to know, for example, that you spend time singing Wagner arias with the local amateur opera society. Similarly, he does not need to know you have a PhD if it is not relevant to the job posting.
Good luck out there, it's a jungle. But it is not nearly as hypocritical in industry as it is in academia.
12
@Alternate Identity The established rubric is, "Publish or Perish." It's been around forever, yet it's still no guarantee.
1
While working on my PhD in the Life Sciences back in the late 90s/early 00s, there was already a reduction in research funding and a reduction in tenure track positions underway. I could see the writing on the wall and also did not love science enough to work 6-7 days a week, 10+ hours/day (which most researchers did to remain competitive). I do find the training you get to be critical thinkers in a PhD program is valuable in many professions and did help me get into a non-academic position earlier than I would have been able to do without a PhD. My graduate program didn't like to talk about "alternative careers" outside of academia when I was there, but it's become more common that programs support other career paths, build career networks and bring in speakers (including me). I still think a PhD is a good path for some but candidates should think outside the box for what they can do with it besides a faculty position.
6
While PhD’s are being abused as adjuncts, administrative costs have ballooned. Sort of reminds one of the corporate world. Has greed run amok everywhere? One would think that a stable instructional staff dedicated to the institution would have more to do with successful student experience than layer upon layer of highly paid administration.
Bernie’s idea is fine but here is a simpler one, not requiring federal government interference. Each rating system, e.g. US News and World Reports, make one high profile number: the percent of classes taught by tenured faculty. You can bet administrators wouldn’t like that and would fight it.
Definitely, there is a place for adjuncts. Experienced professionals employed full-time in their discipline and able and willing to bring their professional experience into the classroom. But the practice has gone out of control and greed seems to be the motivation. For the money university costs, even public ones, it is sickening that the whole point of the process- the classes- are taught by brilliant people in an abusive situation, who may need food stamps to survive. Disgusting.
18
Once again division, in this case tenure vs. non-tenure, represses opportunity and process. It seems like we continue to complain about circumstances of our own making. This complaining is becoming so symptomatic of our “crabs in a barrel” mindset as we jockey for the top of the barrel at the expense of others. This is an example of an industry laying the foundation for its own demise. When will we learn?
1
So, it turns out that earning a Ph.D. in the humanities is not likely to lead to a tenured position in academia. Given that fact, and it really is a fact, I don't understand why these people cannot accept this fact and move on to different career fields.
We are talking about intelligent, articulate people. Why are they settling for really crummy work in the adjunct world when they could so many other things. The unemployment rate is under 4%.
Retrain. Develop the ability to do something that people might want to pay you to do. And be grateful for all of the intellectual pleasure and deep insights your graduate programs have provided you.
6
@AnotherOldGuy As someone pointed out earlier, the organizational, research, writing and other presentation skills you have from an education in the Humanities will serve you well in business.
People should start thinking about presenting themselves in that light. I can't tell you how many times non-humanities majors have pointed out another colleague's misspelling in my presence.
It's true, spelling counts!
2
It is truly scandalous. Not just that adjuncts do all the teaching for poverty wages, but that students are saddled with debt to pay lamborghini-sized tuitions. You'd think parents might object to paying $50k to be taught by an adjunct making $25k.
11
I love working with PHDs, but can't stand their sense of entitlement. Many people working in the real world are as scientifically and intellectually superior to the, "I am deserving because I have some parchment" crowd. You aren't very smart if you spend years working and studying something that doesn't have any value.
3
The need to go to college is a myth that is continually perpetuated by those who seek to profit from natural curiosity. Look at trade schools instead. It will be a better bargain, until these same profiteers decide that a useless administration is needed and more important than teachers.
1
Dear Kevin, Thank you for this reality check. I am a licensed architect, educated at a state university. I took years off for motherhood and family responsibilities. When I returned to the workplace, firms would only hire me part-time or as a temporary employee. SO I returned to school to train as a historian and educator. In a year, I will have earned two Ivy League degrees, a Masters and PhD. I have come to realize in the past year that my career prospects are dismal, despite my credentials and skills, I must either accept adjunct appointments or abandon ship again. (I am at the same time under-qualified and over-qualified for most jobs.) I feel like a newspaper wadded up and thrown in the gutter and caught in a storm grate. Capitalism and the institutions that I have defended my entire adult life have eaten away at my motherhood, my identity as a woman, scholar, and teacher. What do I tell my daughter?
4
@Miranda Mote You may begin by telling your daughter about what you have learned about how, "Capitalism and the institutions that I have defended my entire adult life have eaten away at my motherhood, my identity as a woman, scholar, and teacher."
That would be a great start!
3
If a person is smart enough to get a PHD they should be smart enough not to do it. There has been an overproduction of PHDs for decades and a very large fraction of those people have gone on to other careers. I think if you are the top of your class at a top U and you have some peer reviewed journal articles to your credit, OK, you have a shot at a U professorship. Otherwise, look at another career.
3
As a PhD student in the humanities, I couldn't agree more.
And unfortunately, this isn't limited to the US. It happens in Belgium, where I'm doing my PhD, too.
The underlying idea is always the same: the humanities are useless, so we shouldn't prioritize real jobs and decent salaries in those areas.
That idea is false. Believing it, as a society, means undermining your own cultural and scientific strength, and destroying your competitive edge international. In other words, it's the very opposite of "putting America first".
6
A huge part of the problem is that many tenured faculty are focused on research and a need/ desire to publish, and a weak if non existent desire to teach. And colleges and universities have focused on those who publish and turned their backs on great teachers or those with a mix of teaching ability and publishing skills. So the tenured, voting publishing geeks get to dump on the great teachers, get good pay, and believe in their intellectual and moral superiority. And Universities encourage this madness: with a focus on those who publish. There is no vote or voice to students who pay the piper and want the great teachers, only those at the top who lord it over everyone based on a few articles in periodicals that few people read. A broken system!!
4
I have a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins and now I work at Home Depot. I will never follow my dreams again!
11
So is there any talk of doing away with the legal prohibition of forced retirement for elderly faculty members?
2
When our country’s immigration policy’s preference is to select people with higher education degrees there will be little incentive to encourage American men and women to get PhDs. It is a lot cheaper to import highly trained individuals then to invest in the next generation of intellectuals.
3
In 1992 when i wanted to study history or english in college my high school advisors said "perfect, as long as you dont expect to get a job when your done. How many people do you know who are librarians? Why dont we look at engineering or physical sciences..."
Sounds like 1992 dejavoux...
2
If you can’t find a job in the University, you can easily get a job teaching high school. But that apparently so beneath some that they will suffer as adjuncts.
4
You missed a big one. Private schools do not offer tenure anymore. They do recurring contracts, which means nobody has permanent job security.
4
In the late 80s our comparative literature professors told us repeatedly, "Do not pursue a PhD unless there is nothing else you want in the world. There are no jobs."
When did they stop giving that advice?
4
My previous wife spent tens of thousands of our dollars to achieve a doctorate of education degree. This terminal degree resulted in the glory of her being addressed as “Doctor” and an extra hundred dollars a month from her school district. The vast majority of these doctorate degrees are a ego driven waste of money. By the way.... she has never made more money than me with my measly bachelor’s degree.
3
In the district in which I taught, getting a PhD in education was a requirement for being an administrator. Most of these administrators knew nothing about teaching. At the same time, a teacher with a master’s degree in one’s subject area meant nothing to these administrators.
My husband has a PhD in geology. He is a tenured professor and department chair at a state university. He specifically wanted to teach at an undergraduate institution, and he spends a lot of his time advising undergraduate research projects and teaching a non majors course, which is one of the most popular on campus. There are more like him in his department. Not all PhD’s snub teaching for solely doing research. But, he does lament and fight against the increased hiring of adjuncts as well as the increasing number of college administrators who have no clue about education.
Our society does not reward the love of learning.
7
The nation is desperate for more K12 teachers; why don't these highly educated folks become public school teachers?
Health insurance, paid sick leave, a pension and summers off sound much better than food stamps and part time work.
5
Rule #1 in academia: Don't major in a minor.
Rule #2: Those tech degrees don't look so stupid now, do they?
1
As a Student of a fairly large University, I can say that for every email I get from a professor (updates on due dates, reminders of formatting, etc) I get about 20 from people I have never met. These people have titles like dean of this, president of that. Who are these people? Why am I getting so many emails? Yet, when I have a mystery hold on my account related to my payment plan (yes, I pay completely out of pocket and no, I am not rich, but rather working class) I call the bursars' office only to speak to voicemail (somehow, they are always busy). It says, leave a message and a call back number. Do I get a call back? No. I email my department adviser, asking , for, of, you know, academic advice, I get no response. I guess they are too busy. I understand, I'm a presidential scholar with a 4.0 GPA, a full time job and a full course load who spends his days working, his nights studying till midnight and the time in between, going to class. But I've been told that I must get an education. I must get degree, or I'll be left behind with the multi-headed plebeian monster and I'll spend my days shoveling poop in a septic tank or laying asphalt on a road somewhere.. that is, if I'm lucky.
5
I earned a PhD in physics with the intention of going into high school teaching. And for forty years, that's what I did. The students at my (admittedly wonderful) high school were every bit as good as most college students I have known, and the only things I lost out were status, some money (but not as much as you might think), and more free time to pursue research. High school teachers work five times as hard as tenured professors for half the money. But it's a much more enjoyable job. For those stuck in adjoint hell, why not try high school teaching? The country needs you, and it's a far better life than trying to win the academic lottery. And you will be helping to dismantle a corrupt system by taking yourself out of it.
9
Now I better understand UVA’s resistance for so long to raising the minimum wage for their many low wage staff employees. I think the reckon will be not too far off when millennials come to realize that baby boomers sold them down the river and now their best job prospects will be caring for baby boomers and in some cases their parents. Brilliant plan!
2
@Past, Present, Future
This obsession with boomers is exhausting. Are you talking about the boomers who led the fight for gay rights? For women's rights? For rights of the disabled?
Do you mean all the young guys who fought in Vietnam at the behest of the so-called Greatest Generation?
Suicide rates for boomers are frighteningly high. We see the writing on the wall. As we grow old, young people are sure to throw us under the bus.
Academic job prospects in the humanities were already poor 25 years ago. If young people pursue expensive degrees without doing any sensible reflection, they should grow up and own their impractical choices.
10
Too bad the cost savings isn’t passed on to students.
2
The decline in undergraduate students in humanities certainly influences the number of PhD’s in that field. Since the recession, parents have been emphasizing majors where students can get jobs after graduation. Like STEM careers or business.
1
Not only are adjuncts overworked and underpaid, they are often required to use computer programs to grade term papers, essays and exams and thus do not review student-generated work at many schools. Only those who generate lucrative research grants are considered for tenure track.
2
What would the universities do if all the adjuncts decided, en masse, to quit? Classes would be cancelled, or maybe taught by tenured profs (who would need to scale back their research, their sabbaticals, their office hours, etc.). One thing seems clear: The abuse of adjuncts in academia would suddenly halt. Universities would be forced to fix and eliminate this practice, and if any part-timers were hired, they would have the power to demand decent wages, decent health care, and decent terms overall. The only way this could fail to radically reform the system is if the next crop of PhDs grubbily settled for "anything." Anything, though, is a lot worse than working at Starbucks. There is no hidden moral good to be gained in servitude.
7
I am the product of the system described in the article, having received a PhD from the Univ of Colorado after serving as a "graduate part time teaching instructor." I received top marks and got fantastic experience teaching fairly advanced lit and humanities classes while I studied. I felt somewhat optimistic about my chances to land a decent teaching job at a decent college. When I began searching for a job, however, every position I looked into, even those in what I considered undesirable locations, had hundreds of applicants. Many of these applicants were more published and accomplished than myself. Many were from more prestigious schools. I saw the writing on the wall and pivoted to other professional opportunities, although I did work as an adjunct for many years at the same time. During those years, I saw firsthand how colleges treated and paid adjunct instructors, who are largely viewed as cheap, expendable, and replaceable. Colleges and universities are just factories of another type, and humanities teachers are treated as little more than exploitable labor, necessary to get the job done, but not highly valued. I may go back to academia as a part time retirement gig, but I am happy to have escaped the academic labor grinder...
19
I echo the glut of over payed administrators. But why and how are they there?
1. Trustees who are business people and don't understand academia. So, they make dumb decisions that don't benefit it in the long run and allow administrators - who are the ones that get an audiences with them - rather than actual academics, to be overly influential.
2. To mitigate against our overly litigious system or as a requirement of it. This is self-explanatory.
3. To provide services that attract students (i.e. in a way, by student demand). Can you imagine a modern college campus where the only thing students did was go to class? In my parents' generation (Boomers), that's all college was. It wasn't a whole university-sponsored "experience." Someone has to run that extra stuff, and it costs money.
4. Administrators aren't always the ones making up paperwork: They're often responding to the (insane) requirements of funders, without whom most large universities would be up a creek. Someone has to fill out the required mindless, duplicative paperwork required to get grants that fund the research. Strangely, those funders are often government agencies! It makes no sense. Where I work, we have to fill out massive data tables of the grants we have from the granting agency that we're trying to get additional grants from. But shouldn't they already have that since they gave us those grants? I don't get it.
This could make me become a Republican.
8
I received my Ph.D. in political science in 1980. The advice I would give to Ph.D. candidates today is to look overseas for academic employment. Teaching in Europe, Asia or Africa will present unique challenges, but on foreign soil it still seems possible for a hard-working Ph.D. to pursue a genuine academic career.
5
Several commentators have pointed out that the article is silent on the growth of administrator ranks. There's some truth to that at institutions of all types. But that does not come out of nowhere either: in the fierce competition for enrollment, what students and parents compare today are hotel-like dorms, Olympic-size pools, and dining halls that resemble upscale restaurants. Also: hands-on and experiential learning, and lots and lots of co-curricular programming. Who should build, offer, and administer all this? Not the faculty, who rightly claim that their time should be spent teaching classes and conduct research.
Cutting administrative jobs and turn all these adjuncts into tenured professors sounds like a great solution, until it doesn't: does anyone really think a "back-to-the-basics" approach that foregrounds rigorous learning would attract more of today's parents and students? Such an approach might feel morally right, but it would only hasten the demise of many private colleges.
Finally, if tenured professors were really that concerned about their non-tenured colleagues as they claim, they would have acted -- after all, they are the last remaining fully protected professional class in the US. Why are they not walking out to demand better conditions for adjuncts? Because they know that, ultimately, it requires the exploitation of the many to maintain the privileges of a few.
13
@JD In a "back to basics" style of learning maybe these kids would get an education instead of a 4-year summer camp experience. Ever seen some of the universities and medical facilities outside of the US? Bare bones and basic. No valet parking. No gyms that look like Olympic training facilities. Plain, simple, not fancy, but all that is needed.
9
This is Forrest Lammiman. I was once there, having obtained a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale. The article is interesting, but falsely assumes that being on the tenure track in the humanities at a major university is a path to reasonable economic happiness and security. It is not. In 1977 (a long time ago!) while teaching at a small college in Ohio I got a call from the U. of Pennsylvania to be interviewed. I was offered the job. Both the Ohio job I was at and the Penn job paid the magnificent salary of $12,500. Both had the prospect, but not the certainty, of turning into tenure track jobs. I was honored to be offered a job at Penn, but turned it down as my family was barely surviving on $12,500 per year in rural Ohio.
A few years later, I left college teaching and went to law school. I I graduated from law school (U. of Iowa) at age 39. I soon found out that I love the practice of law. And as I approach my 76th birthday, I still love it. Even staying in teaching in the humanities at colleges on as a tenured professor (assuming I had reached that goal) would not have been a satisfactory result for me. Yet, I have not only loved the practice of law, it also has been good to me and my family. Forrest
14
One of the best decisions I ever made was to drop out of a top tier PhD program in religion and teach high school. I teach classes with less than 25 students, have summers off to spend time with my own kids, work with extremely intelligent colleagues, don’t worry about job security, and earn a six figure income.
16
This is very old news. I received my Ph.D. In 1984. Never was able to get even a one year job anywhere in the 50 states. Rarely received any response at all to my job applications, and all of my applications were to departments that had announced openings. The failure of academic institutions to stop encouraging students to undertake graduate degrees is a scandal. This is how the institutions obtain government subsidies. Worst of all is the lack of self awareness on the part of the over privileged professors who think they speak for the world’s suffering lower classes, and the media’s reliance on those very same professors whenever expertise is sought on the subject of academia.
17
@CitizenJ
Very, very, very old news. This goes back to the 1970s.
2
This has been going on for a long time. I got my Ph.D. in 1984 from a top ranked language department. But even back then, while jobs were available, maybe only half were tenure track. Anyway, after teaching for one year at a nice college in the Northeast -as a non-tenure track lecturer-I decided it wasn't for me, and I went to law school and became a lawyer. Less than half of the people who got their Ph.D.'s when I did in my department remained in university teaching; the rest did something else. The sad part is that a whole generation of scholars and researchers have been lost to their liberal arts field. Indeed, paraphrasing Alan Ginsburg "I have seen the best minds of my generation wasted... "
7
What about the vast growth of administrative positions in the academy? How has this affected the market for people who teach? Maybe colleges and universities should return to their core functions and trim the excess administrative baggage - no matter how well-intentioned.
14
this, more than anything else, has harmed the academic experience. Too many suits trying to justify their pay
5
I'm not sure professor should be blamed...it's administration that decided adjuncts were the budget solution, not professors. It is also the promotion system that requires mentoring of phd students, hence resulting on the glut of grads. I'm not a prof, but, I've been in academia for awhile. It's the outdated institutional structures that enforce this system.
2
But once you become a tenured professor, you might only have to teach 2 classes a week, get release time for any extra duties, get extra pay for any extra work, make a nice six-figure income, get cost of living increases every year, not to mention medical benefits, etc. The huge gulf between adjunct professors, who can't even support themselves teaching half a dozen classes and get no medical benefits, and tenured professors, is unfathomable in any other industry.
16
I’ve said this for years and even as a former Dean—tenure should be abolished completely. This is not 1903. There are laws on the books to protect discrimination in the workplace and retirement programs created specifically for educators none of whom existed at the last turn of the century which was the reason tenure was created in the first place. I believe the same for K-12; no one should be guaranteed a lifetime position. Just like the real world, job security should be based on performance.
11
There was another demographic dimension to this, also. In the late 70s and 80s most faculties where white males disproportionate to their presence in the population. Universities, for good reasons, needed to change this.
This had two effects -
1) a lot of women and minorities wound up in adjunct land (which makes this practice seem all the uglier)
2) new white male PhDs had very little chance of getting a job.
This is just personal observation. I am a white male. I got a masters in History in the mid 80s, was accepted for PhD studies at a couple great schools, but realized what was happening in academia and turned my back on it. I never regretted my masters in history, but my MBA showed me the world and put bread on the table. I would have loved being a history professor but I was born at the wrong time.
14
Science and math also has adjunct professors. A former engineering colleague has been teaching night graduate courses at George Mason in Fairfax, VA for about 30 years. It has been building itself as a premier research university exploiting its proximity to DC. Many science experts from government teach night graduate courses there.
My oldest child studies public health at a small university that keeps its tuition low by hiring young science PHDs who shuttle from the university to community colleges. They leave when they find a job with health insurance. And there is always a pool of candidates to replace them.
There are only two ways to end this unfair two tier system. It starts with the large research universities. They must require professors teach a minimum of 3-4 courses per semester to drive down the cost of tuition which subsidizes their research. Parents must focus on quality of teaching instead of name brand. It takes work, but, it can be done.
4
PhD student here. I agree that tenured faculty should be required to teach more, but I don’t necessarily agree that tuition money goes into their research. A very big chunk of those positions are endowed faculty jobs. Not a nickel of tuition money goes to them. In a lot of ways this is worse because this means that, for some reason, the cost of a college education is much higher than you think you’re paying.
Universities need to stop building and fueling a bloated administration. Those are the “true” costs of a college education, unfortunately.
9
@Joel Ii ,
unfortunately, tuition provides insufficient subsidy in fields where research grants sustain professors and government agencies underwrite their livelihoods.
If a university required research professors to teach four courses, they could not apply successfully for research grants, the university would have to pay their salaries in full and tuition would be even higher than they already are.
1
"The more tenure becomes a rare prize, the more the victors may see themselves as uniquely deserving." In fact, tenured faculty at research universities have always seen themselves as uniquely deserving. That's why it's so hard to unionize faculty at such schools. I know; I tried. Unions form where there is solidarity rather than an assumption that one's merit is being rewarded.
10
Not too bad an article, but you missed a major swath of history - The 1980s!
A steep decline in college-age students together with Reaganomics with its misguided austerity cuts to research and education combined to create a perfect storm for Universities that continued to add to a glut of PhD's despite a clear lack of jobs - tenured or otherwise. Reference your own paper's articles on the academic nomads of the '80s (see for example: 'GYPSY SCHOLARS' ROAM ACADEMIC LANDSCAPE, Andrew Yarrow Jan. 10, 1982 which I found in a quick google search).
Academia is still operating in a feudalistic system that it possibly sees as its only way to survive and make a profit! Yes, it seems to always reduce to greed whether it is individual or, in this case, institutional.
So, this is not a new story, but a continuing one in the long un-ending saga of the failures of modern Capitalism. It began in academics, in the Reagan years with union-busting, "trickle-down" economics, tax-cuts for the wealthy, the invention of making fortunes in finance without making anything, and the destruction of what once was a decent ratio between the income of the middle-class wage earner and the wealthy who didn't own the majority of wealth in this country and paid a fairer percentage of taxes.
Where it will end is anyone's guess, but if it doesn't end soon, I fear for our democratic republic and all it represents because simply put you can't keep killing people's dreams and remain a great nation.
18
Faculty enjoy teaching as well, but they are rewarded for research and publication. The incentive structure needs adjustment.
13
Parents of prospective undergrads: when you go to open houses for prospective undergrads, and they invite questions, ASK ABOUT THE RATIO OF ADJUNCTS to tenure track faculty, ask what kind of benefits the adjuncts have, etc. Which of your chid's classes in a likely major will be taught by adjuncts?
Press them. If they can't give you exact info, tell them you'll be happy to call them Monday for the info.
(Explain enough about adjuncts so other parents know what you are asking, and what's at stake.)
Let them know this is something you take into account in the college decision process as a prospective payer-of-gobs-of-tuition, i.e., income source.
If your child is accepted and you are now choosing whether to accept the college, you have even more voice as it's now a "buyer's market". Use your voice.
We did this when visiting colleges with our older child and will do so again.
Ya coulda heard a pin drop.
This is of great importance for the future of education; it's of importance for the plight of the adjuncts who live so precariously; and otherwise your own child will be taught by temps who don't have time to prepare the class and aren't available because they don't have an office.
31
The problem is similar in Germany, except that it is worse because there isn't even a tenure track. You either become a professor with a permanent position as a "Beamter" (you work for the government and your job security is guaranteed no matter what) if you have been extremely successful AND the people in some committee like you, or you spend your professional life applying for a grant every 2 years to make a living until you leave academia. Even in physics, which a lot of money goes into, very few (less than 5%) postdocs can become a professor. The problem is that if you stay in the system until you find out if you are among the lucky few, which takes about 10 years and a lot of networking, your job opportunities outside academia will diminish in the meantime.
I switched to industry a year after graduation, and I'm glad I did.
12
@Andreas ,
I don't see that the situation you describe is worse.
Traditionally German Arts & Sciences students with academic career aspirations tended to play it safe and choose a teacher track (Staatsexamen) over a full-time science track (Diplom/Magister). Both would lead to a PhD degree. The teacher track had the advantage of providing a fallback should the career in academia fail. German high school teachers in the STEM field earn good incomes comparable to those of college faculty.
3
In these comments I have not found mention of alternative careers that many PhDs pursue. The skills acquired by PhD graduates do not only have to be deployed in tenuous adjunct teaching positions paying deplorably low wages. Many universities have recognized this and offer career counseling for PhDs that presents numerous other options--in the government, non-profit, or for-profit sectors. Job seekers that use campus career resources and creatively engage with alumni networks can find rewarding, well-paying, and stable employment.
10
When I was accepted to a very prestigious humanities Ph.D program in the early eighties, along with the fellowship award letter came another one warning me of the dim job prospects I would face, and a copy of Max Weber's "Science as a Vocation" which for those who don't know it paints a very grip picture of academic life - from about 1910, and still true. People who go into Ph.D programs see the figure that only half of those who complete them will get tenure-track positions, and just assume they will be in that half. After all, they've always been in the top half of their class, so what's the big deal? They forget that the competition is on a different level.
14
American college has become mostly a scam, with naive young people as its marks. A way to squeeze money out of those who don't have it, sentencing them to years or decades of debt (and wage) slavery with industrial efficiency.
Even though the development of multimedia has long meant that information is best imparted through carefully-scripted documentary style presentations, by the best in their fields, with charismatic presenters and illustrative graphics and other learning aids, viewable at a student's convenience (even from home), American college is still stuck in the 19th century. With often boring and meandering "professors" lecturing at sleep-deprived students in dirty and spartan classrooms, and treating them like pre-school children rather than like adult clients.
Further, they expand the fields of study in more and more absurd directions, since the more warm bodies they can capture the more they get in outside money. Money used for vastly over-inflated salaries and benefits for little actual work, and even less actual productive work (compared with cheaper alternatives).
8
A lot of our grads in media get good jobs in their fields, they get a good education, and we also invite job recruiters and encourage our students to meet with them (these are full, SRO events) as well as encourage students to get (thankfully, in the NY area) paid internships. We also have active alums who hire and work with our students, and a Board of alums, local business and creative people, who are active in promoting the interests of our students. It helps to have only 1050 students - it must be harder in depts. and Schools with thousands.
3
I'm going into a Ph.D. program in social science in one of the most prestigious schools this fall. Even in this top 5 department, the struggle is real; a lot of the graduates can't get a decent placement in academia. And the pressure is passed down: from the job market to Ph.D. admission, now to undergraduate studies.
This didn't stop us of course; there are still hundreds of over-qualified students like me rushing into the profession hoping to make a change and produce some real meaningful research work. But if this continues and escalates, I don't see any reason for future students to be interested in academia anymore. With the intense workload and stress nowadays in academia, many of us might as well go into the industry and make a fortune. (I actually turned down several offers from finance industry to pursue my academic dream) Meanwhile, many graduate schools actually pay their students lower than minimum wage. Imagine surviving in the Bay Area with $2000 a month. At that time, who is gonna be our next generation of scholars? 70-year-old professors, who no longer produce quality papers but only sits around and get a salary comparable to CEOs? I don't think so.
Like many other systems in the US, the academic community is putting overwhelming pressure on the young generation, and in the end, we all gonna have to pay for that.
9
Adjuncts have been complaining of their efforts being undervalued since the dark ages, but love of learning and the social status that goes along with working in academia has always been enough to compensate them for low wages, lack of job security, and an oppressive sense of vulnerability hardly at all diminished however useful their contributions may be to their field of study. Go figure.
3
Tuition is much too high for all academic disciplines. The reason is largely due to too many administrators employed by the universities.
Of course, there are administrative costs and the cost of food and board - and there are graduate teaching assistants to be paid.
I've seen the amenities at many colleges. They are too "rich." It's one thing to have nutritious food - it's another to offer gourmet quality that is prevalent. The amount spent on sports in my opinion is excessive. Academics should not be sacrificed for sports.
Much of the cost of college is borne by taxpayers in addition to the students and their parents. We should not give a blank check to the administrators to set high tuition to pay for their salaries.
7
What I despised about being in academia (so happy to be out of it!) is the hypocrisy of those 'liberal' professors who claim to be so 'woke' but have no qualms about getting rid of their non-tenure track colleagues who don't fit their little clubs. I have never seen as much hypocrisy as in academia.
795
@Rosemarie
I thought i was the only one who thought this way. You stole the words from my mouth. I agree 100%
81
@Rosemarie You are 100% correct! At one meeting, a philosophy prof sneered when the whining turned to students who clamor for an expansion of job-related majors. I blew up and asked him he justified his hypocritical view of students while insisting that philosophy be a required part of General Education. His reason? To keep philosophy professors employed. He harrumphed. I too am out of it, retired, and can confirm everything you say without making a single change. Featherbedding, anyone?
90
@Rosemarie
That is not universal. It varies a lot by department and school.
58
Universities do not answer to students or take a cut in tuition if an adjunct faculty teaches a lower level course instead of a full faculty. This is duplicitous behavior that all universities engage in.
Tenured faculties in departments engage and encourage in collective exploitation of adjunct faculty. I have witnessed tenured faculty complain about not getting salary raise to an adjunct faculty making minimum wage.
Universities spend a lot on non-teaching related expenses. IT, pointless memorabilia, subsidizing cultural events, celebrity speakers spouting agenda, sports complexes.
5
If anyone was in any doubt about the notion of higher education being a business, this article should dispel that fantasy.
Ever since state governments started reducing funding to state schools and telling them to become more "entrepreneurial", they have done so with gusto.
Emboldened by the tacit permission to trawl the wallets of would be students, the schools embarked on a frenzy of fundraising (we are poor non profits trying to educate an ignorant world) and marketing designed to maximize profits, not just revenues.
Student loans were exploited as shamelessly as for-profit schools but without the opprobrium (and oversight/scandal) attached.
The churning out of PhD students is a pure profit play as the fees are huge (often subsidized by loans and grants) and the labor is compliant nearly free.
The states need to take back control of their schools but it is an uphill battle as the GOP sees the dependence of the schools on market forces will make them more compliant and reduce their voice that frequently powerfully opposes their policies.
3
Our "state funding" for our "state" school decreased to something like 25% or less, and yet we still have to answer to the byzantine bureaucracy of the state. Tuition of course has soared, and the largest part of my stagnating salary goes on school taxes for PreK to high school which, in New Jersey, you pay until you die. If I didn't have a house, I'd pay very high rent for an apartment, thanks to these excessive school taxes. I have no children, and find that the 'teens are not necessarily well-prepared for university, despite the millions spent on school taxes. Go figure.
2
In my retirement I decided to get another degree after forty-five years. The focus in the humanities these days is all about race, gender, and sexuality. The idea that we should study a work of literature based on its aesthetic quality is gone. This is disheartening. No wonder the humanities are losing students.
One reason postmodernism became all the rage in the humanities and nowhere else is that it makes getting a Ph.D. much easier. Why write about the classics when you can write about popular culture or racism? The notion that we can know what an author intends is now dismissed by postmodernists as the "intentional fallacy." I wonder what Primo Levi would have thought about that.
17
@ar Race, gender, and sexuality are all categories of aesthetic investigation -- apparently, however, they are not structured by values you respect
1
It’s important for professional societies to get into the accreditation game, much like AMA does, and limit the number of PhDs granted, as well as limit the number of PhD granting institutions. Fat chance of that happening though since PhD candidates are cheap labor for institutions and paying members for the professional societies. It’s a chicken and egg type thing.
4
Current PhD student in the social sciences here. At this point, all doctoral students (even in top 10 departments) should be building skills and networks that are marketable beyond the academy.
9
Interesting article, Mr. Carey. I would love it if you could do another story about this, but add more detail?
For example, your chart showing the number of doctorate recipients by some major fields is informative. But, it raises more questions than it answers. For example, what is the ratio of recipients to the number of actual positions available? Is the Ph.D. surplus more pronounced in certain fields than others? And what about sub-fields? Is a degree in Gender Studies more likely to land a position than one in English Lit?Or consider employment overall, for say, a Ph.D. in the physical sciences. If they are not teaching, do they have a higher or lower paying job compared to a Ph.D. with a humanities degree?
6
People rarely associate “clean” jobs for professional or highly educated people with exploitation. But, the University sector has been getting away with serious underpayment for years, which is probably just as bad if not worse than other sectors such as hospitality and manufacturing. It isn’t all just supply and demand - certainly in Australia higher education is one of our best performing export industries and (pre-coronavirus) the sector has never been so flush with money. Money which they’re spending on buildings when no one wants to come to class and the future of the sector is online! The University sector exploits people for one reason and one reason only - because they can and so far no one has tried to hold them to account. Having just finished my PhD in law, I was staggered when I went to a University function to celebrate some of the best PhD students that one of the Professors gave a speech where he actually said that the University saw PhD students - without embarrassment or it seemed even awareness of how bad it sounded - as cheap employees. It’s one thing to know PhDs are slave labour, it’s another to actually hear it publicly expressed by management. As a PhD student, you hope that you’ll be one of the “lucky ones” who will defy the odds. However, I’m still glad I’ve got my PhD and with flying colours. PhD’s are still relatively rare in Australia and if I’m not one of the “lucky ones,” I’ve already had interest from government and other sectors.
5
I'm a secretary and suddenly find myself working as an advisor for the past few years, I sure would like to get an advisor's salary for the work I do, but I've been getting basically the same salary for as long as I can remember, which winds up being $33,000 after taxes. I got a raise for about 5 paychecks, then the paychecks decreased again, so the raise wound up being something like $3 a week.
1
The article makes some good points. However, there are some omissions. It omits the mushrooming of over-paid administrators who dry out the funds. As a tenured faculty in a major public research university, I take issue with the following statement "When a flood of Ph.D.s desperate to keep a toehold in academia depresses adjunct wages, that makes it cheaper for universities to hire them to teach classes and free up time for tenured researchers to do what they enjoy: conduct research.". In reality, there are no winners and losers. We are all losers including students. There is no freeing up any tenured faculty time to conduct research. The tenured faculty are required to teach their contractually obligated number of courses, bring research funds to the Univ., and perform service. These obligations have not changed because we have many non-tenure-track adjunct faculty in the system. The tenured faculty can only be freed from teaching obligations only when they buy out their teaching time from their research grants. The University can make money from this transaction as well. Let's say that a tenured faculty pays $10K from her research grant to her Department to release her from teaching one course. The Department can cover two courses with that money splitting the whole amount between two adjuncts (for two courses) or use a portion for the administrative costs. The whole system has become administrative bloat. There is no money to go around for tenured or non-tenured faculty.
12
There is a moral failing by university leadership. Universities are paying ever-increasing numbers administrators huge salaries that just can’t be justified by any rational accounting. They’re paying economists and management and finance professors hundreds of thousands! Starting economists are getting 180k; management professors are starting above 200k. Mid career management professors are getting 600k - per year. The justification for these salaries is very thin. Inequality at universities is out of control - with some folks with little to no record making hundreds of thousands, while others with modest records making peanuts - and many - with excellent records making middle class wages. Someone needs to implement some sanity to this market - which is starting to look like a market for basketball coaches!
7
@Dan You’re not wrong about the ever-increasing number of administrators, but your salary data is pretty far off for Business School faculty. Business schools respond to the market outside of academia (and pay is generally better than in the humanities because of this), but most very successful management professors (those excelling at R1 universities) are solidly below 200k at the Associate professor level, and possibly a hair above it as Full professors. Most of our MBA students go on to out-earn us within a few short years of graduation. It’s a great living and a good life, but it’s certainly not $600k.
5
Our university president makes nothing near $600,000. I guess this person is looking at Harvard or some other Ivy League school.
Advanced degrees in the humanities is not producing employable skills. So there is a problem.
2
Do admission requirements no longer include the critical thinking ability needed to foresee what is obvious? Or does magical thinking predominate among humanities students?
7
For perspective, former successful academic, turned industry scientist, turned executive.
We are talking about people that are smart enough to get a PhD but they don’t seem smart enough to move past their degree/research to rewarding careers.
PhDs can research, analyze and write. Every business needs employees with those skills and PhDs that sell skills instead of knowledge will get hired.
7
And they do. PhDs have the lowest (or next to the lowest) unemployment rate. After realizing academia doesn’t have anything for them, they move on.
As a former PhD student in the sciences I can attest that graduate school in a research university is the last vestige of legalized slavery.
12
What the article fails to mention is that many of us in academe believe that even if colleagues retire at 70, university administrators will eliminate the tenure line that person held. It also neglects to mention the awful rise in the number of highly paid administrators that has occurred over the last 20 years. Finally, it does not address the fact that budgets for organized sports are protected while funding for teaching is not. It is in short a crisis in leadership and vision that plague American Higher Ed.
13
A university like CUNY also has a bureaucracy run amok, and this is in addition to the byzentine regulations and paper pushing that hamstring the individual colleges. In many cases, more and more administrators are being hired with attractive salaries, while the colleges downsize their professoriat through attrition. Market conditions are bad for new PhDs, AND the priorities of the bureaucrats who run higher ed are out of whack. A short moratorium on PhD production needs to be called till these issues can be dispassionately addressed.
6
So Bernie is going to make college classes "free" for all and he's going to cancel student loan debts. Who is going to pay for that? College professor salaries! Problem solved because, after that, nobody's going to be a professor, university research grinds to a halt (or slows) and cancer will never be cured.
3
Universities have prioritied high administrative salaries and an array of new buildings and “centers” for this and that. It’s why I ignore all calls from my alumni office for donations.
7
I am about to retire from my university position of 30+ years. I've been a lecturer, then a senior lecturer, now an Associate Professor of Instruction--all non-tenure track at the same R1 university. For contingent faculty, critical issues are workload and compensation--the former have rapidly expanded and the latter steadily shrunk. I've been lucky. Because my position was created in the 90's and my contract "grandmothered" in, I teach two courses less than contingent faculty colleagues hired ten years ago and my salary has benefited from years, long gone, when everyone got real raises. Faculty without tenure today might as well be working in Walmart's "Great Workplace" or an Amazon warehouse. Everyone is overworked, underpaid, and exhausted, and administrators care not. Meanwhile they, more and more of them, are making out like bandits.
19
This issue has been going on for a long time. In the 1980s I was on track to get a PhD when I looked around and saw smart, newly minted PhDs unable to get jobs. I could do the math. There’s a fixed number of places to work and an increasing number of people being trained to compete for those jobs. I went a different direction and have had a rewarding career outside of academia.
Attracting and graduating masters and doctoral students is one leg of the three pillars any assistant professor needs to get tenure: publish, serve on committees, and churn out grads. It’s unethical.
Grad students: Wake up and get out before it’s too late.
9
Ah - yet another article on the favorite whipping boy - academia. 1. States have been cutting education budgets for at least 35 years. Mostly Republicans but Democrats as well. State funding has gone from $7000 per student in 2000 to about $4000 now. About 50% drop. "State" universities are no longer state-financed; at best they are state-sponsored. 2. When you hire a tenure-track faculty member, you are potentially making a 35+ year commitment. Given the financial landscape, it's a foolish commitment. 3. The growth in administrators is a myth that is overblown. Lot of these positions were created to help with diversity, retention, and graduation rates. This is what students and parents demand. 4. Research keeps the lights on at most universities. Without research, an institution is a 4-year college and not a university. University of Michigan brings in $1.5 billion in research funding. Johns Hopkins $2.5 billion. That kind of money does not come from tuition. 5. Practically every significant invention began in a university, probably funded by your tax dollars (federal grants).
I know everyone loves to hate universities - but just look at who has better jobs and higher income. These are educated people and we at universities provide education.
Without foreign graduate students, most programs will be anemic and will likely close.
8
I see a lot of comments here claiming that adjuncts are suffering because of the rise of administrative jobs, which people seem to assume are wasteful. It's not so simple, actually.
One of the reasons that more administrators are needed is because universities are increasingly enrolling more students with mental health challenges, students from low-income backgrounds, and students who are "first-generation" college students.
These students need more support to succeed than students from privileged backgrounds who've been well prepared to handle life and classwork at a university. Schools need to provide students gear for surviving cold winter weather; they need to run food banks; they need advisors to teach students about navigating college and counselors who can handle students' various mental health challenges; they need tutors for students seeking academic support.
If you haven't attended college in decades and are wondering why costs and administrative positions have risen, all of this is a big reason. The administrators aren't there just pushing paper all day and sucking in tuition money for their salaries.
3
Here's the question I have: why do state legislatures allow universities to get away with this blatant labor exploitation? Universities pay no or little property taxes, and now taxpayers have to subsidize adjuncts who have no health care and can sometimes qualify for food stamps!
Adjuncts and graduate students could shut down every university in this country, and they should. The tuition hikes are going to concierge services and gigantic salaries to college presidents and upper level administrators who run universities like corporations.
3
I haven't gone through all of the comments, so apologies if this has already been mentioned. The requirement of a PhD to teach at the community college level is yet another way in which PhDs are exploited and the job market distorted.
I've been an adjunct professor at several California community colleges for 16 years. In those years, I've seen the minimum qualifications for my area of specialization (Art History) increase from a Masters of Art to a PhD at many California community colleges.
First, a PhD does not better equip an individual to teach at the community college level. Doctorate-level graduate studies couldn't be further from the pedagogical practices and learning outcomes at the community college level.
Second, from what I've personally seen, new PhDs teaching at the community college are very frustrated new professors, who don't get to engage with their area of expertise in anyway near how they researched and wrote about it at the graduate level.
Third, many California community college hiring practices in the area of Art History are exploiting PhDs, who've over saturated the job market by not being able to find and secure teaching positions at the university level and are forced to seek employment at two year colleges. This makes it all but impossible for adjunct Art Historians, committed to teaching and not researching and writing, to find gainful employment.
"Abuse of power comes as no surprise" - Jenny Holzer (artist)
11
@Lucien Dhooge Best undergrad course I ever took was a one semester seminar in General Relativity taught by an Emeritus Professor who had co-authored papers with Einstein when young. His presence, and he was very much present, was a gift. I'm sure I wouldn't have worked half so hard if it was the typical maths adjunct with an indifferent work ethic, condescending smarter-than-thou attitude, and abominable English-as-a-second-language skills. And I'm still proud of my (rare from him) A+.
7
How would this analysis read differently if institutions were proactive about training humanities PhDs for careers OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA? How would this conversation be different if we all acknowledged the FACT that the multimodal work humanities graduate students--as well as fixed-term and precarious faculty and staff--do prepares them to contribute mightily to all sorts of pursuits?
I'm aware that Carey is interested in the 'traditional' pathway, PhD to professoriate, and that's fair enough--after all, it's the one that was always laid out for me and my colleagues when I was in grad school. Moreover, it's the one I've often felt I wanted to follow.
Still, I think it needs saying: it is a weird feature of academe and its commentariat, among the humanities and perhaps elsewhere, not just that the 'traditional' narrative has withered but that alternatives to that narrative are rarely more imaginative than 'Don't get a PhD!'
I'm coming to the end of a postdoc, and despite writing twenty-three (and counting) job apps these last months, I have no prospect of further academic employment. But I've recently begun pursuing opportunities in other sectors--specifically, in international environmental and aid agencies--and have found the process surprisingly edifying. We humanities scholar-teachers are multitalented folks who have HEAPS to offer organisations of all kinds. I'm proud of my PhD, and if I use it in a way the 'traditional' view doesn't recognise, I'm proud of that, too.
14
@Killian C Quigley This is a very important perspective that's just completely ignored by Carey. And it's not even limited to humanities grad students—many, many STEM PhD's have roles in industry and governmental research programs. In fact, many students in the computer science community (which I am most familiar with) nowadays enter into PhD programs with the aim of going into industry, not even considering academia!
7
I am a public high school teacher. This past fall I was also an adjunct professor for a large public university in the state of Washington. I agreed to the position before I knew how much I would get paid. I developed a course, taught it every Wednesday night from 5:30 to 9:30 for 10 weeks to a group of graduate students, and was paid the grand sum of $1,000 plus parking and travel expenses. I don't think I will ever recover from the shock of being paid so little for something that took so much time and effort to accomplish.
Not sure if this makes it better or worse, but having that on my resume has increased my cache and the respect that I receive in my field.
16
@Jennifer Oh my God! I've heard about low pay, but that takes the cake. That's 40 hours class time, and I believe the standard for out-of-class preparation is two hours for every one hour of class time, so that's 120 hours at an average hourly rate of $8.33. And this is in Seattle, not exactly a low cost area.
Thanks for sharing.
3
I don't believe aspiring PhD students are adequately informed about academic job prospects, even in the sciences where opportunities are greater than in the humanities. When they do eventually encounter reality, the sense of unfairness they feel can be sad to witness.
I recently attended a meeting focusing on an emerging area in astronomy---astroinformatics (data science focusing on astronomy). As is often the case in frontier areas, the attendees were predominantly young astronomers, though a few high-profile tenured professors were there (mainly as invited speakers). The final session of the meeting was an open discussion, intended to focus on open scientific issues in the field. About halfway through, it shifted to a discussion of job prospects. This roomful of a few dozen young scientists had come to the realization that there were far fewer jobs for scientists in their specialty than there were candidates being produced by the field. They were trained and mentored to work in this emerging area, evidently without ever being told that there was no career path for them beyond a postdoc (perspective: there is perhaps 1 faculty opening in this area per year). At this point, a colleague next to me pointed out that the two of us were the most senior in the room, both of us in insecure, non-tenured positions. All the tenured folk-those in a position to change things-had left the meeting by that point. It was a sober ending to what had otherwise been an inspiring meeting.
12
@Tom Loredo I am with you entirely until "tenured folk-- those in a position to change things". You clearly do not know how universities are governed, and how hiring is determined. Please educate yourself with facts before advancing the tired canard that somehow the few tenured professors that still exist are responsible for hiring practices at their institutions or in the broader field. They aren't. In any way. At all. Please direct your resentment at the proper targets -- university boards and executive administration.
3
It’s hard to have this conversation without taking account of the dramatic rise in ancillary services (non teaching/non research) provided for students at universities. In many respects, the rise of ancillary services—from student wellness, recreation, international office, community liaison, career and professional advisors, equity related offices, counseling services, and so on—has grown a lot more than the senior administrative ranks. It’s time that we stop pitting adjuncts against tenured faculty. The reason why universities have so many adjuncts is because university resources have shifted towards making the “student experience” more marketable. There has been a massive, massive mission creep in the University over the past 20 years.
17
I know several people who are administrators at prestigious universities. They earn a fantastic salary and great benefits. They agree that many administrators are not really needed, and the system is a racket. They also agree that there has been a kind of silent coup in which the administrators have taken over the university.
But they are fine with the system because they are benefiting from it. They don't do much in their job and the adjunct professors carry most of the burden. But they get paid very poorly with no benefits. This frees up a great amount of money to hire more administrators.
Soon colleges and universities will be just administrators, who are in charge, and poorly paid, low status adjunct professors, and students who are massively in debt.
But even when these facts are pointed out nothing changes. The trend line in hiring administrators continues to grow exponentially while many departments hire few faculty.
It's sad.
29
Not getting tenure at a university 20 years ago was the best break of my life - I moved on to a community college teaching job and never looked back. A heavy teaching load, but that is what I love. I have tenure, and we have some of the problems of the four year world, but not as intense.
10
I'd like to amplify one of Carey's points: overproduction of PhDs.
In my field (astronomy), the last demographic study I've seen that addresses this is by Travis Metcalfe in 2008. It found a "continued overproduction" of PhDs and an "unprecedented expansion of [insecure] postdoctoral jobs" since ~2000.
A key paragraph: "The most important aspect of the ongoing cultural shift in the astronomy job market is the persistent gap between expectations and reality. When first year graduate students are surveyed... fully 87%... say they would like to end up in an academic position.... By contrast... less than 50% will ultimately obtain academic positions---and probably fewer, since the turnover at universities appears to be episodic. Graduate programs in astronomy should prepare their students for this reality." And this doesn't recognize that many academic research positions in the sciences are insecure, non-tenured positions (like my own).
My field takes a hard look at its scientific and professional trajectory every 10 years in "decadal surveys" overseen by the National Academies of Science & Engineering. I and others provided input to the 2010 survey pleading for this "gap between expectations and reality" to be addressed. I haven't seen significant response from the academic community. To be fair to tenured folk, they need PhD students, both to do research, and because it's a promotion factor. But there's an ethical issue here the academic world has not adequately addressed.
11
There's a research-oriented flip side to this story.
I'm irregularly offered an "instructor" position at a university in the Finger Lakes (the local euphemism for "adjunct"). But my main source of income is as a non-tenured researcher in a science department, and similar issues arise on the research side.
My dept. has 23 faculty members, but over 30 "academic staff" members, researchers with non-tenured "soft money" positions. The majority of these are postdocs. Much could be said about the reliance of academic research on postdocs. For that discussion see a provocative essay that aspiring science PhDs should read: "A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn" (Google it).
About a dozen of the academic staff are in long-term insecure appointments funded by grants we write or co-write. Those who can stay 100% funded are well-paid, but 100% funding is incredibly stressful to maintain. There is no mechanism to help if there's an off-year in funding. If your funding falls below 50%, you lose benefits. For every 1$ I bring in for my salary, I must also bring in .64$ for the university (overhead) and .35$ for my own benefits. A few years ago I was asked to apply for a promotion that would increase my pay; I declined because it would just mean I'd need to find more grant funding. Many jobs are stressful, but what's trying here is the combination of funding uncertainty and the long gaps (6 mo to 1 yr) between grant opportunities. Not a career for any but the most passionate.
27
Supply and demand. Way way way too many in academia even at peak demographics and peak student loan bubble (late 00s, early 10s?).
We are now approaching post demo peak and post student loan bubble (one way or the other), and we’ll need even fewer academics.
That my barista has many years of study in Chaucer, Yeats, etc has never made much sense to me.
2
The failures and foibles of education at virtually every level are complex and countless. Having spent 40 years in education at various levels, my professional judgment is, however, reduced to a simplistic one: America ultimately cares very little about learning, about schooling, about a child's or youth's ability to solve problems, make decisions, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, and all those traits that lead to a dynamic, humane life.
Profit-seeking, entertainment, athletics, materialism, celebrity -- all those interwoven desires have far greater power to motivate school administrators as much as they do politicians or the guy down the street.
There are plenty of well-meaning teachers in schools at all levels, and lots of hard-working students, and even earnest administrators. But our nation just does not see education as anything near a high priority -- intellectual pursuit is merely a means to entrepreneurial wealth.
Until the U.S. develops a cultural conscience in which intelligence of many kinds are sought, and in which every person can be taught in ways that rouse his/her greatest human potential -- we'll remain locked in grim pursuits that lead nowhere. Meanwhile -- we must pay all teachers much more, and value those who value learning far, far more.
46
@SGK
Despite all these grad students, as of 2011, less than 30 pct of the US has a college degree.
1
PhDs from the very best schools (top ten) who are very good at their work will get the few tenure-track academic jobs that are out there. This has been true since at least since the 1980s in the USA. Long time academic here. The article skirts this topic for some reason.
10
@K Henderson Former Yale English professor William Deresiewicz published an article in The Atlantic about his days in academia. He mentioned that one year his colleagues were ecstatic because half of their newly minted English PhDs had received tenure-track job offers. That's right, they were thrilled about a 50% success rate. And this was at Yale.
3
After getting my master's in 2005, I adjuncted for five years before returning to school for a PhD. I graduated in 2017 and decided to take a position in China at a start up joint venture university. Many folks have since joined me there (though at the moment I'm not in China due to the virus); many folks fleeing the increasingly dire conditions of academia in the States. All to say, the US is not the entire world. There are opportunities outside of the States if folks are willing to move for them.
7
I can’t imagine a 70 year-old tenured professor stays on because of the money. They stay on because their work gives them purpose, a sense of identity.
Don’t universities have other positions for them that would also allow for junior faculty to rise up? If not, shouldn’t there be an inventive to create one?
7
@Emily | I think money, purpose, and sense of identity can all come into play. (At well-endowed schools, professors can earn six-figure salaries; the leftmost figure may be a 1, but still …) Professors who stay on past age 70 clearly make it hard for a younger generation to find teaching jobs. It seems so selfish to me.
3
A different country, a different perspective. I am an assist prof at a large German University. In this country, tenured positions end at age 67. Period. However, state governments all have programs to keep emeritus professors involved if they want to. We have a now well into his 80s emeritus in the Department who still has his own 3rd party grant for his research and is paid as an external educator for his contributions to teaching. We are happy to keep his lifelong knowledge and expertise alive in the Department. At the same time, he is not blocking any tenured position.
Germany has its own set of issues in Academia, but I actually like this solution to keep knowledge available and give those few older profs the opportunity to stay involved. Win-win.
6
How do you know they son’t need the money?
Never heard of high medical or other healthcare expenses for self or family members? College tuition for kids (especially now that people are having children well into upper-middle-age)? Unforeseen or unavoidable legal expenses? Personal or natural disasters such as major losses due to a pipe bursting or a wildfire or apartment building fire, or earlier job loss?
Don’t assume everyone has your cushy life, or that your own situation could turn upside down when you least expect it. It can happen.
3
I am a millennial currently on year 9 of my PhD in the humanities. I'm living with my parents and working in retail, because I cannot afford to work in my field while attempting to finish my dissertation. And I tell every prospective doctoral student who asks that they have to choose to do it for the love of the research, because a job they can afford to live off of is never guaranteed.
8
I am a career academic, nearing retirement at age 65.
A shortage of positions has plagued the humanities throughout my 40 year career. I feel frustrated sometimes that individuals who earn doctorates expect that there will a tenure-track position awaiting them, which is obviously not the case. A downside of the leftist politics among those in the humanities is the tendancy to not face the reality that the world doesn't owe one a living in the job of one's choice.
I realize that this last comment is likely to provoke outrage and the accusation that I'm a cretinous conservative who doesn't appreciate the arts, but this is not the case. Colleges and universities have faced tightening budgets for years, and students are increasingly focused on majors that will lead to jobs. The humanities have in general turned a blind eye toward that reality.
16
It's an outmoded system that has priced itself out of relevance, abetted by the flow of federal-backed student loans. But they've been able to survive only because the tide of international students saved many of them from earlier obsolescence.
6
So you’d rather have no skilled and knowledgable and humane doctors or nurses, pharmacists, legal advisors and advocates, policy makers, elementary or high school teachers, judges, foreign language teachers, economists, history teachers, psychologists, social workers, engineers, architects, virologists, diplomats, etc.,?? You want a society without large numbers of people whose written and verbal communication skills are mediocre, at best? Who aren’t familiar with critical thinking, the philosophical underpinnings of our our and others’ cultures and societies and how those factors likely influence or are influenced by the activities and interventions, policies, practices, goals, and so forth of those professions and professionals?
Go ahead, but you’re going to be pretty uncomfortable, your kids or grandkids knowledgable, and all of you a lot less healthy and possibly in jail because no one’s around with enough legal expertise to help teach you the laws of the land and how what they do and don’t mean, and guide you through the system.
3
Too many academics teaching too many future low-wage gig workers, with funds guaranteed and paid up front by the taxpayer.
No rational person would lend 100,000 to a teenager to study Sanskrit yet our government does it writ large. That’s the root of the student loan mess as well as the academia job market mess.
Tha author says, "There was another complication. In 1994, a new federal law outlawed the widespread practice of requiring professors to retire at age 70. The effects of this accumulated as the baby boom generation aged. The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s."
I am a recently retired professor (age 73). I have not observed the "not retire" effect the author claims. Where is his data?
9
@Darth Vader | I see the "not retire" effect in spades at the elite school where I teach.
1
That is why I got my PhD in a field that mattered (biological sciences) and promptly went to industry. Better pay, better hours, and a future.
10
The 1950’s and 1960’s were good years to begin an academic career in the humanities. By the time I began graduate studies in the early 1970’s, the applause had died and jobs, even adjunct ones, were fewer than scarce. After four frustrating years, albeit at little expense, I threw in the towel and found substantive work. I did pretty well, was able to retire fairly early, and cannot complain. I would have been wiser, however, to have looked into secondary school education and then transitioned into educational administration. Still, I never had to become an academic Gypsy or leave the New York metro area. I woke up just at the nick of time. Humanities PhD’s have been a dime a dozen for years.
10
Readers, you could make a difference with this problem here in New York State. At SUNY and CUNY campuses (including those where enrollment is not declining because New York students need more affordable education options than ever), budgets have been so brutal that this very situation is working and some campuses are still not able to get by and are in receivership. You could make a difference by asking your senators and assembly members to fund the state and city university systems. We have been severely underfunded since the last financial crisis and things are not looking better yet. The payoff of funding the university system for the state and its citizens would be immense.
23
Scores and scores desperately need housing (or live on the street) and healthcare (or die), but the assembly should redirect funds to SUNY-Plattsburgh(?) for someone to teach Bluto Blutarsky Russian comparative literature?
Cmon outta that ivory tower...
1
The University of California, Santa Cruz professors were not striking just for higher pay. They were also withholding the final grades of students.
3
They were not professors. They were grad students who serve as instructors.
22
I sincerely empathize with the plight of newly minted PhDs who are left with no choice but to take adjunct positions that pay meager wages and don’t offer health insurance. This piece makes a point that I agree with—that senior tenured faculty age 70 and above should consider retiring to free up the job market for younger academics. I myself earned a PhD about 10 years ago. I was on the job hunt during the peak of the Great Recession, albeit, I was fortunate to have landed a non-tenure-track full-time position upon graduation, and after 3 years working in that NTT, I landed a tenure-track. I recently visited my PhD adviser, who is now around 75. When I asked him if he planned on retiring anytime soon, he said, “no.” I couldn’t help but think his decision is keeping a junior academic or two out of a full-time job that offered health insurance.
16
@Islander if you "couldn't help but think," then you need to examine your own assumptions. First: you have no idea what your advisor's compensation (read: his ability to prepare for retirement) has been, and Second: you have no idea whether the university will replace his position with a tenure line when he has left.
3
The plight of adjunct faculty is indeed tragic. However, like many articles on higher education, this glosses over many differences. Non-tenure track faculty include full time faculty with benefits, such as Lecturers and Clinical faculty, who can be well compensated and have full benefits. In addition, there is a huge divide between tenure-track faculty at prestigious research universities and the faculty at the many small private and public regional universities. The bulk of tenured faculty are not focused on research and teaching graduate students--they have heavy undergraduate teaching loads and relatively low salaries. In short, non-tenure track clinical faculty at major universities can earn significantly more than tenured faculty at many universities.
14
@Scott I would love to see some numbers that back up these claims. I work at a "major university" (an Ivy in the Finger Lakes), in irregular/insecure instructor ("]adjunct by another name) and research appointments. I know very few non-tenured instructors here who have full-time appointments. And I doubt we non-tenured folk (many of us part-time) are earning "significantly more than tenured faculty at many universities." At meetings I meet many colleagues with tenured appointments at small colleges, and to a person they marvel that people stay in positions like mine (there are non-academic factors in my case, like having family nearby). My experience is merely anecdotal, but I doubt Scott's claims are accurate for a significant population of academics.
2
I am winding up 41 years in academia this year and will retire (albeit all this not in the US, but the situation is not different, maybe worse). I am in the Humanities bordering somewhat on various fields of Social Sciences.
The only Ph.D students I will take on are those over 50 who are doing it for their enjoyment and already have careers. Their Ph.D will hang on their wall and they might publish their dissertation (which they might pay for). My oldest students from the past are now professors. This would be impossible today.
My children, thankfully, are not in academia, although one started out going that way.
I had a great run; I enjoyed what I did and I still enjoy my research which continues as long as I do.
If i had to do it again and start now, I would probably have taken my parents advice, which i ignored then, and gone to law school.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
8
I was lucky. I saw the writing on the wall during the second year of my fellowship in 1988. I applied promptly to law school and had a successful, rewarding, and even intellectually stimulating career. Maybe it is time to earn a Ph.D. in my 50s, even though I’ll never use it to teach.
5
@David S. Enjoy it and the process.
1
Discouraging reading, but unsurprising to anyone who works or has worked in academia. Graduate programs in the humanities, especially at lower-tier universities, should be slashed, as law school enrollments were a few years ago. It is heartbreaking to see talented young people invest their lives and treasure in what is ultimately a dead end. Yes, I agree scholarship is rewarding for its own sake. But it must also be sustainable; the rent must be paid, the groceries bought. It too often seems that graduate students are recruited to justify the senior faculty who teach them or to heighten the profile of the institution enrolling them. It's just wrong.
26
This article could have been written in 1980. 1990. 2000, 2010, just as it was written today. I finished my PhD form a top program in 1994. My advisor was the considered one of the most significant scholars of his generation. My dissertation was published as a book four years after I completed my degree by a major university press. The book received glowing reviews in a dozen peer review journals. I won several teaching awards. I was unable to secure a permanent position and abandoned my career in 1998.
45
You are correct. This abusive academic model has been going on at U. S. Universities at all levels (Ivy League and poor state schools included) at least since I earned my Ph.D. in 1985. The quality of your work is not related to success in the American academic system. Consulting pays better.
5
@caplane I was warned about pursuing graduate studies by my History teaching assistant way back in 1976, and the poor job market was specifically discussed. I ended up giving up my aspiration to become an academic, and ended up in Accounting. Upon reading all that's been written about the state of the academy, the exploitation of graduate students and adjunct faculty, and numerous other issues, I now look back and realize I dodged a very large bullet.
7
Unfortunately, there are few incentives within academia to intentionally limit students from pursuing PhDs. There are plenty of incentives to do just the opposite. In addition to being cheap labor for staffing the teaching of introductory courses and a source of almost indentured servitude contributing to tenured professor's research priorities, funding agencies and accreditation programs rank academic institutions by, among other things, the number of PhDs granted. In effect, academia has no 'skin in the game' to assume an investment in the career success of the PhDs they produce. Does it bother them that their PhDs are woefully underemployed? Maybe a bit, but not enough to risk their chances at research funding or promotion.
12
@Dennis Mathews
In the European Union, politicians aware of this problem managed to pass a law that invites (not yet forces ... ) tenured professors to actively invest in PhD students' research careers.
Mine disagreed with my politics, however (I'm an agnostic atheist, and he's a militant anti-religion atheist), so he never ever even tried to help me.
The EU does value research contracts, since a couple of years now, that can PROVE that the supervisor will actively contribute to the researcher's career.
But it will still take a long time before the influence of such an important European Commission decision will have an impact on ALL European universities.
I'm not a Bernie fan (he lies too much about what is democratically possible within one single term), but on this issue, he's certainly right, so I hope that Biden (and hopefully his VP Warren) will take this over, once he wins the general election.
3
Academic tenure has sound purposes - protecting teachers and scholars who have proven their abilities in a long and rigorous period of training and peer evaluation from institutional evaluation thereafter of their professional abilities. The obvious risks of eventual declining competence with age were greatly mitigated by universal policies of mandatory termination of tenure (not necessarily termination of continued academic employment on term basis), as well as generous retirement policies..
But after Age Discrimination laws were expanded to forbid mandatory cessation of tenure on the basis of age, there followed a dramatic increase in the number of senior tenured faculty remaining in their positions into much increased ages - filling positions that previously were available to new young scholars, as well as absorbing larger and larger portions of the available funds for faculty salaries. This extremely harmful effect on the academic profession has been of course far more pronounced in the most prestigious institutions where teaching loads for senior faculty are frequently small to non-existent. It is a largely self-inflicted scandal of higher education in the U.S.
24
After a brief sojourn in graduate school in history I went to law school and have worked as a union lawyer. So I have a perspective on this. For all the supposed progressive politics of the humanities professorate it has never ceased to amaze me that they’ve yet to figure out what the organized working class did long ago: ‘B’ scales or casual employment schemes inevitably degrade the working conditions of incumbent employees and undermine solidarity. Look at employees like mail men, truck drivers or pilots. They fight these neoliberal schemes tooth and nail and for good reason. Unlike most employees, the professorate actually has a role in governance at many places. Yet they permitted this to develop presumably because they felt cosseted by tenure and were eager to shed the scut work of actually teaching undergraduates. Is it false consciousness or just the difference between the old left ethos that still has echoes in the organized working class and the new left cultural politics of the well educated?
25
I have a PhD in engineering, dating back to 1970. I never worked in academia as I preferred the challenges of leading large profit making organizations. However, in my retirement years, I was an adjunct professor, teaching undergraduates. For a time, I found it interesting and it did for what I sought: a way of sharing my experience in business and passing that on to the next generation. Pay was not an issue for me, but I was astounded at how low it was - especially compared to what a tenured professor earned. I fully realize I was not conducing research, did not serve on academic committees, and so forth. Still, the disparity in pay stunned me.
Here's what stunned me even more: there was no (as in "none") effort whatsoever to organize the adjuncts. If there ever was a situation where the power clearly resided with one side - the adjuncts - and the other side had almost no alternative, this was it. Yet, any such organizing revolved around the graduate students, where the power and the "case to be made" was a lot less clear. Many, though not all, adjuncts do this as a sideline so a strike for them is not a "hurt". The universities in no way can readily fill all the slots in a semester that adjuncts teach. The leverage that adjunct can use to remedy the pay disparity is enormous. I am still stunned that this has not happened.
25
In 1995 the adjuncts starts Kent State organized and formed the first collective bargaining unit in the US for non-tenure track faculty. The full-time non-tenure track faculty here (of which I am one) now have job security, benefits, opportunities for promotion, and a role in governance. We are still second class citizens, and some departments are worse than others in that regard, but the working conditions overall are good. We now have few part time faculty. Unfortunately their pay is appallingly low. They did not have a pay increase for two decades or so.
8
I am a non-tenure track full-time faculty member. I previously taught in adjunct roles while working in another full-time career. I teach twice as many credit hours as my tenure track colleagues - by contract. I am engaged in service activities, advising and speaking to student groups, attending student events, planning and hosting dozens of guest speakers, and running micro-consulting projects. Tenure track professors are dissuaded from service roles because of the need for them to research and write. Tenured faculty are often (not always) uninterested in such things - and have an even lower teaching load.
Adjunct pay is terrible, and I value the contributions of my tenured and tenure track colleagues. Do they value mine? Does Senator Sanders?
11
@Krebtown No they do not. If they did, they would leverage the faculty senates and other bodies and demand an end to labor exploitation of people just as qualified as they are.
1
The administration payroll passed that of the faculty at my institution in 1992.
Lambasted by NY Times readers, there are reasons for it.
Ever increasing demands of from Federal and State governments government for proof of compliances with ever increasing State and Federal l regulations. From Title 9, to compliance to disability access, proof of nation wide advertising campaigns in hiring , to reports on minority representation.. Every one a highly laudable cause, but everyone requiring people that handle the paper work
Ever increasing demand by students and parents for student support. Support groups for gay and lesbians, physiological counseling, auxiliary instructions if a student has difficulty with a class et . Again, every one a laudable cause, but again every requiring people to carry it out.
Ever increasing haggling with local government. Although, by law , Universities are excluded from State and local taxes, local government increasing try to level taxes on Universities, With arguments reaching from that the presence of a University requires more municipal firefighter to that University generated traffic more rapidly wears out roads. Add to this : Do local zoning laws apply to University to land grant University ?
This all requires time, money, and people. None of this was present when I went to University 50 years ago
16
@LArs Don't forget that every time some faux-issue hits the news, the universities MUST act, and they usually do so by hiring an over-paid assoc dean or asst vice president of puppies and fluffy stuff. And a staff. Oh, and we have to remodel the office, of course.
2
I started an undergraduate degree in 1998 and earned a PhD in 2011, matching closely the timeline this article follows.
While I’ve been relatively lucky - despite going through the closure of a small university, which was awful - conditions for faculty are as described here. Dire with lots of adjunct exploitation.
One piece that’s missing in this analysis, however, is a typically corresponding (over)investment in administration and student services.
The latter covers for what can be neglected with an increasingly adjunct faculty. With fewer full time faculty, adjuncts often take on unpaid labor to support students, but regular advising and the like has been professionalized and outsourced at a huge cost.
Even curriculum is outsourced where universities are highly dependent on the adjunct model. This cost was part of what closed a local university last month.
Instead of investing in instruction, many universities have opted for spending on enrollment management (recruitment), especially during these lean times. When those efforts turn up short and instructional quality has suffered, damaging reputation, universities flail and sometimes fail.
8
In today's world, getting a PhD in something like English literature (and in many fields, actually), should be considered what it is, a luxury. I'm hard pressed to think of many instances where it's worth not only the cost of tuition, but also the lost earnings during often lengthy programs. And, as shown in this article, the degrees are certainly not paying for themselves in increased earnings after the fact in far too many instances. Pretty soon, only the 1% will be able to afford them.
At the same time, an academic system that continuously raises tuition to stratospheric heights while paying the workhorses doing most of the teaching -- grad students and adjuncts -- essentially slave wages, is reprehensible.
The education system in this country is broken in so many ways, it's hard to even list them all.
19
I earned my doctorate in psychology in the 80’s and then most colleges & universities weren’t hiring as their allotted tenure-track positions were filled and expansion wasn’t sustainable.
I finally found a tenure-track position at a small state university considering myself lucky. The military recruited me for a specialty program and my department head advised me to get out. The handwriting on the wall was that the school was going to go to adjuncts to save money and I wasn’t likely to get tenured.
Higher education has evolved into a peculiar business where it’s less about teaching and more about revenue flow. Tenure is for those who can get grants and funding. Student-contact positions are like the scene from “On the Waterfront” where the foreman goes through the crowd of workers selecting the favored until he just flings the remaining job tokens into the crowd to be fought over.
Higher education needs an overhaul if it is really to prepare one to contribute meaningfully to society at best or as an intellectual trade school at worst. Academia churns out degree recipients as a product, not as part of a succession plan. In its worst light it’s a racket, in its best probably blissfully ignorant of its consequence.
11
I'm baffled those placing the blame for low pay on professors. Anyone who's ever been in academia knows how hard faculty members fight to retain tenure track positions in their departments. Every time there is a position eliminated or converted to non-tenure, it's a loss for all. Look to Republican tax cuts, and the move to force universities to be run like corporations if you want to see the source of making universities run like FoxConn, with the lowest paid labor they can find.
29
(Continued) With de advent of international student and with silly US News and World Report ranking, we have a competitive University Marketplace. I find that this can only push tuition up, and enrich the Bureacrats which are compensated like Wall Street guys. Meanwhile we are adjusted for inflation, unless we discover a new element of the periodic table or receive a Nobel prize. You get the idea: tenured faculty works hard for its money, first, and also we follow the basic tenets of an American University: Educate (serve the sons and daughters) and Research ( serve the country, the science, and the well-being of our society). I dont know if Sanders sound-byte idea on faculty retirement will so anything. I do know that if the Academic Bureaucrats and their money-driven culture is not put in check, we wont have good universities. We'll have luxury hotels ("dorms") with "classes" and "seminars" run by "famous professors" and get a GPA-4 diploma at the end of the stay. We dont want that to happen.
3
It's no longer true that we keep on producing a large number of PhDs. We are acutely aware of the market and prefer to have fewer doctoral students who will have a much better chance of getting a job than a lot of doctoral students who may go from post doc to post doc without ever landing a tenure track position.
We also usually have many more applicants than funded positions for graduate students/assistantships.
Finally, there are plenty of personally and professionally fulfilled tenured professors. I'm sorry to read about all these negative experiences. I'm also sorry to read about those who appear to enjoy putting down academia and professors without knowing much about it and/or them.
5
I always wanted to teach English. I got my MAT from Fordham and became a high school teacher. At the time, my parents really wanted me to pursue a PhD. I just couldn't see the benefit in accruing so much more debt for such an unsure future. I teach 12th grade, have savings, and enjoy a fulfilling career. No regrets!
9
The only way out of this bind that I found was to have a second specialty. In the mid and late 80´s, I found myself widowed with children recently out of college. I had always been a good typist and I managed to get some summer jobs in which I learned word processing and updated manuals for use with computers. I also had a second language (French) which proved useful for a company trying to get European customers. There was also traveling to Canadian customers involved. Then I married a man I had known for several years and shortly afterward a full time tenure track job materialized in a local college where I had already worked. The work schedule and other factors made it possible to go back to teaching. I did get tenure and spent my last working years doing what I had always wanted to do — teaching and writing. with time as well for a private life.
This is all partly luck, but it is also partly happening to learn more than one thing.
6
The problem for higher education appear to be money. If that is the case, why not use the tax code to provides subsidies to non-tenured professors, the same way that housing is subsidized and health care is subsidized.
1
I do not think it's accurate to say that Ph.D. programs did not work to adjust to this new reality. I completed my Ph.D. in English at Brown University in 1991, at which time 12 new students a year were generally accepted. Not long after I finished, this was cut in half to 6, and this for an Ivy League program with a better placement record than most. I suspect the increase in earned Ph.D.'s in the humanities is in large part due to programs that do not inform -- or prepare -- their students for this diminishing job market.
5
@Russell Potter I disagree. Programs in humanities do prepare their students for the job market. Their students are typically double majors precisely so that they may be more marketable.
@Haumea I never meant that programs in the humanities didn't prepare their students academically -- only that they didn't always advise their students of the difficulties they might face in particular fields. The good programs have very robust preparations -- precisely because jobs are steadily growing harder to find. Double majors (at the Ph.D. level) are rare, and may not be an asset.
2
Brown is hardly representative. Were Ph.D. students in essence the entirety of the teaching staff for undergraduate intro writing? By the time I got my PhD, about 8 years after you, at a large public university that was a top 20 program, that was certainly the case, and the number of grad students was only growing to meet the teaching demand. At least we were unionized and had health benefits. Of my PhD cohort of 37, fewer than 10 are now in a tenured job.
4
Part of the problem, as mentioned, is all of the right wing controlled state legislatures that have cut taxes and college budgets to very little. Secondary ed is the first to take a hit when budget gets tight.
10
As a former academic, I have nothing but disdain for academia - it is a big con. As a grad student at Iowa State University, I earned $3,000 a semester to work on various History department projects - like History Day. My supervisor - a tenured prof - made $30,000 a semester to supervise my work. He did absolutely nothing.
In numerous courses, I had to read a 100 or more articles a semester, summarize their contents, and give the reviews to my profs - who then used the summations in their own written work. I received nothing for those reviews, not even a mention in their articles or books. Such lovely people.
Once I had my Ph.D. - I earned in my first year as an adjunct a whopping $2,500; the second year, $7,500; and the third, $10,000; for teaching between one and four courses at Texas Tech. Later, while an adjunct at U. of Northern Colorado, I was told my classes would each hold 25 students. Then just days before the start of the semester, the department chair opened the courses up - enrollment jumped to 65 per course. I did not receive any raise in pay to compensate for the larger number of students.
In my experience, those who run the departments, and who are tenured, are ruthless opportunists - as ruthless as any one within the upper echelons of the corporate world.
Beward anyone seeking an advanced degree. You will be swimming amongst sharks. Your best defense is to ORGANIZE, UNIONIZE, AND STRIKE WHEN NECESSARY!
34
Further, the rise of Student Affairs staff with salaries that exceed those of adjuncts, and continue to grow.
17
My several close friends in academia have post doctoral degrees and tenured positions at a State University, in two instances and a tenure track position at an Ivy League. They all have essentially 4 months off, teach 2 days a week, part of the day and have graduate students grade the exams. The Ivy leaguer got a sabbatical after his first 2 years at the university. Notwithstanding, all I ever hear is how overworked they are, how underpaid they are (they each make more than I do as an attorney, working 50 weeks a year, 5-6 days a week, with self funded retirement) and how overburdened they are. I'm not saying that is the sole reason that college tuition is crushing, but in the case of the Ivy league tenure track, that may be a reason why it costs $75,000 a year for an undergraduate. Based on this, I have little sympathy for the tenured or tenure track professors who love to complain to anyone who listens how overworked and underpaid they are.
20
I tend to agree with what you wrote. I will, however, point out:
1) Faculty pay, even for tenured professors, often varies across disciplines, just as salaries may differ across areas of legal practice.
2) Tenured faculty often have additional administrative/committee responsibilities that require time, attention, and effort.
3) The pressure on tenure-track, and even tenured, professors to produce new knowledge and to write and present and publish the same still exists.
4) The fact that graduate or senior undergraduate teaching assistants may do the grading is irrelevant in your comparison. After all, think how much of the labor billed by lawyers and law firms is actually by paralegals, legal assistants, law librarians, law school students and summer interns, and administrative assistants.
21
@Harley I am a tenure track professor at a mid-level research university. I can assure you that I and most of my compatriots are not having fun during the summer break. We are teaching summer classes, doing research and writing and attending conferences. Summer is when I can work normal hours instead of working 60 plus hours a week.
I spent years working as an adjunct while writing my dissertation. I agree the system is exploitative. We have to change the system. It is hard to cut spaces in grad programs because departments’ enrollments go down the departments can be cut completely. It would be helpful if programs focused on helping people get non-academic jobs.
I would advise most people against entering a non-professional graduate program. It is high stress. I developed a substance abuse problem and I was not the only one in my program. It is a dirty little secret in academia. People were taking beta blockers to get by.
2
This is mostly about adjuncts.
1
(Continuing). Words like "prestige", "top choice schools" were now in the vocabulary. The Ivies became the benchmarks. We were competing for tuition dollars.
Even state universities knew the difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition. So the pressure was to get more grants, teach more students, cut the TAs. Unionization of adjunct faculty and TAs, fuggesdabboudit!
3
Kudos to your friends at research 1 and ivy league schools. Most professors in this day and age do not have that schedule. The 2 days a week you speak of is an illusion. This says nothing of the class prep, grading, student advising and endless meetings. It's as if saying that you, as an attorney, count only your time in court or mediation, and discounting all the work leading up to that. I teach 4 classes a semester and use those long breaks you speak of to write for required publication. Perhaps your friends are very advanced in their careers or somehow lucky.
19
@H Z I dont get it. You suggest that we bring down the American University system to equate with tier 2 schools.
What I am saying is: cut the HUGE admin overheads and make a school that works (U presidents make 1-5 million a year.
Im saying to have universities that serve their purposes. The hole is not in the tenure faculty work its in the Wall St salaries of presidents and provosts.
Like a Provost for University Like a Provost for
University Life.
Another thought: inequality in salaries in a matter of collective bargaining, not putting people to pasture (without pension, on social security). THAT is socialist. Sanders does not know what hes talking about and wont get votes for pandering to underpaid adjuncts. The idea of adjuncts is that they do this because they like it, not to be overworked and underpaid. I always was for pay equity. All the best. (My post had three parts. Theone you replied to does not read well out of context)
The job market for Ph.D.s in academia started to shrink in the late 1960's. Too many graduates for the positions available especially in the humanities. Once colleges and universities started to replace full time faculty with part-timers and increasing the number of better paid administrative jobs -the market for full time teachers shrunk. At the same time universities were increasing the number of doctoral candidates they admitted. It was a race to shrink full time faculty with part-timers at lower pay with increasing the number of better paid administration jobs to provide more "fluff" for students. Universities love to crow about how many advanced degree students they have, add more and more masters and doctoral programs, change what were formerly Bachelor degrees to "doctoral degrees" to get more tuition money while shrinking the opportunities for their newly minted "doctors" to find jobs in academia at anything but poverty pay. Meanwhile they increase the number of "deans" and "assistant deans" many of whom add nothing at all to the academic stature of the university (formerly a college)and try to convince wealthy graduates to donate millions in exchange for a meaningless honorary doctorate.
7
Education has fully become big business. It’s about revenue and profits. There are faculty members who still think they are in academia of yesteryear but they are sadly in denial about the broad trend. All this money-driven dismantling of the last bastion of uncensored scholarly pursuit will adversely affect us. It is consistent with our overall decline as a nation. Like most things that go downhill, it will accelerate.
9
I got an Engineering PhD late in my career because I hoped to be a professor someday. I found then that a lot of the professors I had in the seventies were still teaching! There are no jobs for seasoned professionals who have so much to offer. Two of my mentors who were Deans of prestigious engineering departments encouraged me to stay in industry because they said a University would rather pay a new grad $50k and if they don’t work out - oh well, than hire someone who is more of a slam dunk! My colleagues that do have appointments all plan on staying till they die. Is this what our education system needs, 50 years of status quo?
8
Despite the very crowded classes (especially at the freshman level) and the pittance the grad students teaching the entry level classes, the actual profit is massive in light of the gigantic fees charged.
We are not even considering the enormous endowments these institutions have amassed and the monumental buildings paid for by donors getting their names over doors.
Higher education is focused on revenue generation with the executive class being paid private sector CEO pay levels.
Business delivers what the checkbook holder demands. However, the checkbook holder is not the student but rather donors and the Federal student loan program.
4
Such an outrage that even as compensation for many people with PhDs, even from the best schools and program, declined, tuition and fees charged to students and families greatly increased.
Friends serving as adjuncts not only make well below minimum wage given the hours they devote to course they’re assigned, but they also often have to cobble together a course load spread across multiple institutions and multiple locations, often 30-130 miles apart. Many also have to move regions every 1-3 years just to secure work. None of that bodes well for the creation and sustainability of relationships, family, or meaningful community. They lose, as do the cities and towns from which they move as itinerate workers.
Meanwhile, our nation and world are increasingly replete with purveyors of untruth, attacks on science, and slander of intellectuals and expertise.
11
Their students often lose, too - adjunct professors are often wonderful, dedicated teachers, but with all the commuting among 3-4 campuses, lack of benefits, and lack of stability term to term, they are likely not at their best. For the student who connects with an adjunct, they can be hard to sustain a mentor/mentee relationship with, or pursue an independent study with, or even track down for a rec letter.
Pursuing a Ph.D. (or a J.D., or an M.D., or any degree) is a choice.
I earned a Ph.D. in a physical science 20 years ago, and spent time in academia (not to my liking) and in the private sector (so-so, but it's a living).
So many people seem surprised to find out that their choices don't guarantee employment, and seem fixated on blaming the system into which they willingly entered.
I urge anyone considering pursuing any degree to remember that there are no guarantees in life, and that pursuing graduate degrees is a choice.
16
I spent 5 years and 10 months on a PhD in biology. I passed all my classes, passed my comprehensive exam, and after being psychologically, financially, and temporally abused by a narcissist advisor while getting $96000 in debt, I had to leave. Is this how the US wants to do research? If so, I'll happily learn another language and finish my dissertation abroad. Meanwhile, I'm starting my own for-profit lab. And, if I am going to be an adjunct professor, I'll do so in a union.
7
Lots of accurate info here, but the real issue never comes into focus. Universities and 4-year degrees as the norm--and as the requirement for making a decent living--are obsolete and inefficient and are not appropriate for most people. They are also increasingly unsupportable, and many will fail financially in the coming years. The managerial levels of this now bureaucracy-ridden system are beyond belief. The student support (that is, non-instructional) costs are staggering. The student debt is crushing. The university culture and environment has also become a danger to the mental health of many young people.
We need to think in transformational ways about the universities. Huge parts of the university curriculum could be accessed online. We should offer chances to test through a college education after completing online study. We should replace much of higher ed with opportunities across the lifespan, chances to learn and to retool and receive further training and education at any point, whoever you are and whatever age you are. We should end the unjust extortion of money from young people who do not thrive in college.
Universities and 4-year degrees should not be the sole gateway to meaningful work and a decent living. There is no justification for that monopoly. Bryan Caplan has shown that college degrees mostly signal social conformity and that someone has a decent work ethic. We are paying way too much for that.
16
@Nathan , I don't know who you are, or what you do, but your comment is spot on. Thank you
A PhD takes at least 4 years AFTER a 4 year degree.
1
Another wrinkle: community colleges are booming. More students are opting to earn two years of affordable college credits before transferring to finish their last two years in a four-year program at state & regional universities.
9
In addition to numerous overpaid administrators, a big chunk of university budget goes into Athletics. The football coach is often the highest paid employee many times over. Then comes the basketball coach. And so on. Most athletics programs lose money and students are forced to pay via fees and tuition for the entertainment of alumni and fans. Quite a few more tenured positions could be funded if these overblown sports programs were scaled back.
Another question is whether all PhDs will or should be university professors / teachers? PhD is a research degree, not a teaching degree. PhDs who understand and can do research (of various types) can go into industry R&D, consulting, data science, be entrepreneurs, etc. In Germany a fair number of business professionals have a doctorate degree.
21
Well, there’s always another market for similar skills to which this PhD oversupply could easily turn. Few places not in need of more great K-12 teachers. You have a lot more say on where you go and how long you stay there, not to mention chance to impact more lives. Free to pursue publications on the side, too, should you have the drive and make the time.
7
Academic employment and college fees are tightly linked. Both require exactly the type of changes Mr. Sanders proposed. Both domains are supported by governments in developed countries, as they should be in the US as well. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have been exploited for generations. Their salaries can be improved in part by reducing the number of doctorates awarded by universities, and increase the size of masters programs by requiring graduate students to acquire this degree before proceeding to doctorate. The real need for the latter is much smaller than the current production. University budgets would benefit from a drastic cut in the number of overpaid administrators who are not scientists and can be replaced by computers in most cases. The guidance of universities should be solely in the hands of practicing professors, just as medicine should be guided by physicians and surgeons. Most importantly, faculty in all universities should unionize to fight together against the current misguided policies.
2
This might not make much of a difference, but I would still encourage prospective students and parents to demand to know whom the courses will be taught by. Ask this when you visit campuses. You are investing in your education, and you deserve to be taught by someone who is not simultaneously teaching 5 courses, making way below minimum wage, has no health insurance and/or office space. You will not receive quality education if these are the conditions under which your professors work and live. So when you visit campuses, please interrogate schools if the education they offer is based on adjuncts. Schools might not care about what adjuncts say, but they will be pressured to hear what you say.
18
The so-called "prestige" of a university or a faculty member, especially as imagined by administrators and by "pushy" professors, is directly related to the output of Ph.D.'s by that institution or by that professor's "program".
With this attitude firmly in place, even at institutions that, realistically, have no business cranking out Ph.D.'s, is it any wonder that there is currently a glut of "Drs." out there.
Also, keep in mind that doctoral students, like all grad students, represent a pool of smart, dedicated, hard-working people that work very cheaply.
Now, the trend of colleges and universities hiring non-tenure-track, adjunct faculty, especially in the humanities, has only exacerbated the problem of Ph.D.'s without a viable future in academia.
Until the whole dysfunctional system is scrapped, particularly at second- and third-tier colleges, potential grad students should certainly exercise "caveat emptor".
2
The author misses some pretty important points in characterizing the "benefit" to the lucky few on the tenure track. Hiring adjuncts "frees up time for tenured researchers to do what they enjoy: conduct research." He seems to have internalized the implicit message from most administrations: higher education is no longer a place where students acquire the knowledge, skills, and self-awareness to be productive and valuable citizens. Rather, students pay big bills in exchange for a marketable credential. Their big bills support a small clique of really smart people who are valued because some of their research output can be monetized. What for? To hire more administrators, and further undermine state funding for public institutions. The article fails to mention that even at Mediocre U, tenure is contingent on bringing in grants with outrageous overheads that in my experience are used to ... support grant administrators, build plush dorms, and fund money-losing semi-pro sports teams, the latter two so as to compete in the zero-sum battle for tuition with peer mediocre U's. Of course the tenure track faculty are relieved to get out of teaching HUMA101 - their 39th grant application this year is due tomorrow! The notion that someone seeks a professorial career for love of the art of teaching at the highest levels is nowhere to be found in the article, which I think accurately, if pathetically, reflects reality. Such people are the adjuncts, no longer tenured professors.
15
Contributing to the oversupply of PhDs in the humanities is the emphasis, since the 1970s, on research and the resulting competition among universities (and departments within universities) for high grad program rankings, internal and external. The result: overall growth in the number of programs, the number of admissions, and the number of PhDs. // Today's humanities PhD students in the top-ranked programs do understand it'll be hard to land a good tenure track job; but many are willing to trust in their intelligence, their professors, their finances and their luck, and to hold out hope for as long as they can, pursuing the intellectual life that they love.
7
I myself dropped out of a distinguished PhD history program back in 1979, with nothing left but the dissertation, at the bottom of the previous demographic wave when there really weren't jobs to be had, so I've been observing with interest but at an ever-increasing distance.
One point that needs to be made is that the collapse of realistic professional prospects for humanities graduate students in "accredited institutions of higher learning" dating back to 1980 neatly coincides with the right-wing donor class's discovery that it could establish its own intellectual sphere, complete with all the trappings of academia (but without that annoying heterodoxy of belief systems), and very affordably too. You can buy a lot of intellectuals for a bit more than pocket change if you occupy that rarified stratum.
This would have been problematic simply from the point of view of intellectual integrity, but in the context of a collapsing university market it opened a door to their becoming able to exert more influence than otherwise probably would have been the case.
You need look no further than the Supreme Court and the cohort of Republican judges if you want to see an example real-world consequences.
11
It is easy to fall into the trap of seeing this is a supply demand issue. However, the root cause lies in the desire of universities to continually raise the bar on the amount of money being brought in by their faculty, i.e. industry funded research.
On the surface, this seems like a win across multiple fronts. The spending is kept local to the US, it is cheap, universities are able to progress their research ecosystems and students are able to conduct research that is relevant to industry, often giving them a head start on job offers.
Lurking beneath this, is a more complex outcome. Firstly, young faculty members are often under extreme pressure to obtain funding, publish or perish. Secondly, there is an extreme demand for cheap graduate student labor so that the funding can be stretched further. Thirdly, the cheaper nature of the spend incentivizes industry to bankroll universities for far longer than they ought to which not only lengthens the time to graduate but also helps create the illusion that a long tenure as a student is often the easiest path to a job in the industry. Lastly, it creates a caste hierarchy within academia with faculty that are successful in fund raising being treated as royalty ahead of those who might want to concentrate more on teaching - which oddly enough is the primary reason for which universities should exist.
This is not an easy problem to solve.
11
Not all PhDs want to work in academia. The article assumes that earning a PhD means you want to work in academia. There are so many opportunities to continue research and academic pursuits, as well as applied research positions, outside of academia. I completed my PhD over a decade ago and never thought of applying for a tenure track position. I have enjoyed working in the private sector, non profit organizations and the Federal government.
10
I will reach the age of 80 this year.
I have a PhD in History of Culture from one of the top ten universities in the world. Number eight, I believe.
Crescat scientia, vita excolatur!
Yes, "the enhancement of life".
I have always known that, though I come from a poor family, I have had a rare privilege in the development of my mind.
I am extremely thankful for the privilege.
I have never regarded studying the humanities as a career path that would offer financial rewards.
After my years studying, I found suitable employment that has allowed me to retire in modest comfort and to pursue the develop independently the knowledge I pursue.
Thank you UC!
21
I am a university professor (I am foreign born). There are a number of points that can be added to this opinion. Number one, higher education is a free market place in US, which means that the universities are competing with each other for market share (students) and try to slash labor cost by all means. There are accrediting agencies, but they are just another mostly useless layer of bureaucracy. Two, the students show severe lack of judgement, which is typical of young people. They all believe that they will make it and will win the academic lottery. It is the same human optimism of all those who play the lottery because they are certain that some day they will win the millions. It is also fun to be a student. I loved it. Three, the universities have endless number of people that do not contribute anything to the educational side but take a lot of funds: coaches, fund raisers, recruiters, etc etc. Add to them the heavily overpaid administrators that contribute very little to the academic process (tenured faculty own how the classes are run and the material that is taught in them as well as research and service). All of these demand extra funds and cheaper teaching labor. Sure the tenured faculty are egocentric in many ways, but I don't see anybody who had secured a piece of the American dream jumping out of a skyscraper for altruistic reasons, say, to free space for the new generation.
10
I am an administrator at a top university and I could not agree more with this article.
What was left unsaid was that just as adjunct professors get an unnecessarily raw deal, tenure and tenure-track faculty probably have it too sweet. Tenured faculty at my school teach three classes per year, are often not on campus when they don’t have class, and get their entire summer, as well as all school breaks, off. Not to mention a semester off for sabbatical, pre-tenure review leave, reduced load for new instructors, etc. Also, it’s a job for life, which is almost impossible to get fired from, even if you are a poor instructor. Yes, they are researching outside of their classroom time, but it is an incredibly cushy gig.
A sustainable solution would be to reduce some of the perks for tenured faculty and even it out with adjuncts, as well as bringing on more “professors of practice” who are full time but not on the tenure-track and don’t have the same publishing expectations. We need full-time faculty who are fairly paid and experts in their fields, we don’t need to hire people for life and limit the school’s flexibility to pivot as students’ needs and interests change.
Many faculty have commented on administrative bloat. There are two problems here: 1) students are are paying through the nose to attend school and thus expect to be catered to; 2) Faculty who are unwilling to contribute to the administration of the school. The administrators keep the place running!
17
@Cici
Faculty provide the key service students pay for: education.
Tenure isn't an absolute guarantee in this day and age & faculty can't afford to rest on their laurels. We're all striving to adapt as programs are cut & students' needs change.
As a tenured faculty member, I've been on campus every weekend this month helping advise & recruit students for my program. I've done this for years to help my field and because the university administration doesn't offer campus tours on weekends.
6
@Cici
To take issue with one point: you can't simultaneously lower publication expectations and expect professors of practice to be "experts."
1
As a professor, on average (unless there is a huge increase in the number of faculty positions--with tenure for arguments sake) each of us has to train 1 replacement over our entire career. Yet, many of us have mentored multiple grad students towards their PhD. True, a number of my students have become tenured faculty, but even more have secured good jobs because of their PhD outside of academia. A number of note (sometime with a smile, but this is true) that the PhD who ends up with tenure in academia has pursued the "alternate career". The availability of jobs outside of academia does depend on field. I train grad students in life sciences, where there are many regulatory, administrative and industry jobs. My current students now that they have many options once they get their PhD and only the minority of them want the job that I have. Still, there needs to be an effort to help potential graduate students understand what their options are and see if this fits with their career goals.
2
@Vince In the U.S., at least, there are large numbers of liberal arts colleges and smaller state schools that do not have doctoral programs. So there was not traditionally the 1-to-1 ratio you describe.
1
I graduated with a Ph.D in English from a major university in the northeast in 1990. Most of the grad students in English received a tuition waver and a small stipend teaching composition. It was the main way grad students were able to eke out a living and path to a degree. Occasionally a grad students was given a literature course to teach. This was considered a plumb—a highly desirable reward and resume item. Many years later (around 2010) I returned to my alma mater and walked the halls of the English department, curious about how things had changed and looking at notices and job opportunities or internships just to see what was happening. To my surprise I saw a list of English department lit courses and their instructors. It looked to me as if a majority of those undergraduate lit classes were being taught by adjuncts. No longer a reward, they were the teaching path to the PH.D right along with the classes in composition. Things had gone from bad to worse.
6
@DLS Mr Phd. in English: I think you are confusing "plumb" with "plum". Plum means desirable in your context. Plumb, from the Latin for the metal lead, is in the adverb form a synecdoche for "plumb line", and means "exactly vertical", or in a looser parlance, "exactly correct".
So many reasons that academia--as a business--has alienated it's funding sources and it's client, so it reasonable to expect it's labor feels the pain.
UC and CSU still exclude most of the state residents from attending. If they substantially eliminated the exclusion process (made admissions equivalent to community college) they would increase business and state funding. If they made intersystem enrollment a matter of student choice, not transfer admins, the market would be desegregated, and thus significantly more efficient. The factoids and hang wringing about the cost of tweed do not constitute change. Evolve or decease.
38 years into an academic career in which I have occupied a lot of titles brought up in this post (grad student instructor, tenure-track and then tenured professor, dept. chair, program director, dean), I have some thoughts. Oh, and I should mention that my field is that most contested and often contemptuously dismissed one of English Literature. Colleges and universities were for a long time faculty-centered institutions. No more. Yes, there are ruins and fragments lying about of the former order; some people have or can aspire to tenure, and there are processes and faculty committees that decide whether or not to award that security. Many of those remnants are wonderful teachers, and superb researchers. Many of the senior administrators are themselves tenured faculty, thus providing the slender reassurance that the faculty--the teachers and scholars--still run things. But, as a number of the comments here have noted, this vision of the university, of higher education, has disappeared, and is more and more like the royal family of Great Britain: in place still, nicely compensated, symbolically significant, inspiring a warm glow, but not in charge, not really at the heart of things. On campuses, it is the flotilla of offices for this and that, endless meetings and floods of memos, high officers begging for money, lawyers dictating what's safe to say, all of them constantly reiterating the mantra of our time, and in all arenas, "moving forward."
25
The Ph.D. is archaic and narrow. The academy would be better off not issuing letter grades and specialized degrees that are self-serving, protective, inauthentic, and, if so, virtually meaningless. What is the true point of scholarship?
3
It is very bad in the humanities but it isn’t great in the sciences. Scientific research at universities is carried out by large numbers of graduate students and post-docs (domestic and foreign) who are cheap, have no labor rights, and in the case of post-docs are basically highly skilled temps. The academy has no incentive to cut the PhD pipeline as they need the hands in the lab to get the grants and concomitant overhead for the institution. The fact that there are nowhere enough jobs in either academia or industry, which has drastically scaled back research since the 1980s, for all these PhDs - well too bad for them but good for the professors. As an added bonus, with a cut throat job market, people are even less likely to rock the boat.
11
I wrote an article about this crisis in the 70s. Then again in the 1980s. By 2000, I urged my college-age son to scrap the idea of being a college professor in the sciences (as his father had been), and instead go into dentistry or whatever else paid well and might have job stability. So, with not one but TWO PhDs in hand, he went begging for some sort of job in Silicon Valley. Yes, the New Adjunct tends to skip the university routine completely--this subject is too well covered to claim ignorance, dear adjuncts--and go directly to a gig-like grant economy funded by apps. By the time my grandkids are college age, I hope the whole idea of college, as we've known it, is gone, in favor of practical, well paid (with benefits or govt takeover), apprenticeships. No use spending years and mucho bucks training for low-paid, hard to find positions in fields that evaporate while you're still in your prime. Take a look--too many of us "boomers" are in that fix today! Over-educated, underpaid, and insecure, too. I say change it massively or abandon the university system.
11
I have worked in higher education both as an associate professor and as a staff person (when I had to leave my teaching job for my husband's career). Anyone who loves the academic environment but is worried about getting a teaching position should consider some other higher ed field. You get to work with students and stimulating colleagues, you can tackle some interesting questions collectively, you might still get to do your own research and publications, and you can probably work on a graduate degree for free or at a reduced cost as an employee. I have a decent salary as a staff person and also teach on the side as an adjunct for fun. Making a difference in students' lives is meaningful no matter what the field.
3
@Cathy
Glad you enjoy your job. I wonder, though, whether any of those students you teach "on the side" will enjoy repaying the huge tuition debt they're accruing in this sparse academic environment.
I have been hearing stories of this so-called crisis in the humanities since the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate. Getting a PhD is for the independently wealthy or for those few who are truly gifted enough to beat the odds. Most of the universities awarding humanities Phds should stop granting the degree in such high numbers.
12
Why are these highly educated people willingly debasing themselves working for miserly colleges and universities.
A PHD in business, sciences, certain political fields, health and education can find jobs in the private sector with their education attainment alone.
If these people want to insist on working in academia, well the pay is what it is.
6
The market was terrible when I started a Ph.D. program in English 17 years ago. I was 24 at the time and knew the market was bad, but, being 24, I didn't think I would be harmed by it. Many of my professors were so successful in their fields that they had no idea the realities that we faced as grad students. My advisor even made me lose a well-paying teaching position because she felt my dissertation needed more revisions (I needed the degree for the job). I am all for rigor, but sometimes you have to let people move on with their lives. (I did the revisions, and got the degree, but I had to find another job.)
I just want to emphasize that the market (and the accompanying delusions among grad students and tenure-track faculty) is not newly terrible; it has been terrible for a long time.
9
No one is entitled a job. If fewer people are taking humanities courses overall, then it follows that there will be fewer opportunities for those wanting to teach in those fields. It isn't the fault of the universities that so many continued to pursue advanced degrees in absence of evidence of future demand.
4
@ConsDemo
"No one is entitled [to] a job," you write. That's a rich topic that should be explored, in public. At a time when tuition to enter kindergarten calls for two earners in a family, it should certainly be incumbent on some authorities--perhaps even at universities--to adjust the cost of their programs, and consider whether they're outdated or should carry warning labels: "Take this course and you may struggle to survive for the rest of your life," seems appropriate for the humanities, post-1970. It's rather bait-and-switch for society to insist on a college degree, then shrug when that hard-earned, expensive degree gets them nowhere but, maybe, a job with one of their parents' friends. Nepotism certainly seems to work better in the US job market than knowledge backed by diplomas.
9
My brother-in-law received his PhD in English 20 years ago and the job market for tenure track jobs was poor then. I don't feel pity for those who chose to enter an educational pursuit with an extremely poor economic outlook.
I majored in art history, which I loved, but knew I most likely could not make a living from a PhD in this subject. I chose medicine instead.
Today, doctors face decreased salaries - partially due to the influx of nurse practitioners, who practice independently in many states. Meanwhile, Med students go into debt $200,000 - $400,000.
Currently I do not recommend medicine as a profession to enter, and recommend a NP program.
14
Debt depends on the medical school attended. NPs have a limited role and represent cookie cutter medicine. Creativity still matters in medicine; unfortunately, too many who enter medicine were simply good at memorizing, which is antithetical to creativity, which ultimately leads to the disgruntled mindset of the physician automatons.
I had 1 sister who got an English degree and couldn't get a job teaching it.Another sister had a Art Ed degree and couldn't get a job in that field. My son wanted to get an
English degree and I said I would not help him. He could do English on the side but he needed to get a job degree
so he went into computer science and it has worked out
1
“Creativity” doesn’t matter in medicine and has nothing to do with the current situation in medicine.
Despite three academic degrees, recent offers in the Boston region varied between $3,200 and $4,000 per the class, per semester. In one case, I would create the a new class (curriculum and reading list) for free and wait one year for approval. Where I to leave the institution, someone else could come in and teach that class. With so many adjunct professors in indentured servitude, how will colleges and universities persuaded students they degrees have any measurer of worth?
10
A PhD in foreign languages, I long ago abandoned any wish for a tenure-track position. I had other skills, and while jobs related to them aren't as interesting, I will not accept adjunct wages and conditions. (Even if I wanted to, here in New York, graduate students are teaching most all lower-level courses as part of their training. These grad students are often native speakers, too.)
My doctorate is from a state university, and the competition I have with PhDs from more prestigious schools was fierce. Most all tenure-track openings are in small state universities in the American heartland, and their faculties prefer (and get) PhDs from top-tier private schools. I am still happy I got my doctorate, however. It was my dream, I took on no financial debt, and the program and its dissertation were as fulfilling -- and as difficult -- as I ever imagined.
12
The humanities, in fairness, have themselves to blame as well. When I was an undergraduate English major in the late 1980's at an elite liberal arts college, postmodernism was all the rage. The text was independent of the author. Relevant meaning in literature was sacrificed to arch and incomprehensible notions of intertextuality. Most literary criticism of the era was simply self-serving nonsense.
As students began to realize that the emperor had no clothes, postmodernism morphed into identity politics.
Now it's all about the author, and the text hardly matters. And most literary criticism is still simply self-serving nonsense.
It's too bad, because books are wonderful things. They should be approached with rigor instead of muddy agendas, and encourage both critical thinking and aesthetic appreciation instead of various forms of joyless and incoherent socio-political tribalism. No wonder students turned away.
38
As a tenured faculty in communication at a regional masters-level university of mostly first generation and adult students, the article is a bit misleading, unsubstantiated, and somewhat elitist, in my opinion.
First of all, our full-time faculty teach all of the first year classes. It is part of our mission.
Our faculty comes from R1/Tier 1 - R3-T3 schools because they believe in the teaching and students. I graduated from an R1/T2 and landed here with a reasonable teaching load, research opportunities, and significant fulfillment. My field allows me to teach across two programs. We hired 3 Tenure Track faculty this spring. We have both TT and long-term contract faculty. We are actively reducing adjunct teaching unless they are in training or work in an industry.
Our tuition is the lowest in the state. Our students can graduate debt free, go on on to top graduate schools or enter careers in a range of industries, start businesses, win awards, etc.
Where is the NYTimes story about these universities?
Are schools producing too many PhDs, likely. However, it is tiresome to hear over and over again a story of how PhDs from elite schools have to hold their nose and work at regional teaching schools, as if the work of teaching local students is somehow beneath them. It is tiresome to read once again a story about higher ed that completely ignores the significant good that is generated by regional schools.
40
I'm an ABD in English who finally gave up after years of full course-load adjuncting. Too exhausted grading papers from 5 sections of freshman writing courses each semester to do what needed to be done to finish my degree, and too demoralized by my prospects to let the process drag on forever. My first job after giving up was in a shampoo factory, 12 hour shifts, minimum wage. One day I was teaching 19-year old kids how to evaluate evidence and present a coherent argument on paper--the next my 19-year old line supervisor was screaming that our line had lost "6 precious seconds!!!" Now I drive school bus for $13k a year (roughly the same as I made as an adjunct, working much longer hours) and shake my head at the mess I've made of my life.
19
@J Ithel, if you have not already done so, see if the university where you were a grad student provides career counseling to alumni (whether or not you graduated). There are many occupations besides bus driving to which you might retool your experience. Pre-award work in research development is one of them. See NORDP and NCURA and NACRO.
4
I left my tenured faculty role for a non-academic position several years ago. In academia, I was a triple threat. I earned countless teaching awards, professional awards for my research and had funding and the ability to collaborate with some of the best in my area. Initially I felt a loss - the professional role / prestige / etc. Not anymore. I make more money now, spend less time actually working (no more weekends grading or writing research grants / manuscripts), and my quality of life is immensely higher. Academia is a racket - and I’m happier feeling that I’m not a cog making the wheels spin. Students deserve better.
26
I have a PhD in the humanities from a top 10 university (top 5 in my department) and teach as an adjunct at a community college. It's frustrating to work for one of the most progressive states in the nation and yet not receive any job security or health care.
I teach 6 courses, 3 at one college, 1 at another, and 2 at yet another. Overwhelmingly, I teach students who are first generation, ESL, working mothers and fathers, and older returning students. In other words, I'm teaching a population of students who are most representative of our state.
And yet... I make between $600-750 per course per month. Honestly, the money would be fine. It's a flexible job, and I enjoy the work. The real issue is the lack of security and lack of benefits. Give adjuncts health care, and give us a reliable work load and you'd be making major in roads to fixing the issues.
29
I’m one of the lucky one who escaped just in time. I earned a humanities master’s before switching paths to pursue an MBA instead. One year out of business school, I’m a consultant making at least 3x what I would have made as an assistant professor, and many of my humanities classmates (from a top program, no less) are struggling.
Am I happy with my choice? I accept it and am glad for the security. But I still grieve the dream I didn’t get to live. I don’t have the intellectually luxurious existence I imagined, thinking and teaching only about inherently beautiful, meaningful ideas. My deliberative temperament isn’t as well suited to business. And I don’t have a vaunted “calling”—just a job.
However, that luxurious life doesn’t really exist anymore. And it’s freeing not to feel like you are trying to outrun a bridge rapidly collapsing behind you. I am more in touch with the world and the people around me now that I have left my academic cloister. I think many PhDs would actually be relieved if they could let go of their vision of a special life of passion, set apart from the workaday economy. Except in very rare cases, that path is no longer available. With their sharp minds, there are many places outside the academy where today’s grad students could stay intellectually engaged, help others, and add enormous value to the world.
I’m just at the start of my post-academic path, and while I’m still adjusting, I see many possibilities now that I’m using a different filter.
17
My experience has been similar. I left a tenure-track teaching position in biology to join a start up software company. After that failed, I remained in IT, and had a financially successful career. I enjoyed the intellectual challenges. But now, in retrospect, I would rather have stayed in academia, immersing myself in research and writing, even if my income would have been a fraction of what I was able to make in technology. I don't regret getting a Ph.D.: the experience provided an insight into the world that business alone could not.
1
From the article: "As competition for tenure-track jobs becomes more fierce, only the graduates of top-ranked programs have a realistic chance, and even they increasingly settle for positions at less prestigious institutions that emphasize teaching and service over research."
As a tenured faculty member at a "less prestigious institution that emphasize[s] teaching and service over research" I sort of take umbrage to this comment. But no matter.
The real issue is that I am two years away from early retirement and am ready to make way for a recently-minted Ph.D. student from a top-tier graduate program who no doubt will be more than happy to land a job at a "less prestigious institution that emphasize[s] teaching and service over research."
15
Well said!!!
Meanwhile, the students are being put in debt peonage to support these institutions. Where is all that money going? My guess is to pensions for the long-time tenured faculty.
4
No - it’s filling the gap left by declining state support.
1
So Bernie is going to make college classes "free" for all and he's going to cancel student loan debts. Who is going to pay for that? College professor salaries! Problem solved because, after that, nobody's going to be a professor, university research grinds to a halt (or slows) and cancer will never be cured.
3
Teaching undergrads and intro sections is not boring - very far from it! - but it is very, very, very demanding and time consuming. What this article omits is that the academy changed from rewarding a combination of teaching and research - you know, because it was a university - to rewarding almost entirely research. Especially in STEM. That's because that research translates to intellectual property that can generate income for the university and the research-intensive profs. Universities have become the R&D arms of corporations that do not, therefore, need to employ their own researchers.
23
Education, like health care, and and the legal justice system in America are broken. The concept of Tenure is outdated and should be scrapped just like the rest of us who work in the private sector must earn our keep.
Being a PhD may have meant something at one time, but in today's job market, much of what they study and research is irrelevant. I work with PhD academics who study business and entrepreneurship who have zero work experience. Students would be much better served if they were taught by people with real world experience.
The whole system is propped up by student loans which have accumulated a trillion dollars in debt much of which will never be collected. There must be a better way to train young people with real skills that are needed in the job market.
10
I graduated college 40 years ago and this story could have been written then, Tenure came easily until about 1969, but there’s been a glut of PhDs since. Why these smart, educated people don’t learn this and continue to moan decade after decade is a complete mystery. Maybe colleges should require students to sign a statement that universities hand out far more doctorates than there are teaching jobs. Before devoting years to the pursuit, students need to understand it might be better to get a job and climb the ladder, even at Walmart which now pays managers six figures.
9
The disappearance of tenured profs is nothing, if not a good thing for American students and academia.
The University courses I took from tenure professors all too often shared common traits.
The profs were indifferent, cared not a whit about the students, and had stopped learning decades earlier.
6
I am a Caltech graduate - some 5 plus decades back.
I did one year towards my PhD - found it so boring, I bailed out.
I then spent over 4 decades - very productive and financially rewarding in the oil patch. Got me a couple of parents - one of which is still on the market and in use.
In my industry - we employ thousands of PhD to do research - on which billions are spent.
But we also say this of PhD (also derisively called Post Hole Digger) - that a PhD is inch wide and mile deep.
But we need folks who are mile wide and inch deep to get real work done.
Academia is not the only place for PhD folks.
I am surprised this article did not mention increasing number of foreign born folks who pursue PhD and then an academia position.
It's simple.
Academia has no quotas when it comes to green cards.
And while awaiting green cards, they don't demand much. One reason why academia in many colleges is dominated by folks from India and China.
8
This article is right-on in so many ways. This quote in particular struck me as true: "The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market." Yes! I graduated with a PhD in a social science in the 1990s. There were precious few jobs then, and I did not win the tenure-track lottery. I refused to be part of the adjunct army, because I saw friends who were teaching 6 courses a semester, running from campus to campus, and making $3,000 per course, with no benefits and not even an office to meet students in. Yet my former department continued to take in the same number of PhD students, turning a blind eye to the miserable job market.
Years later, I changed my focus and got an advanced degree in a field that is still hiring full-time teachers, but I am again not on the tenure track. Given what I know about the politics of academia, I am grateful for my full-time position, and OK with not having to deal (much) with the tenured faculty researchers who look down their noses at those who "merely" teach.
The whole system stinks. And parents and students should start questioning colleges that tout their "world class" faculty. Ask how many of those faculty actually teach, and how much they teach.
9
I earned a Ph.D. and am able to use it as a psychologist in private practice. I knew early on that academia would be a horrible place for me and I am even more glad now that I did not go that route.
I feel fortunate that I am able to be my own boss. The only bureaucracy I have to deal with is the insurance companies, and they are terrible in their own way, but overall I have more freedom than I would in academia.
3
I'm surprised this article didn't mention all of the recent college closures. Here in Portland, two private colleges have recently closed, throwing thousands of people out of work.
10
I retired from a mid western university a few years ago, my sense is that internal faculty dynamics and major universities have not changed much (publishing as status and dominance of humanities faculty); in external contexts there is expansion in optional instructional modalities and types of undergraduate programs. Community colleges and innovative four year colleges have develop pipelines to high schools' early enrollment initiatives. Even in large universities changes reflect a dilution on the hiring of tenured professors. Meanwhile universities continue to court grad teaching assistants in spite of the thin job market for their graduates. I have known numerous masters students that subsequently enrolled in a technical program or state-based certification programs such as corrections or nursing assistant etc. Labor market trends show jobs that do not require an undergrad or graduate degree. It is doubtful that the major universities with collective bargaining will be the innovators in the future. It will be addressed by the two year and technical schools. So the intellectual divide will be on the one hand pie in the sky and on the other hand practical skills development.
3
NYU will be charging $66,000 per year next year for tuition. That makes me want to gag. Liberal academia is just one more sacred institution that's gone corporate, with bottom line figures being pretty much the only important factor. Much like hospitals, and much of the medical establishment. Much like megachurches.
6
Back in the 70's and 80's the job market wasn't so hot. We have lost a couple generations of scholars. Back in the late 70's the running joke was "Treat that waitress/waiter with respect, they have a Ph.D. in French lieratue".
5
C'mon, New York Times. One or two of your crack reporters needs to spend some time looking into the explosion (make that nuclear explosion) of administrative staff that has occurred over the last 30 years. That has hurt higher education as much as any other factor.
23
Colleges went corporate with manicured lawns, fancy dorms, food courts, super sport facilities- should have listed them first. Mea culpa. At the same time administrative staffs doubled and tripled with new office buildings and usually the Old Main as the seat of presidential power.
In the meantime departments were shrinking and students were increasingly taught by grad assistants. That wasn’t all bad because young teachers were innovative and open to new ideas and much more engaged than senior faculty who had either been damaged in the battle for tenure or at just gotten old. Forty-year old literature was still being used as primary sources.
So how to revise the system? The department system silos information and closes minds. Senior faculty should not be choosing the next generation of scholars. Too often they look for clones of themselves.
The future continues to invent itself. Somehow a largely medieval system continues to work.
11
Observations from many years in higher education:
Just as everything else has been financialized, so too has education. Extract the most value for the least cost. A glut of Phd's lowers the cost of PhD's. Adjunct's are in the same boat as the Uber drivers in the taxi business.
Around 1970, business got the big idea it could extract more value by sharing less with employees, using raises that were less than inflation to sneakily reduce wages. The business magazines (and now blogs) have been touting ways to extract more value from employees ever since. It's now reached the point where everything is dysfunctional, there is never enough money or people to tackle problems so the problems grow while there are ever more ways to cut corners and extract value from people. It's a race to the bottom, and it will end badly.
Grad students are often literally treated as slaves. They are expected to already be expert and able to learn on their own, so they are simply used as cheap intellectual labor. The only thing their advisors teach them is how to gather kudo's from their work to enhance the advisors reputation. Tackling big problems is discouraged, it takes too long to enhance the advisors reputation. How to get the most out of your grad's?
It's a crime that there is so much need for problem solving today and the training of people to solve problems has been so perverted. There are no jobs for PhD's and hence no value to a PhD? What a travesty!
2
Job creation issues are paramount. There are too many monopolies damping opportunity, externalizing cost, and excerbating inequality. This bipolar world results from 25 years of outsourcing the middle. Bloomberg was wise to suggest that not all corporation are equivalent nor should they be taxed in that fashion. The smaller businesses need incentives. Russia had a lot of Taxi driver PhD's too, we just got there differently.
2
Teach overseas.
I did that.
Unfortunately, overseas too much of education is a farce. A Bachelors is more like a high school diploma. And 'private' colleges are often for rich kids who didn't pass the government's college entrance exams. That's teacher's hell in Oman and Turkey.
4
This is one of the main reasons I left my PhD program before completing my dissertation. I entered the program straight from undergrad, and none of my professors ever indicated it was anything other than a brilliant choice. I come from a family with a lot of people working in higher ed, and none of them warned me either. The reality of the PhD program was hell on my mental health, and watching cohorts before me face abysmal job odds was demoralizing. Of the cohort I would have graduated with (11 students) only two are even still working in the field five years after graduation, and they are eking out a living on very temporary adjunct or postdoc positions. I love the school environment and learning and would love to go back to do another masters, but only if I could ever afford to do it with no expectations.
7
I have a STEM PhD from an ivy-league school. I left academia and sold out to Wall street because there were no post-doctoral positions or jobs that could provide me healthcare and the means to afford having a roof over my head. I walked away convinced that graduate school is just a big Ponzi scheme, especially in the life sciences...Graduate students and post-docs are cheap labor for both class-teaching and conducting biomedical research (which can be very labor intensive) that their [usually old, tenured] thesis advisor will get credit for.
Just like so many other experiences in Millennial life, I feel like grad school and the false-promises of academia is just another way the old have screwed over the young for their benefit.
24
In general agreement except for this statement , "that makes it cheaper for universities to hire them to teach classes and free up time for tenured researchers to do what they enjoy: conduct research."
That reveals an author who assumes that all public universities are like top level private and state universities (a common ignorance I am deeply tired of). The pressures at smaller universities on tenured faculty are different and often result in higher teaching loads, even as adjuncts are hired to fill in the gaps.
4
I was in NYC in 2008 getting a Ph.D. when I saw the writing on the wall: tenured profs not retiring, schools only hiring adjuncts, and only freshly-minted Ph.D.s from Harvard et al getting the good jobs.
So I left and struck out into the wilderness.
While it looked like I was crazy at the time - my family and friends all thought I was since this was my dream - it was THIS trend that I was painfully aware of, and I did not want to wait around to be stranded when the tide finally went all the way out. Looks like it has and it's worse than I thought it would be.
I now teach high school and feel very lucky to be teaching in conditions which, by just about every measure except "prestige", are far, far better than I would have likely had in academia.
This is no accident: I am here in no small part because I know the same thing won't happen to public K12 schools...I think it has something to do with the stringent credentialing requirements public school teachers go through, as well as the unions teachers have in place to protect them and their jobs...things conspicuously missing in the adjunct life.
I'm still keeping an eye on my cheese though; my time in academia taught me never to trust that the institution has my best interests in mind.
11
This article rings true from my recent experiences evaluating a Ph.D. in astrophysics. While I decided to go into industry, the most helpful advice I got was: become an expert in a widely-used tool or process (it increases your marketability), and pursue this route if getting the Ph.D. alone is worth it to you.
Let's put an end to the prevailing "if you are smart enough and want it bad enough, you can get a tenure-track position." Everyone wants it bad enough, there simply aren't enough positions/dollars to go around.
9
As a PhD, I have never desired or sought an academic position; I presently work at a senior-level position with the Government of Canada - and you know what, I am surrounded by PhDs. The modern public service of today requires talent - so opportunities are there, just not in academia . . .
12
I'm not a PhD but work intensely alongside over a few decades in life science. I've known academics that benefit from grant work and salary who invested wisely and are multi-millionaires. There are enormous agency bias in favor of SBIR grants going to PhD's and provide enterprise opportunity in an (exclusive) science "club". Unfortunately, innovation, invention and enterprise are not a major aspect of many PhD programs, per se. Life science PhD's would benefit if an invention submission course was an optional aspect of the education course work. Life Science PhD's candidates need to be more involved in innovation and invention early in their studies and laboratory efforts. Essentially, scientist are most happy inventing (if they learn to think like an inventor) and then they worry less about salary or tenure or classroom teaching.
2
I agree with Sanders. Universities have gotten away with blatant exploitation for too long - it is time to examine “the way universities conduct their academic business” and force changes.
15
It’s simple arithmetic that very few PhDs will get jobs as college professors. The supply of new PhDs vastly outstrips new college teaching jobs plus retirements. That’s why, for example, many PhDs in chemistry or biochemistry become venture capitalists or patent attorneys.
11
When I was in college, many profs tried to get me to join their ranks in academia. I am grateful to two profs who were real with me. One adjunct told me that my tendency to mentor others would be best suited for schoolteaching as academia was no longer emphasizing teaching ability for researchers. A tenured prof later told me that his time before being tenured was highly stressful as he could not speak his mind; as someone who often speaks her mind, this piece of information was crucial. Still, other profs were convinced I should go into academia: they told me I'd get "bored" as a schoolteacher, and that I was too intellectual for the job. I notice hierarchies very quickly, and I saw the divide between "teachers" and "researchers" (I felt it would be best to be both as a prof, but researching ability seems to be what gets universities money) and I had excellent adjuncts whose teaching inspired many of us to become teachers. When I applied to and eventually landed at Yale for graduate school, my intention was to be a schoolteacher. Again, profs tried to convince me to go into academia. By then, I knew the reality. And seeing PhD friends at Yale struggle to secure work only cemented my sense that I had made the right decision. I absolutely love being a middle school teacher despite the difficult conditions for an introvert. I craft my own courses at a unique private school. I am never bored.
18
In the 1930s and 1940s, many PHDs taught public high school in places like NYC. This generation of students would propel the civil rights movement, achieve a “great compression” in wage equality, fly to the moon, attend college in significant numbers, and make other once-great feats.
Tenure track is not the end-all be-all for PHDs.
14
When I was a college student, many of my profs tried to get me to join their ranks in academia. I am so thankful to two professors who planted some seeds that helped steer me away from the ivory tower. One was an adjunct. He told me that my tendency to mentor others would be best suited for schoolteaching as academia was no longer emphasizing teaching ability for researchers. A tenured prof later told me that his time before being tenured was highly stressful as he could not speak his mind; as someone who often speaks her mind, this piece of information was crucial. Still, other profs were convinced I should go into academia: they told me I'd get "bored" as a schoolteacher, and that I was too intellectual for the job. I notice hierarchies very quickly, and I saw the divide between "teachers" and "researchers" (I felt it would be best to be both as a prof, but researching ability seems to be what gets universities money) and I had excellent adjuncts whose teaching inspired many of us to become teachers. When I applied to and eventually landed at Yale for graduate school, my intention was to be a schoolteacher. Again, profs tried to convince me to go into academia. By then, I knew the reality. And seeing friends at Yale struggle to secure work only cemented my sense that I had made the right decision. I absolutely love being a middle school teacher despite the difficult conditions for an introvert. I craft my own courses at a unique private school.
3
When I was a college student, many of my profs tried to get me to join their ranks in academia. I am so thankful to two professors who planted some seeds that helped steer me away from the ivory tower. One was an adjunct. He told me that my tendency to mentor others would be best suited for schoolteaching as academia was no longer emphasizing teaching ability for researchers. A tenured prof later told me that his time before being tenured was highly stressful as he could not speak his mind; as someone who often speaks her mind, this piece of information was crucial. Still, other profs were convinced I should go into academia: they told me I'd get "bored" as a schoolteacher, and that I was too intellectual for the job. I notice hierarchies very quickly, and I saw the divide between "teachers" and "researchers" (I felt it would be best to be both as a prof, but researching ability seems to be what gets universities money) and I had excellent adjuncts whose teaching inspired many of us to become teachers. When I applied to and eventually landed at Yale for graduate school, my intention was to be a schoolteacher. Again, profs tried to convince me to go into academia. By then, I knew the reality. And seeing friends at Yale struggle to secure work only cemented my sense that I had made the right decision. I absolutely love being a middle school teacher despite the difficult conditions for an introvert. I craft my own courses at a unique private school.
1
My husband is tenure track in science in a top university in Canada. I work at a non profit. Before he gained tenure, in his early 40s, he was a post-doc for many years at two college in the US, where he did research and published, trained graduate students to do research, and obtained grants to pay for his own and others' work. He was very low paid so I was the breadwinner until he reached tenure. I had no graduate school in my field and my entry level job at a non profit had a higher salary than his post-doctoral researcher wages - and this is after the PhD from UC Berkeley that took 7 years to obtain. Today in his tenure position, he laments the admin bloat so many people here have talked about, and his value and salary increases are absolutely equated to how much he publishes, while he is not valued for teaching the classes he is passionate about, classes that open minds, classes where I have seen 300 students give him a standing ovation because he just rocked their world.
30
Good analysis but, the author does not mention how federal,state, and local governments have eviscerated the “public” in public education. If you take away tax dollars from a university’s operating budget, then the university has to operate like a private company/university but, can’t charge private university prices. This one basic fact must be included when discussing the plight of higher education post recession.
17
So just to make sure I understand...we want to reduce the insanely high (and inflating) cost of higher education by making Universities hire a lot of people that they can never fire as demographic trends are reducing the number of students (demand). And this increased cost will be paid for by taxpayers in order to ensure that getting a humanities PhD is free so that more people will seek humanities PhDs because it’s more attractive than graduating and getting a job, plus they are being promised tenure at the end. This will require schools to hire more PhDs that can’t be fired, further increasing costs, which are covered by the taxpayer...
This is insanity. And may explain why the Sanders family has a penchant for bankrupting institutions of higher education. There’s a much more effective solution- don’t get a PhD in something that nobody will hire you for unless you have either a) a passion for making $5 cappuccinos, or b) a trust fund.
Perhaps if Sanders and this author had taken the time to get PhDs in economics, they would understand the folly and flawed logic of policies that promise to bury our valued institutions in the rubble of unintended consequences.
11
Plus ca change....
In 1972, 48 years ago, I graduated from an Ivy school with a doctorate in research psychology. I took the maximum allowed 7 years to complete the degree because I enjoyed, and learned a great deal from, working with tenured professors as their research assistant and teaching fellow. I even worked with some of the profs on their outside consulting gigs, which most of them had in addition to their very well paid teaching posts.
In 1972 there were not many tenure-track positions available at the better schools, so only a few of my classmates went into academia; most of us chose non-university jobs that proved personally satisfying as well as more remunerative than tenured professorships.
I never received job counseling per se from my graduate-school mentors; working for and observing them was guidance enough, though they were generous in pointing out opportunities.
Today, with the overwhelming reliance on adjunct faculty in higher education it seems that job counseling should begin at year one of doctoral programs. Someone needs to tell the students that some subject areas are not in high demand, and that competition for tenure-track positions will only get worse.
And job counseling needs to include conveying the critical concept that doctorates in many—but not all—subject areas can lead to well-paid and rewarding careers outside the university.
8
Another factor is the rankings; colleges and universities are ranked higher and have more category options if they offer advanced degrees. Thus some small-to-medium schools, especially those that are tuition-dependent, offer graduate programs and steer students toward them. The rationale is that better rankings will attract more prospective students from a dwindling pool of high school graduates, and more programs will bring in additional tuition.
7
The crisis of the academic job market is not only in the humanities. Adjuncts and lecturers teach in the sciences, communication programs, etc. It's a mistake to see this as solely a humanities issue. Also, graduate students at UCSC are organizing for a COLA (cost of living adjustment), which is subtly different than "higher pay." They literally cannot afford to live in the town where the university is located. UCSC's treatment of its graduate workers is reprehensible and will have devastating effects on that campus.
13
Having a surplus of highly educated people, who cannot apply their skills appropriately, costs society a lot. Both public and even private Universities depend greatly on societies surplus including tax breaks, tax breaks for their endowments, direct subsidies, grants, etc.
Highly educated people may have loved their education, which is great. A big question is: if a highly educated person cannot apply their skills, might they and society be better off if they were steered to an area where they will prosper?
If these folks prosper, this seems to indicate they are contributing well?
3
As I understand it, another component was the vast increase in the number of administrators--and well paid ones at that.
The money for them came from cutting the money for full time /reasonably paid faculty.
15
To an English major (Class of '76) like me there is not just artistic but social value in; e.g., comparing the Paris' of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Miller, or the Heroines of Howard's End and The Age of Innocence; the disheveled imagery of Under the Volcano with that of Steinbeck's works; or the puzzles of Ulysses or Pale Fire. No one thinks such of any value today. I guessing that in the 22nd Century how people think today will be measures by Netflix fare.
8
@Paul Kramer Oh what fun!! I am going to check if these kinds of classes are offered on Coursera!
I'm a Berkeley Humanities PhD who taught as an adjunct for 20 years. Increasing tuition at universities and four-year colleges began long before the 2008 recession occurred, at least by the 1980's. And exploitation of adjunct faculty also began long before then. Most starting adjuncts are former graduate students at the same institution. The take the job for experience and hoping they will eventually get a full-time academic job with benefits. But for decades the supply has been way more than demand.
Meanwhile, many tenured faculty literally die or lapse into senility before they retire. The thought that they are blocking entrance to the profession by their own students does not seem to occur to them, despite the availability of emeritus opportunities to teach a reduced schedule and get a life.
As for university/college administrators (I'm not talking staff), the many I have known are the kind that give advanced degrees and MBA's a bad name. There's something about working on a college campus that causes administrators to think they are superior to mere mortals.
27
When I decided to change careers and leave publishing over 10 years ago, I had two options I was drawn to: 1. Academia, I am an intellectual by nature and 2: Medicine, I have had a life long interest in medicine, but had deferred due to length of training. The decision wasn't hard. If you look at the two professions, Academia was back then clearly a mess and it's only become worse. Medicine has some control over the number of MDs produced so quality is more assured and jobs are available. The PhD world has nothing similar, PhDs are pumped out and the quality varies enormously. There are far more PhDs produced than there are jobs (especially non-STEM PhDs). Someone really needs to get a handle on this or it is going to destroy one of the cornerstones of the US economy and culture.
8
Back in the late 80s and early 90s we had a PhD anthropologist as our house cleaner in Boulder, CO. Cleaning houses paid better over the long run than adjunct jobs. It was a long struggle to get a tenure track job, but she is now a dean of students at a university. My daughter in law is currently trying to find a tenure track job in one of the critical sciences. She has been working as a post-doc for 5 years now. Meanwhile, the proportion of administrative expenses to teaching faculty expenses continues to escalate.
13
As many of these comments suggest, the crisis facing the humanities cannot be explained only in economistic terms of supply and demand. It’s reflects a devaluing of anything that does not serve an immediate, instrumental purpose.
37
@PhD Surivor
Which basically means devaluing anything that serves a long term instrumental purpose.
And nothing is more irrational and immoral than that.
1
I think a marketplace evaluation is a critical component before committing oneself (and one's finances) to an academic field of study. I understand how that could be challenging in today's emerging world, and not everyone has the aptitude for becoming an AI engineer or a biomedical researcher.
I occasionally tease my wife about her MFA degree, asking 'what did you envision you would be doing for a living' AKA, who'd pay you to do that?
5
There doesn't seem to be a problem finding incredible salaries for football and basketball coaches. My amazement at the priorities established by our leaders is exceeded, however, by my amazement at the tolerance of such leadership by the American taxpayer. Was it Pogo that used the line about meeting the enemy and it is us?
23
I think part of the world view of the tenured faculty running these doctoral programs, is the belief that "What we do here is sacred. We do not sully our hands, or our minds, with considerations of mere lucre."
Graduate students come along and embrace the myth, hoping to similarly elevate their lives above workaday economic struggles, thereby falling prey to the very strife they were seeking to avoid.
13
There are far more people with PhDs than society needs. People with PhDs need to understand this; most of them need to find real jobs. The search committee I just sat on had 120 applicants for one tenure track position -- that's in Chemical Engineering, where they could make twice as much in industry.
The primary product of universities is graduates, not research. Most research is only read by other academics. Yes there is value in research, but we have thrown so much money at it that we're seeing diminishing returns, and far too many PhDs.
Stop giving professors tenure. Expect them to teach, and evaluate them on their teaching. Push out the least capable.
15
@Tom Meadowcroft
In that case, how exactly do you define "society's needs" ... ?
Would you argue that when it comes to chemical engineering, what our society needs is to NOT do all the scientific research that would be possible if all qualified PhDs would have a job in academics ... ?
If yes, what would your arguments be? In other words, why would you want to slow down scientific progress ... ?
The most important contributor to the dismal state of academia gets hardly a mention here: bloated administrations.
Administrators are ruining the American educational system.
As colleges hire more and more contingent faculty at bargain-basement prices, they are hiring more and more administrators at obscene salaries. Look at two figures—the decrease in full-time faculty hires and the increase in administrative hires over the last three decades—and all the other hogwash about "giving out too many PhDs" (please) melts into thin air.
For anyone who has done something useful for a university (study, teach, or work in maintenance), the absurdity of college administrations is obvious. One meeting after another, one "council" after another, a new "plan," a "vision," a "strategy," an "initiative"—none of it is of any value, all of it is extremely expensive, and it is buttressed by layers upon layers of assistants and assistants' assistants who do nothing but "manage workflow." (Who does the real work? The work-study students.)
When colleges get wise to how administrations are wasting students' tuition dollars, and when colleges start to care about students' tuition dollars, there will be plenty of means to hire the full-time faculty that are solely needed.
41
There's one winner in all this: undergraduate students. Even the most inexpensive community colleges now boast extremely qualified teachers. Those professors may be unhappy, but they're giving the youngest millennials from working class families a very fine education.
14
@Betsey You're assuming that doctoral credentials from a top-rated school automatically make the recipients "extremely qualified teachers." In reality, they're qualified researchers in a very narrow subset of their area of study for whom teaching often is a chore they resent. Community colleges would be better off hiring experienced secondary school teachers with proven classroom skills than recent graduates from "prestgious" programs who would rather be somewhere else.
3
@Betsey Made me think of Paul Krugman, who is teaching at CUNY now. But he is not one of those unhappy ones.
“Forever tenure” is a serious problem. My youngest son is in a PhD program now at the university where I received my undergraduate degree. Forty years after I graduated, he had the same two, lousy professors I had for the same subjects. The only difference now is that they are in their eighties and probably functioning at a lower level. They should have retired years ago. Aging faculty like these are almost certainly dragging down the kind of creative research and teaching that a healthy academic system needs.
15
@RN
Ageism is certainly not the solution here.
Many academic teachers are truly exceptional precisely because they have decades of experience.
Oddly, I took a JD program with a focus on business and finance, then a late in life night school MBA program, again focusing on finance.
I work regular hours, get paid OK and have a pension. I’m not in banking and not making mad dough but my education is still relevant to my industry (insurance) and I’ve been consistently employed for 20 years.
Funny how that happened.
4
This a good overview of the academic job market over the last decades, but it's missing a key element: administrative bloat.
While it is true that the the percentage of tenured faculty has been diminishing over the year, the proportion of non-academic staff and administrators had ballooned. Not only are their numbers through the roof, their salaries tend to be indexed differently than those of academics. The highest paid employees of a university tend to be the football coach and the president. At my institution, of the 20 highest compensated employees in 2016 (information publicly available via IRS form 990), only 3 are faculty (and they are the lowest of those 20).
In essence, what has happened over the last few decades is "administrator-capture" of higher ed. As more students flooded the system, administrators hired low-cost contingent faculty to educate them, and used the excess cash to hire more of themselves and pay themselves more. The rest of the money was used on funding quality-of-life amenities for students and alumni (e.g. lazy rivers, stadiums, etc.).
It would be fascinating to compare relative salaries and admin budgets for higher ed in the 1970s versus today. If we classify non-academic salaries and expenses as "overhead", I think we'd see that line item go from about 20% of the budget to more than 50%!
19
The general public has the mistaken impression, based on the burgeoning growth in post-secondary institutions that existed after the Second World War, that universities are ivory towers, insulated from the vagaries of "real life". But, as this article demonstrates, academia today is, in fact, subject to even more cut throat competition than business, despite all those newly created business graduates!
5
At the university where I spent most of my career, the "administration building" housed the deans and the president. The rest of the building was classrooms. No more. Year by year, the classrooms became homes to assistant to assistant administrators. Then they took over the old science building for administration. It seems that administrators love increasing the overhead in colleges. Every secretary demands an assistant secretary.
24
@George
And this level of administration explains the dramatic increase in the cost of a college degree in recent years.
2
@George "Every secretary demands an assistant secretary." With respect, my experience was that professors also wanted secretaries, and in many cases were given them. The desire was not to do administrative tasks that many are burdened with in nonacademic managerial jobs, and not to teach lower-level courses such as composition -- these were taught by nontenured contract hires.
I object to the way this article portrayed the responsibility of universities to provide both the training and the job for their students, and not distinguishing the very different roles of tenured vs adjunct faculty.
The primary job of tenured professors is to do research, not teach. That research is paid for by grant money that isn't increasing at the rate of enrollment, so there's no option to just hire more tenured professors. Adjunct professors' job is purely to instruct students, and therefore is the natural place to expand positions when balancing the need to increase educational opportunities to more students while research budgets remain static. The salary and benefits offered to adjuncts is a much more meaningful debate...
Unfortunately, there are too many people who don't want to leave academia out of fear of missing the professor job they imagined on entering grad school. These people become adjuncts in some fields, and eternal post-docs in others (8+ years of post-doc isn't uncommon in my field anymore).
It's ultimately the student's responsibility to understand the job market for their degree and the cost/benefit of delaying entry into the job market while earning the degree. PhDs train you to think and research, which is highly transferable both within and outside your field of study.
All my friends and classmates who pursued industry careers are happily employed and well compensated. The ones who stayed in academia, not so much.
9
Supply and demand are frequently out of balance for Ph.D.’s, because the social, political, and financial conditions when you start down that road are likely to be radically different by the time you finish. It was the same story in the 1970’s. Many of us ended up in very different careers. It was not unusual for each suitable job opening to have 400-500 well-qualified applicants with a recent Ph.D., so we had to find or create a career on the fly. However, in those days we didn’t have huge debts from student loans!
10
What about all the insanely overpaid coaches and assistant coaches of not only football and basketball, but fencing, volleyball, swimming, etc. etc. etc.? The athletic budgets at many colleges and universities, including athletic scholarships for "student athletes," would fund many tenure positions in academic fields. The highest paid public official in many states is the state university football coach.
16
Their salaries come from earmarked booster money
Can you say baby boomer professors who won't retire?
5
Perhaps the best solution is to decrease the time it takes to complete a phd and make it easier for humanities phds to transition into other careers
4
@Cole
As a PhD student in the history of philosophy, I can only say that a 3-4 year PhD is ridiculously short, IF you want to obtain some solid scientific results.
In the 17th century, philosophers worked for decades on their next book.
To imagine that you can discover something serious in 2 instead of 4 years, is as irrational as it is absurd ...
6
@Cole How to make it easier for humanities phds to transition into other careers? whose job might this be?
Two grad degrees and I've been adjunct in both education and higher education for the past 20 years. And yes, I apply for jobs in other fields.
In education, you work literally 1-2 hours less per week than what would get you benefits like health insurance. Pay for support staff is around $10-$14/hr. The assistant superintendent of human resources is my age, has one graduate degree, and makes in two months what I make in a year.
In higher ed, I was paid one sixth what a full time professor earned for teaching the exact same classes. 2 grand a class when 4 classes is a full teaching load means you just might come in below the 16k limit for a single person to qualify for Medicaid in this great state of Michigan.
"Ghastly" is the word that comes to mind.
Help?
14
This is nothing new and has been going on for at least 35 years. I will give you my own experience. I received an NSF Fellowship in 1970 to postdoc in a Nobel Price winner’s research lab. Of the 10 postdocs I was the only American, the others from Japan, Thailand, Germany, France, England, etc. My compensation was $6000, the others received 14-17K from their governments. All returned home and became productive and prestigious scientists in their respective countries. Nothing wrong with that. It was also some of the best times in my life knowing and interacting with these people. I still keep in touch with all of them. When I finished 10 years later and started looking for a job I was unsuccessful in getting a tenure track job. I was forced to take a soft money job in which your salary, benefits, etc. had to come from your grant.. Stability was a problem and there were times with no salary. But I persisted since I was not married and had no children. After 29 years I totaled my accomplishments. I had published some 150 research papers, in hindsight some important, others not so much. My total compensation for my 29 years was $635,000 before taxes. Was I disappointed? Absolutely not, going to an interesting job everyday made me a lucky individual. The only bad point was trying to get grant money. I write this to let other PhD’s know to be flexible, hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Serendipity will play a part in your success.
9
The article makes this sound like a millennial problem. It's not -- it's an old story, one reflecting the decades-long intellectual dishonesty of a college-industrial-establishment that thinks cranking out unemployable PhDs is a good thing.
I left grad school ABD in history in 1970. At that time there were 50 qualified PhD applicants for every opening in my field. Since I had attended a second tier private university, my chances of ever teaching at a decent school were nil. Further, my existing masters degree scared off a lot of non-academic employers who figured I'd just be hanging out till I found something better. I discovered adding PhD to my name, would be an employment disaster outside academia. So I walked from my PhD candidacy, and from teaching history. Ultimately I went into a profession, and entered academia though the back door, as a lifelong adjunct getting paid a fraction of what professors made teaching the same stuff.
So, the issues described in this article are an old story, not one made for millennials. That this continues after so long reflects on the poor ethics of grad school academia.
11
I’d like to put in a word for the faculty poached from one institution to another by rock-star salaries and celebrity status. This is to attract research grants from which these institutions take handsome cuts for overhead (electricity, heat, letterhead cachet) as well as tuition-paying wannabe-academics. One such headliner at a Big Ten university I know was given not one but three offices in the several departments wanting a piece of the action by claiming this person as one of their faculty. It’s not just administrative bloat.
6
A long overdue piece about our poverty stricken Ph.D's, one of which is our daughter. A scholarship athlete by the way as well. Having earned her Ph.D. in 2017 in Social Psychology, she surpported herself teaching as an adjunct for poverty wages. With no full time tenure track opportunities in sight, she is now over $300,000.00 in debt and is earning money as a Post Doc and consultant to non-profits. Which means she is constantly working and getting nowhere in terms of paying off her loan. Along with the rest of her generation, she is trapped in quicksand. Oh, by the way, my husband and I also can't retire because, we "foolishly" helped our daughter achieve a Ph.D. and depleted our retirement fund. We're in our 70's. So, my question to our country is, don't we can't professionals in our society any more. No more professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists? No more investment in human capital?
12
@Marjorie
Plenty of doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists. Your daughter doesn't qualify for any of those. Yes, it was foolish to support extended education in an overcrowded field with minimal monetary prospects. Follow your passions, the money will follow, is extremely destructive advice. I am sorry this happened to your family.
1
@Marjorie
I don't mean to sound harsh, but....
What the heck was your daughter thinking when she took on $300k of debt to get a Ph.D? There is no way that math works. Even if she took on that amount of debt to get a JD or MBA, it is still almost impossible for that investment to pencil out.
You asked, "[D]on't we can't professionals in our society any more?" Yes, but we already have more than plenty, as shown by the PhD. market described in the article. Don't they teach supply and demand to freshmen anymore?
1
Honestly, my perspective as a permanent adjunct is that requiring 75% of faculty to be tenure-track is a move in the wrong direction. Tenure is part of the problem! Tenured profs consume an outsize share of resources with their many perks, and there is little incentive for them to actually do a good job in the classroom. All of this is paid for with adjuncts cheap labor.
Meanwhile, in my union full-timers dominate the process and continue to vote through contracts that do not meet our needs. Then they put degrading "spin" on the result and tell us how they've come through for us.
So, I say let's hasten their extinction. When the workforce is 100% adjunct colleges will have to pay a better wage and treat us with respect. And they'll be able to deliver quality classes for less money!
7
Agree that tenure is the fundamental problem. Who leaves a job where they dare not fire you even if you just mail it in. Give professors 10 year contracts. Say what you want. Do what you will. Keep current and active or be gone when your time is up.
NB
The moment of clarity should have come when I learnt that my teaching assistant's pay was higher than mine. Or, when they rejiggered what defined a full-time load, in order to deny us (adjuncts) health insurance. Only when I physically collapsed in the middle of a lecture did I realize that not only could I no longer do the work I loved so dearly, but that the conditions under which I had been doing it had left me ill, impoverished, and emotionally spent.
The shadow jobs connected to higher ed (mostly in academic text book publishing and standardized test development) that I used to get by, are just as exploitative.
6
My cousin has a humanities Ph.D. She loves her job teaching high school. Just a question of expectations really.
3
I agree completely. I earned a Ph.D. In French decades ago and, after a frustrating job search complicated by being half of a dual-Ph.D. couple, I knew I wanted nothing to do with being adjunct faculty and its associated lack of dignity. To my graduate professors’ great horror, I got my teaching license, found full-time, tenure track work easily, enjoyed my summers and snow days, and never looked back. Frankly, the pay was better than what my graduate school classmates in academia ended up making.
Last year, I offered to give a talk at my alma mater on a panel for “academic adjacent” jobs for all the clinically depressed soon-to-be job seekers, but the department chair politely declined with a condescending “we recommend that path to our undergraduates.”
6
This is why we need a social safety net: universal healthcare, universal basic income, etc.
No one can predict how various social, economic, political trends will coalesce to affect people's livelihoods.
9
@Alex
Or, I suppose, we need people with some sense of what degrees will allow them to earn a living.
I do not understand why Anti-Trust Indictments have
not been served against the Colleges for it is utterly obvious
that most of them pay Adjuncts the same miserable rate and
their Graduate Students around the same across the nation.
I had a friend who taught a section of Ethics to 40 Juniors
for $ 4,000, a course that cost each student $ 3,000.
So the University received $ 120,000 and paid him $ 4,000.
Meanwhile a Tenured Professor was paid $ 20,000 for teacher
a section of Ethics.
The Adjunct had a course rating of 6.4/7
The tenured professor had a course rating of 5.1/7
The College enrolls only Undergraduates.
Why is that not seen as manifestly unfair ?
Why is the miserable pay not seen as a product of collusion ?
10
@John Brown
Every night at 8pm, I put on a puppet show in my garage. My show takes the audience (one of my two dogs, and sometimes a passing UPS or Amazon delivery guy) through the absurdities of modern life, with an overlay of modern political theory and be-bop era jazz.
But nobody pays me for my show. Meanwhile, the Kardashians rake in billions. And even the worst TV drama pays its performers hundreds of thousands of dollars per performance.
This is obviously manifestly unfair to me, and likely the product of collusion. I was of course thinking about getting the DOJ involved, or possibly suing the networks and HBO. But then it occured to me: maybe its just a lousy puppet show that nobody wants to watch.
It is in part due to 70 and 80 year old tenured professors who won’t quit, won’t retire. That’s epidemic in the academic world. Tenure needs to incorporate a mandatory 70 year old retirement age.
7
We all need more public discourse and discussion about the state of faculty at institutions of higher learning. Kudos!!
Like many of the other writers, I am a tenured faculty member in a small college having earned a Ph.D. at a top research university. Our curriculum is technically based in the liberal arts but mostly we train students in accredited majors like nursing and social work. It is not a prestigious institution by any one's standards but I love it. I have researched, taught and published in many places, including international institutions. I love working directly with students.
Even though my training is in humanities, I would have happily worked in industry or other sector outside of higher education, but I did not find friendly faces. I was told several times that they were afraid to hire someone with so much education.
Now that I see how higher education is evolving in the US, I am beginning to think that, like their counterparts in industry, college administrators would prefer to hire more administrators and not more academics.
8
In recent decades tenure-track positions seem to have been on a precarious [downward] journey. It was only a matter of time before it fell to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Post-secondary institutions found a way to maximize profits while whittling down their expenses. During the late 70s when I was in school [at a major public university] TA’s were already instructing approximately 80% of the undergraduate courses. We really only saw the big-name professors for maybe one or two lectures. Since these were hard-core science courses, I assumed they were busy doing long-term grant research projects or engaged in other important endeavors.
5
I really believe a lot of this could be avoided by not looking to professors for career advice. They exist in academia, they are invested in academia. They inherently produce more people looking to be academics. What professor would tell a passionate student to NOT pursue a masters? And once you're in the masters program, you feel stuck on the train.
I don't expect professors to be savvy about business or other viable professions. Students just need to know to look outside the faculty for advice on what to do after school.
It's especially tragic when first generation students get caught up in this. They by and large especially can't afford to become failed academics.
12
All I can say is if you are studying the humanities in graduate school, don't rack up a lot of loans. I spent 3 years in graduate school and did not get a degree but got a wonderful education, which I had not gotten in college. Then I went into a totally different field having nothing to do with the humanities and did just fine.
8
This was a very helpful article covering economics and a labor system (not market)where we spend enormous amounts of money with little oversight or understanding. No mother wants to stand at a party and announce that yes, finally, her daughter had gained a Ph.D., but hasn't a hope of landing a job!
Growing up in academia, I closely followed the disciplines and standards necessary for a Ph.D. In my immediate family were a couple of doctorates in science. The standard requirements of a candidate in the late '60s meant the ability to converse or answer oral questions on the thesis in two foreign languages. I loaned out my French books to numbers of candidates. There were calls to locate German textbooks, as well. My surprise came when in 2013 I learned from my young family friends that the language requirement was mostly abandoned. Not only had standards been abandoned, but the numbers of candidates increased, particularly in the area of education. There it was: teachers teaching English no longer majored in English Literature but Education. The market was flooded. To this day, I ask the date of a doctorate. Parents should look for smaller colleges and universities who have Ph.D.s teaching students.
5
Much has been made of the need for students to pursue degrees in a STEM field or a field that will be sure to offer a decent job. People who study history or earn an English degree are typically ridiculed as having made a bad career choice.
I do not know what the optimal number of PhD s might be in any given field. It is not reasonable to expect the market to make that determination because in the 6-8 years needed to earn that degree a lot will change. You need to be able to predict the future to make the right choice.
But, I object to the idea that STEM degrees are the most valuable. I have had a long career as an academic scientist. What has impressed me with many of the younger students I see is that they cannot express their thoughts coherently, and they have no understanding of - or maybe interest in - how different ideas have developed through history. This disconnect diminishes STEM fields. The humanities do more than enrich our lives with art and literature, they can help us understand the world around us and make it a world we want to inhabit.
All subjects should teach students how to understand the world they live in and how to solve problems they face. STEM fields just seem to have better defined the problems they are trying to understand.
24
How is this different from other employment areas? Job security is down, benefits are down, union membership is down, more contract workers will fill the gaps as "contingent" workers. This is the new normal. It has nothing to do with academia but with running the university system for profit. Profit motive drives universities to reduce the number of tenured positions, rely more on contingent staff, and offer more online courses. Again, nothing different here from other industries.
13
my husband got a PhD in biology from the University of Michigan 20+ years ago and after many years just gave up trying to find a job in academia. And then he was overqualified for other jobs. it's not a good career decision!
15
At least universities can still afford multi-million-dollar salaries for head coaches of money-losing football and basketball programs. Alumni boosters apparently have more clout with senior leadership than provosts or union representatives for faculty organizations.
11
The big athletic programs bring in the money. So do the medical sciences. It’s all about money.
4
@Edward Big programs like Michigan bring in money, but more than half lose money and need subsidies.
2
Ironically a person who runs a very important government lab is not a PhD. He has many prima donna PhD’s working for him, however. We both agree that being out there in the working world and experiencing work-related hassles gives one The ability to develop an EQ that we also need to get through life in addition to a very large IQ and ego.
2
I completed a PhD in the humanities in 2018. The number of tenure track jobs has dwindled, and the expectation for new hires is that they have a book contract in hand when they apply for jobs.
Meanwhile, the people evaluating our performance (who are often very harsh) entered academia and obtained tenure at a time when academic jobs were plentiful and standards were lower.
11
3 years ago (or was it 4?), our son got his Ph.D. in Mathematics. At this time, he makes probably 5 times what my wife and I earn, put together (I'm a machinist in the Defense Industry, my wife is an inspector in the same industry, we're doing alright, comfortable), and the world is his oyster, in my mind, he has it made. There is no money in Academia. Get into industry, that's where the money is!
9
@BorisRoberts,
I agree with you about private industry but there can be money in academia if you do consulting on the side.
2
Such an important issue to bring to the fore. Many academics and former academics have been writing about this, but while a graduate student at the University of Washington I personally benefited the most from reading Karen Kelsky's blog 'The Professor Is In'.
One quibble: there are a great many tenured and tenure-track faculty, myself included, that enjoy (!) teaching as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning. These faculty work at all types of institutions, from small colleges to large universities. You can typically find more of them at teaching-focused institutions, like my own (The Evergreen State College).
2
I have a humanities Ph.D. After 5 years of adjunct teaching, a kindly colleague (who had been forced into taking a retirement package from her state university) noted that my age would work against me, even though I still had 20+ years to contribute to a career in academia. I wanted to disbelieve her until I watched a job-search faculty member throw herself at a 28-year-old ABD who was about to graduate and who totally ignored me at a scholarly conference. I had it all over this kid in terms of experience, publications, etc., but it didn't matter. So I left academia.
14
"There was another complication. In 1994, a new federal law outlawed the widespread practice of requiring professors to retire at age 70. The effects of this accumulated as the baby boom generation aged. The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s."
This statement does not take into account a point made earlier in the article: Only 6% of the new Ph.D. hires were in tenure track positions.. When a boomer professor retires, s/he is either not replaced at all, or replaced by adjuncts. Not mentioned at all in this article is the enormous growth in academic managerial positions. These positions are filled by people who have not classroom experience who have earned "academic administration" degrees like the Ed.D. Yes, it is a "doctoral" degree but it has nowhere near the rigor of Ph.D. programs. So, now we have people who never did the job in charge of those who do it. The corporate model for higher education Mission for administrators: Dumb down the curricula, get more students in the seats, hire more adjuncts to teach them, increase tuition, eviscerate faculty governance of the academic mission, suppress faculty salaries, and see to it that the managerial class is paid handsomely. I know. I saw it where I worked as a faculty member.
20
Decades ago, when considering a job change from manufacturing to a university, my career advisor said, "The politics in academia are the most cutthroat of any organization in the country." I listened, and stayed put. It was a wise decision, indeed.
9
I’ve been retired for about 20 years from a 45-year academic career (English). I see four main facets to a solution for this problem.
1. Borderline Ph.D. programs, in English at least, have to be closed. I advocated for this position in the late 70s while I was teaching at an urban university that had no business offering a Ph.D. program in English. No dice.
2. The vast number of superfluous administrators has to be drastically reduced.
3. The primacy of teaching has to be restored, Teaching loads have to be increased; teaching evaluation has to be taken seriously. Class sizes must be reduced. When I was in graduate school, standard teaching loads at all but the top schools were four courses a semester. By the mid-60s, they were at three. By the mid-80s they were at two and negotiable. A three-course teaching load in research universities would do much to restore the perceived importance of teaching. Teaching evaluation is a complex issue, but the system I left behind me was a joke.
4. Finally, retirement. The problem is that people teach beyond 70 and continue to hold academic tenure, blocking advancement for their juniors. I retired at 64 (coincidentally the same year my daughter got tenure at her university, in an ecologically satisfying move).
Too few of my former colleagues realize what a growing crisis confronts academic institutions and academic life. We have lost the public’s confidence. It is long past time for serious efforts to gain it back.
25
What needs more attention is how easy it has become to get a Ph.D. Some universities have become Ph.D. mills, handing them out for academic activity that would have been laughed at 50 years ago. A doctorate used to mean you'd achieved thorough knowledge of a field and had contributed original thinking or research to it. No more. Now a doctorate leads to three years of post-doc, trying to actually accomplish something and make oneself attractive to a potential employer.
I watched this happen (as a clerical employee--with a master's degree) at UC Berkeley. Much of the pressure to dilute the process came from graduate students themselves, demanding eased workloads and an easier path to graduation.
What's amazing is the sense of entitlement and resulting outrage described in this article. A friends daughter with a Ph.D. in gender studies gave up a tenure-track job because she found it demeaning to teach freshman comp instead of leading small seminars on gender issues.
The tenure system is a vital component of academic integrity, and anyone who doubts that should reflect on the Republican "war on science" now being led by Donaldo, the teenage mutant ninja slumlord. That it is sometimes abused or becomes a featherbed for unproductive academics is unfortunate, but must be tolerated for the greater good.
A solution to many of these problems is return to a system in which a Ph.D. has real meaning and represents a difficult accomplishment. Sadly, that's not likely.
8
The paucity of jobs for humanities PhDs is an old story. I enrolled in an excellent graduate program in the late 1960s and quickly realized there were almost no jobs for new PhDs in my field (literature) and that, in the unlikely event I did get a job, I'd never earn more than $3,000 a year. So I finished my master's degree and joined the corporate world. It took a while to get on a good career track, but I eventually had a very satisfying long-term career. When I retired, I went back to graduate school and got my PhD at age 72. Today I write as well as teach in local adult-learning programs. I love it; my students are smart and enthusiastic. And if I'm really lucky, this year I'll earn close to $3,000.
34
Every year, my students ask me why I'm teaching high school English when I have a PhD, and that PhD's in music. It takes only a few numbers from my adjuncting years to make the decision clear to them. The instability is nearly as bad as the pay--it's a hard, hard thing to not know what (or *if*) you're teaching until a few weeks before a semester begins. My last adjunct job was at a for-profit college in a suburban strip mall. I miss doing scholarly work, but I'm teaching, which matters deeply to me and, at least some times, others.
I tell my AP seniors who are already considering grad school not to start it without an exit strategy. I wish somebody had told me that.
14
My PhD adviser was only a couple of years older than me and got his tenure track job at his alma mater in his early 30s. When I asked him what I should write in my application to TA job at our university (yes, you had to properly apply like an external candidate to TA even if you were a current PhD student), he wrote back that they were probably looking for someone who wasn't an endless hassle and then told me to my face that I should stop acting so entitled. In terms of mental health, I've never fully recovered from that and think about that almost every day even three years later (three years employed btw, though not teaching).
5
There are, indeed, complex forces at work here that are sometimes difficult to grasp (labor, legislation, etc.) However, there is a deeply pragmatic issue of real exploitation at hand as well that should not go unnoticed— at least from my 10 years of piece-ing a life together as an adjunct with a PhD in philosophy. For instance: My classes will “make” at 10 students enrolled— that is to say, the college deems it satisfactory to pay me my full adjunct salary at that number. Yet, my classes are often over 25-30. However, if a full time faculty member’s course doesn’t make— one is taken away from me and redistributed to the FTer. This obviously effects my budget and my life tremendously. Yet, no initiative is ever taken to split my other classes with 30 students to help me recoup lost funds (for a multitude of reasons, I’m sure— student schedules, classroom availability, etc. Even so, could something be done to rectify this type of abuse? There is no real care for adjunct professors, we are viewed as simply a herd of useful, and often desperate, educators who love what we do in hopes of one day landing a FT job— even if it’s not tenure-tracked.
6
It is a pretty big presumption that individual colleges & universities observed & fully understood the college-level-teaching labor market because “they” invented it, and therefore rigged it to damage people born in the 80’s or 90’s. Also, an increase of fewer than 2,000 overall successful Ph.d candidates in the humanities over a 30-year period is hardly cramming the pipeline. Finally, what would the response from the market seeking a Ph.d (here where the customer is king) have been if colleges & universities either shrank or eliminated programs, or advised applicants that fewer & fewer were required in the labor market, so their application was denied? Litigation, for one thing. If you want (real, real bad) to be a steam locomotive engineer, whose obligation is it to make that career available to you?
3
I don't understand the point of this piece. Unlike people going to professional (e.g., medical and law) and trade schools, people seeking PhD's in the humanities can't possibly expect that there is more than an even chance they will get decent academic jobs. If that's right, policy shouldn't be dictated by a desire to provide them with a better job market.
It also is not clear that tenure-track professors teach better than assistant professors or adjuncts. At least the article doesn't say this is so. If it is so, that would be a good reason to increase the percentage of tenure-track positions.
An interesting question is how important it is to improve quality of life (i.e., pay and benefits) for people teaching college. If I were teaching, I would think it important! But so is keeping tuition costs low.
So there are no obvious answers, right?
1
Because I am a tenured professor, this article would categorize me as a winner in the higher ed labor market.
Fact is, the general dependence on contingent, low-wage faculty depresses the wages of tenure-line and tenured professors, as well. I hold an endowed chair at a prestigious small private liberal arts college in the mid-Atlantic region, but I earn less than a public school teacher of same years’ experience—never mind the time & cost of advanced degrees at a prestigious R1 university—and have significantly fewer benefits (e.g., no defined-benefit pension, no supplemental health care benefit in retirement, etc.).
Please tell the whole story, instead of making all of those such as I sound like trophy-clutchers who selfishly refuse to retire. I certainly would if I could.
29
You are placing under erasure a real social problem by saying that you experience 10 per cent of it and that should be the focus.
1
The number of administrators has grown steadily in my state institution. These administrators do not teach yet their salaries outpace and eclipse those of tenured faculty. When a tenured faculty person retires, they are replaced with an adjunct who is paid next-to-nothing with little investment in the institution. Administrators draw huge salaries and do next-to-nothing for students; some dislike students and openly admit their dislike. What is forgotten is that if the students were not present, none of us would be present. Many of those administrators, who have never taught a class, have tended to lecture me, a 32-year veteran professor, on how to teach students. Let's drop the number of administrators and hire tenured faculty to teach.
20
The bottom level is two tier, too: public vs private, and depending on the discipline, once a teacher has gone private, it’s incredibly difficult to get in public, where tenure and pensions exist. Private elementary school is where teachers go to starve.
3
The article implies that academia is the only career path for newly minted PhDs.
5
“...provide inexpensive research assistance.”
Assistance?
Graduate students and post docs conduct the entirety of the research. Professors secure funding.
No grad students? No research. Period.
7
@Chris Sorry, this is not true in all fields.
The Universities know that they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by enrolling more PhDs. The lousy pay for adjunct faculty and increasing numbers of them is a supply and demand issue, as this article states. It is only a matter of time before the universities start to lose their brand recognition, in the sense that people just say 'I'm not going to do this,' enter a PhD in the first place. Especially with the democratization of the means of publishing on the internet, the social capital of being an academically recognized authority in the arts, philosophy etc is going to erode. Or so I suspect. I'm glad I got my PhD so I can emasculate my male family members with it, but apart from that I am happy to walk away from academia, and think this erosion is likely as it should be.
4
I am a millennial who emerged with top marks from an esteemed Master of English Literature program with zero job prospects and zero support from the staff at my university. This was after years of being paid less than a McDonald's employee so that I could do the bulk of the tenured professor's work grading papers and teaching classes. On top of that, the entire atmosphere in liberal arts academia is that you better fall in line with whatever political/philosophical beliefs are popular that year and you better start publishing papers championing those beliefs (it couldn't matter less what your original thoughts might be). I think about 95% of my cohort left academia after graduating. It all felt like a giant scam to get us to pay the salaries and do the work of these tenured professors who all refuse to retire even when they are over 80 years old.
16
Read one of Julie Schumacher's hilarious, perspicacious novels if you want to know what academic life is like now, under the rule of Administrators and Accountability. My father was also a professor, and from his working lifetime to mine--an unrecognizable landscape.
2
Being a teacher of young minds, I have had the pleasure of interacting with those with doctorates, who are only in our school district to come up with wonderful ideas for us plain jane teachers to implement.
First of all, I really don't pay them any mind, as none of them have the faintest idea about teaching. Just because you had the means and opportunity and money doesn't make you an expert in the classroom.
I find it hard to hold conversations with PhDs because they have no sense of reason. They really don't.
"It's all about me" comes to mind.
3
The smartest guy I know holds a Master Plumbers, Master Gasfitters, and Master AC license.
He works on repairing large heating and cooling systems, with one helper. Had of a company with 50 technicians, sold it because of the grief.
If your kids are not academically inclined, this life is an option.
It's a service industry and the hours can be brutal, but can lead to a very successful financially life.
7
@Lawrence
100% true, not to mention that it involves real-life skills that are in actual demand.
7
the demand for most of these jobs is entirely artificial, financed by loans that will never be repaid. -Andy, Michigan English, 2002.
5
Something's wrong when folks who teach the bulk of college classes are treated like Uber drivers. I thought that the U.S. has the world's greatest university system.
7
Not only do colleges and universities exploit adjuncts. They also turn out students with worthless degrees who can’t even get a job but are loaded up with student debt. I don’t know how tenured professors can sleep at night. They are nothing but drones living off society.
5
It actually made perfect sense for colleges to handle the millenial generation by hiring more adjuncts. Those students were the offspring of baby-boomers who had delayed marriage and children. So, there was obviously going to be a drop-off in numbers of students once that generation graduated.
How to explain this to outraged phds?
H'mmm. How about this.
There are no guaranties of a job in anything at all any longer.
hey, you can always go to law School. That's what I did.
2
So why has tuition increased 8 times faster than inflation if adjunct professors are carrying so much of the teaching load?
7
@John Mardinly Econometric studies have shown that most of the increase in tuition is demand-driven, not cost-driven. What has forced up demand is the ready availability of cheap government loans. Meanwhile, supply (numbers admitted at elite universities) has not gone up at all. If you increase demand and hold supply constant, the price goes up.
Ph.D.s? Who needs 'em. Smart people know what counts in American higher education and where the money is: Deans, Associate Deans, Assistant Deans, Vice Presidents, Associate Vice presidents, Assistant Vice Presidents, Provosts, Associate Provosts, Assistant Provosts, Chancellors, Associate Chancellors, Assistant Chancellors, Athletic Directors, Associate Athletic Directors, Assistant Athletic Directors, Head Coaches, Associate Head Coaches, Assistant Head Coaches, Assistant Coaches, etc., etc., etc. Duh!
11
@Cowboy Marine
Unfortunately –
Except for the Athletic positions. One needs a Ph.D. plus tenure.
2
Tenure should be exclusive. In what world is someone guaranteed a job for life? Really....people act like tenure is a right. It should be reserved for a small minority of exclusive professors.
4
This politically correct article does not mention one thing: how immigrants exploit academia as an easy way to immigrate since universities can get work visas very quick and easy. This benefit was meant to attract the brightest and talented from all over the world. But it is not the most talented and brightest that get hired: it is those that are great at kissing up to students and administrators and who are great at manipulating American empathy as descendants of immigrants themselves. When my contract was not renewed due to budget cuts that did not affect administrators, I was told by a professor from Africa, " you're an American citizen. You can always get another job. And if you don't, you can always get government assistance. But (he mentioned all the foreigners remaining in the department from Mexico, Chile, and Venezuela), need their contracts renewed so they don't have to back to their countries." These were professors who did not like American students and who did not teach anything and who did not research or publish anything significant. I also was told by another professor, hired because she was the wife of a vice president), that I was a single female and I did not have kids to raise like the men that had their contracts renewed. Administrators increased instead, with dubious duties, who want to enjoy the prestige of academia, who treat the students as customers, and who are scared to teach. Faculty who challenge students are, therefore, terminated.
5
So, fun part about not for profit & charitable organizations...
Go here:
https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/
Select your local, not-for-profit college, and if you take a few moments of scrolling in the long-form filings that are publicly available, you will see the top officers of the college listed, with their salary & additional compensation.
Now, it's not unusual for college executives to make decent money (often 200K to a million)--in fact, it's usually well below the horrible bloat that exists in corporate America vis a vis the rank & file employees, but not all colleges are created equal, and in many division 1 athletics schools, a coach makes more than a college president.
2
It's kinda ironic that the most leftist part of academia - the humanities - is also the site of the most ruthless capitalist exploitation in American life. Wall Street and Silicon Valley plutocrats have nothing on the tenured gentry of academia.
9
I think it is futile just to talk about Humanities Ph.D.s only. What about many foreign students who complete a Ph.D in 5-6 years in Engineering from prestigious universities here in the US and not able to find a decent teaching job due to their status?
There should be a study on this too...!!!
3
I have an acquaintance who got an online Ph.D. As far as I can tell no in person classes. This person got a job as an adjunct professor at a large Virginia University, ad soon stopped teaching in the PhD field. And now I see the only benefit was the ability to refer to him/herself as “Dr.”. Perhaps this is a motivator?
Please do not use my name- it is easily recognizable to many parties. How about “Tipi”?
2
I finished my Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2008, and quit Higher Ed in 2013, even though I was about to get tenure. In my experience, one of the trends that is missing in this article is the spending on 'Administration,' which has gotten more and more broadly defined. As the spending on faculty stayed steady over the '90s and '00s (with student numbers greatly increasing), spending on Administration exploded. You'd think that more administrators would lead to less administrative work being done by the full-time faculty but you'd be wrong, the opposite is actually true.
Each administrator needs to affect the lives of students in order to justify their own position's existence. However, one administrator can't actually affect all those students by themselves. So, they create tasks for the full-time faculty to carry out for them (adjuncts would need to be paid extra for this, so forget that -- when I adjuncted, I wasn't even paid to offer any Office Hours). So, as the number of full-time faculty per student dropped, the administrative load increased radically -- both because there were most students per full-time faculty and because there were more administrators. This has changed the job description of full-time faculty away from teaching and research, which used to be the primary roles of a college professor.
6
I am puzzled by this statistic: "Of the approximately 50 scholars who have graduated from the department and won tenure-track positions since 2008, only one is employed at a top 12 department, and that is Michigan itself."
PhDs have always gotten positions in places ranked lower than their PhD programs. I did, and I've had a lovely career. The stat that matters involves the difference between the number of tenure-track and non-tenure positions.
6
As a tenured faculty member I would say that there is a bright side to all of this. Almost all of those 'excess' PhDs can find very good work outside of academia. And often work that pays much better. In a knowledge based economy, that is not a bad thing.
At a minimum these PhDs can write well, analyze problems, conduct and understand scientific research, and use applied statistics at least at a modest level.
Second, there is a lot of competition for the adjunct positions. Many people who work full time in a career - accountants or financial analysts for example - earn substantially more in the private sector, but want to teach a course or two a year because it gives them credibility and looks good on their CVs.
6
@Dred Really? Have you actually had to try to find a job in the real world? A PHD has always been essentially useless except within academia. Companies hire only token PHD's, and only in Engineering - they look good to the VC's when it comes time to beg for more funding. Most PHD's wind up working for the likes of GM, Ford, etc on the assembly line right next to the guys who were smart enough not to waste 2 years getting a Masters and 8 years getting a PHD. BTW, the same now holds true for as BA in any field. Final note to all you people in the Ivory Towers of academia, the first people to get fired now are those who make the most money. These are the people with the advanced degrees and the knowledge and experience. The last to go are the "entry level" people since they cost the least. advanced degrees
The situation in the academy is reflective of broader changes in the economy. We are increasingly a winner-take-all society. Gleaming multi-million dollar high rise condos overlooking tent cities on the sidewalks below. And, dare I mention, a leading presidential contender who announced in a speech, "If I am elected, basically nothing will change in America."
2
I taught and was an administrator for 33 years at a top 20 university. Over that span I saw increasing pressure to publish, which led to increasing pressure from faculty to begin ph.d. programs that were unjustified by demand or the ability to place graduates. Teaching loads among regular faculty also declined, and teaching became undervalued. Academia used to be a comfortable, and useful, workplace in which you could remain absorbed in your chosen field and take some time off in the summer. By the end of my career it had become a place in which faculty were supposed to be on the job constantly- I actually heard an upper level administrator who gave an orientation for incoming junior hires tell them to read articles as they were driving to work, at stoplights of course. Salaries were/are significantly lower than in other professions requiring advanced degrees, and that is fine in an atmosphere in which you are able to self direct your time to scholarly interests. But being paid like a high school teacher doesn’t cut it if you are being asked to work 24/7. I would never recommend a career in the academy anymore. Even with an Ivy League phd, which I had, it isn’t worth it.
5
In the early 90s I had decided I wanted to go into academia to be a Philosophy professor. I had always wanted to be a teacher and so the prospect of I teaching complicated subjects to undergrads, get paid $60k a year, and be in a intellectual community for the next 30 or 40 years sounded wonderful.
I was of course naive and further made no effort to look at the practical job prospects (true to form philosopher mentality!) My undergrad experience had given me this impression that I was temperamentally special, part of a small group who were willing to forgo the practical world to be lost in the abstract. Not needed on an industrious level, but needed culturally.
I got my masters degree in Philosophy, but then I started hearing from friends who had gone straight for the PhD that it wasn't worth it. I finally started looking at the actual numbers in terms of jobs, graduates, etc. I was shocked to see that this "special" niche of graduating philosophers were in the thousands every single year, that there were only so many schools in the US, and that most jobs were adjunct which paid slave wages. The nail in the coffin for my future was when I saw a Philosophy position at the local university generated 600+ applicants. There was no future there to raise and family and buy a home.
I grieved, adapted, and now I teach high school Social Studies. I love the work, but at times I still pull out the tiniest violin in the world and play dirge to my dream.
14
My father was forced to explain to my very traditional family in China that in the US, PhDs were not necessary. We children failed somewhat in his eyes due to that particular missing diploma, though we are all fortunate to have chosen a discipline (computer science) that meant we did not have to suffer financially as my overeducated and underpaid father (and the entire family in childhood) did. m
Indeed, among the reasons not to pursue a PhD were our family finances; never mind worrying about finding a job.
Now I find myself working as part of the administration supporting hundreds of PhDs in research, including faculty. We are fortunate in having in having our own funding, yet I sense the tension between researchers and admins. The administration exists because of the huge burden of regulations (necessary, alas), which the researchers don’t want to deal with, yet do not seem to appreciate the white glove treatment they get in our dept and resent us for spending ‘their’ money. Having worked in high tech, I am paid substantially less here than in the private sector, but more than most researchers - as I am aware of the NIH salary scales. Those who manage to hang on (and as others noted they try not to retire, if only out of boredom) are well paid, but new postdocs are not; so we get lots of talented foreigners who don’t mind the low salaries, and any ‘free’ food we supply means saving them some money.
There are so many (disposable) adjuncts in academia because tenured and tenure-track professor have so many job protections and other privileges. It's a two-tier system, and it isn't going to change anytime soon.
1
I am a PhD student in the US. Brilliant article, which reflects the anxieties of many of my peers. However, where are references to international students like me? My department is filled with them and so are other departments. The fact that we study in the United States does not mean we will look for a job in the US. There are plenty of students who come to the States due to the many great universities that exist here and want to go back to their respective countries to build their career. If you are not making a distinction between American and foreign grad students, you are distorting the numbers.
3
I have been fortunate to have a good career as a tenured professor. The academic world has changed radically since my student years, mostly for the worse. The author gets some of the discussion about causes and consequences right, but he gets more wrong. I attribute most of the blame for the increasing reliance on poorly paid contingent faculty on state legislatures that used the 2008 recession as an excuse to gut university budgets, and to university administrators who exploit budget constraints as a way to undercut the entire premise of tenure as protected speech. Tenured faculty have the power to challenge questionable acts by administrators that weaken and distort the academic mission of universities, often in compliance with the bequests of rich donors and corporate boards of trustees. During the same decade that budgets were slashed and the number of tenure positions declined, universities have seen explosive growth of administrative positions, many well paid. When I entered academia, administrators were typically faculty members who took these jobs on temporarily before returning to their offices and labs. Now, administration has become a profession in itself, and is stocked with business or management types who have little or no academic background. They spend their days looking at budget spreadsheets and talking with corporate donors about how to pump out more drones to code for them. Their dream is a university without us pesky professors!
14
A point that the author did not mention: the addition of inexpensive adjuncts has been used by administrators (who often come from the ranks of faculty for temporary admin assignments and then return to faculty after a few years) to reduce the teaching loads of tenured and tenure track professors. At the business school where I taught 10 courses a year as a full time adjunct, the standard teaching load for tenured faculty was three courses. I considered my 10 courses about a half-time job. What the 3-course profs did with their spare time is a mystery to me. What a deal!
2
It makes no sense to graduate legions of PhDs whose only job prospect is "professor". PhD programs should educate students for a much wider career market.
Academic research, which is integral to PhD-level education, is heavily oriented toward the interests of academics themselves. Those interests may do little to prepare students for careers outside academia; but those interests are great for raising an H-index, securing another federal grant, and eventually gaining an academy membership.
Universities depend on professors' grants to support graduate students. And those grant awards depend on a professor's academic record (publications, citations, H-index, etc.), not on whether the PhD students got good jobs.
If the rewards system were better aligned with student outcomes, we'd surely have fewer PhDs who can't find good jobs. What if the H-index were replaced by an E-index -- something based on the employment and income of PhD grads?
7
State funded was also cut, which meant schools are more dependent on tuition from admissions, and states sometimes demanded more graduate admissions as a trade-off for funding. Also, to the degree that states increased funding, it was often in widespread tuition grants to students, which were very popular, but left states in dire straits in terms of their budgets, and didn't necessarily fund anything else at a university.
That is, indeed, the issue with Sanders' plan--it isn't clear that schools will have any more revenue to hire these tenure or tenure-track faculty to teach classes. It makes it easier for students to afford college, which is of critical importance, but it doesn't make it any easier for colleges to offer reasonably-sized classes.
2
One reason there are fewer job opportunities for tenure track faculty in the Humanities is the decreasing number of undergraduate students choosing to major in those departments because of the perception that a Humanities major will notmlead to a job with a high beginning salary. As an advisor I frequently had students tell me that their parents would only provide financial support if they majored in Business or Engineering.
5
My husband and I are two former English grad students (he got his PhD and adjuncted for a couple of years; I left at the all-but-dissertation point, knowing the chances of a job were dismal, even from our well-regarded program). Far fewer than half of the people who graduated with my husband have jobs in academia. We started our own business and now have a small chain of urban gardening centers, focusing on organic and hydroponic gardening. Grad school taught us how to research, break down large complex problems into smaller manageable ones, and communicate effectively. We met incredible people - faculty, fellow students, and even students we taught. BUT, if we had known when we started what our chances for employment in academia were, we would have most likely skipped the extra decade of schooling. When we were in school in the 1990s, the word was that tons of hires from the 1960s were going to retire, and so the job market would be great. Instead, universities shifted from tenure-track faculty to adjunct and graduate student labor to teach their courses, basically taking a page from corporate America and their hiring of contract workers. The faculty may have been liberal or even Marxist; university administrators certainly were not.
20
Another problem with academia -- all these PhD's are being trained for academia, not the private sector. And there is not enough jobs in academia for them. This has been true for 30 years, in all fields, including STEM. And as someone who hires for the private sector, I often do not need the academia skill set, especially when I am expected to pay a premium for someone who has done a PhD. I usually find more what I want in people with experience rather than graduate schooling. I wish that wasn't the case, especially with all the work and slave wages most PhD's have dealt with.
1
There is a lot of talk about administrative bloat in the comments. What isn’t mentioned as often is that it is needed in response to the generation currently attending college who demands hand holding at every step and the array of federal laws universities now have to be not only mindful of, but vigilant in following. We can’t make demands of institutions and then repudiate them for hiring the staff necessary to comply with the demands.
With respect to the glut of PhDs, it will correct itself eventually. Being a professor is like any other job. If it becomes less attractive or harder to obtain, the number of people pursuing it will reduce. This has happened in the legal market since 2008. The colleges of course deserve some blame for taking too many PhD students, but they, like the students, were most likely unaware of what the contours of the entire professor job market would look like in 8 years. At what point do we start to ask people to understand and accept the risks of their own decisions?
2
In my perspective as a university science professor, the problem is not hiring of non-tenured faculty. In my dept., almost all courses are taught by tenured faculty (although grad students to teach some of the labs). The problem is over-production of PhD's. It is not just the professors who want graduate students, it's the departments and universities strongly pushing for each professor to have several grad students because that means tuition income and indirect cost monies on grants that support them.
Universities, like good private companies need to assess the market for the PhD's they turn out and adjust accordingly.
4
It is reported (or at least I have read) that every college graduate today will have two or three careers in the course of their employed years. This is because all fields of knowledge are expanding. I did my engineering degree with a slide rule. That knowledge base is now museum-quality. To recover, I went on to other areas of related skill. Even those barely got me to an acceptable retirement age. Walmart aside, I am now unemployable.
Why should this situation not apply to PhD's? A PhD holder is one with mastery of some arcane bit of knowledge. The market for that skill will, like all others, quickly mature, i.e., go down. Tenured PhDs are enjoying the benefits of a system and an era when a knowledge-set, once mastered, guaranteed lifelong employment. Those years have passed. It's time to seriously question the concept of tenure. Those coming up the ladder have skills to offer which their predecessor didn't, doesn't, and can't.
3
Plenty of Associate Provost for Social Justice. Equity, and Diversity positions.
6
Universities are now resorts. Student centers, fitness facilities, student centers, expensive sports teams. Cut all of that and put the money saved into hiring professors. Problem solved.
2
Teaching prowess counts for nothing in the academy. That’s because most excellent researchers are wretched teachers and have rigged the system to reward their own kind. Even lousy publications count toward tenure. I bailed on my Ph.D. In the mid-80s because I discovered I didn’t like lecturing, let alone research. I had no trouble doing it—just didn’t like it. I wound up teaching high school, which was psychologically rewarding—and, shockingly, more remunerative than many professorial jobs away from the big name universities. And I never had to immerse myself in the nasty world of academic politics.
2
Teaching as an adunct fits into a broader pattern of the gig economy. People who are actually doing the front-line work of a university, school, hospital or business have not been sharing in the economic growth that they have been providing. This shift in values goes back to the days of Reagan and ends up with lower wages & less security. Yuck.
6
So what are the explanations?
1) changing demographics, with fewer qualified students
2) increasing customer (student + parent) emphasis on financially viable study, e.g., "servile"/trade education
3) humanities suicide via widespread assault on liberal education, e.g., oikophobia, diversity as an end-in-itself, intersectionality, etc. (cf. Ross Douthat, NYT 1/11/20, and Anthony Kronman, WSJ 8/2/19. for more on this topic)
2
In 1980, when I first thought about going to grad school in the humanities, the first reply to an inquiry that I received came with a fact sheet about the horrific jobs situation in academe.
I eventually did go to grad school, and I did not land a tenure-track job until after my first book was published, nearly a quarter century ago. By the professional organizations' counting I never got that job because their studies run only five years out.
This situation, then, is nothing new, and for as long as I have been teaching, I have discouraged my students from thinking of academic careers. The food's lousy and the portions are small.
3
I live in a university town and know a lot of tenured professors, as patients and as friends. Most of them are pretty miserable, more miserable than doctors are. The politics, the constant grind of getting grant money, the constant fighting for attention and precedence, always having to interact with jerky colleagues and administrators and indifferent students.
Maybe it's just this particular university, but academics would not be my choice.
6
It’s been said before, think of a tenure track professorship as similar to being a pop star, movie star, or pro athlete. Many people covet these jobs for the status and relative wealth they confer but only a relative few will be successful.
5
Apparently, not many of these degrees are in economics. Scarcity raises value. Doctorates, especially in the humanities, are about as rare as oxygen molecules.
2
Good grief, as Charlie Brown would say, the problem of teaching history in college has been in crisis since I left Graduate School at the Maxwell School in 1970. There were no academic tenure track positions at that time and History as a viable discipline never recovered. Those who paid attention knew it was doomed at that time. I myself became a lawyer as did many others.
4
The sciences need to bring back the university laboratory researcher career. There are so many PhD's chasing too few jobs because the research labs run on grad students and postdocs, of which they keep a fresh supply by filling PhD programs.
4
I expect the situation to get even worse. At the top 20 university where I adjunct, those who teach online courses are excluded from the bargaining unit, so are not eligible for the minimal gains achieved by the union. This was a shrewd move on the part of the university, as their growth is in their online programs.
4
I am an adjunct professor at an ivy league. What is not mentioned is that in addition to teaching, I have assignments to grade and also help struggling students succeed. Often, this means setting up small groups to help students (I lead them) and making myself available for meetings and conference calls with students to tutor them at no cost. After all is said and done, my salary is probably pretty close to a MacDonald's laborer although my educational credentials are very different. I disagree with Sander's solution. All that is needed is a fair wage and benefits. I'd be happy with that. Colleges (and mine) have stocked up on middle management positions, jobs that are, in my opinion, totally unnecessary. Students are treated as customers, which creates unhealthy relationships between students and the universities. It also leads to grade inflation since student evaluations can be a reason for an adjunct losing his or her job. There is a problem in academia, but it is more complex and demands some creative solutions, especially given the fact that college is becoming more and more unaffordable for an average family.
15
It's no different in Canada. At my university (University of Ottawa), it's cheaper to keep part-time professors with no benefits, no job security, and no tenure. The university saves millions every year that way. It makes the university system seem like a corporation.
5
I was junior faculty many years ago in a renowned physics department. I did not get tenure there, but I did get the equivalent at a renowned national lab. In those days, that was the normal way to do things. The real problem, I think, is that required retirement at a certain age is now illegal. Being a professor is not necessarily easy, at least intellectually, but it is hardly physically demanding if you discount the required tennis and squash tournaments with faculty and grad students. Hence, tenured professors can and often do continue to do research and teach long after they have lost their marbles.
Many foreign universities and labs maintain the required retirement age. In those countries, upward mobility for junior faculty is far better than in the US. This makes entering academia more enticing to young people, which results in a more vibrant intellectual life. Further, it is my experience that, at least in the laboratories, the turnover in leadership results in better and more vigorous leadership, willing to change course and take risks.
4
The article’s title is disingenuous. Only after reading the opening sentence do we realize that this is a humanities-specific issue. Many, many STEM Phd students are foreigners who will return home on graduation. This leaves a smaller pool of academia candidates, suggesting the life of a STEM Phd isn’t quite so bad. Further, STEM Phds are often employed in industry, further reducing the candidate pool for academic candidates.
There is no doubt that the percentage of foreign humanities Phd candidates is smaller than for STEM. And I suspect industry doesn’t have the same zest for hiring humanities Phd grads as they do STEM. So the clambering for tenure-track academic jobs among recent humanities Phd grads must be intense. But put yourself in the shoes of an administrator. With declining humanities enrollment, why would you hire a tenure-track or tenured professor that you then can’t get rid of?
It’s just not good business.
5
Many commentators on this article state that the increase in administrators in higher education has played a significant role in both the rise of tuition and over-reliance on contingent faculty. The reality is more complex.
Each passing decade sees universities required to supply vastly more student support and conduct far more extensive reporting. This takes administrators. Disability resource centers, Title IX offices, and mental health professionals were not part of my college experience in the early 1980s, but they are (appropriately) standard features of modern campuses. In addition to such legally required support, we now have deans of diversity and international affairs, who are charged with ensuring that our institutions are as diverse and supportive as possible. We also require administrators for ever-more-extensive state and federal reporting requirements--including through the Higher Education Act, Title IX, Title VI, Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, etc.
The reality is that vast majority of US students are educated at public institutions and these institutions have been incrementally starved of state support for decades. Should we chose to reinvest in public education, most administrators--I am among them--would be delighted to increase the percentage of tenure-track faculty and pay our contingent faculty better wages.
8
The opportunities for engineering PhD’s has always been good, in industry, federal labs and to a lesser extent academia. Skilled engineering PhD’s even from second tier schools (and even foreign students) can expect 5 figure salaries. It is illogical to think that those who “chose” to do their PhD in the humanities were unaware of the job prospects upon graduation. The universities may sell their programs with glitzy brochures or new campus centers etc. But the most important aspect to check before enrolling is the type of jobs (or lack thereof) of the graduating class.
2
I taught as an adjunct for 9 years at the City Colleges of Chicago and at St. Xavier University. My median pay per course was roughly $2,300, with no benefits. Both colleges limited the maximum number of courses they would offer an adjunct to avoid paying health benefits (a generous course assignment of 3 per semester therefore leads to a total of $13.8k annually with no benefits). The CCC adjuncts were unionized, but the St. Xavier adjuncts, who voted twice to unionize, were illegally ignored by the SXU administration. At these two institutions, roughly 75% of faculty were adjunct. These "faculty" members are truly contingent, have no year to year job security, and can be laid off or fired at will. Just to torture myself, I would occasionally calculate the tuition dollars generated by the students sitting in my courses. At SXU, it was about $90k per full room. I would marvel that this many tuition dollars would result in only $2500 in salary for me.
Something is very deeply wrong with higher education in the US. The way teachers are treated (as expendable) leads to poor student outcomes. I don't claim to know how to fix it. But the problems are real, and if anything are worse than this article makes them out to be.
13
@Matthew Weflen I am shocked at how much they expect of adjuncts low wages and no health benefits.
1
I'm a tenure-track Assistant Professor at a public R1. A major part of this problem is administrative glut, based - you guessed it - on decades of free-flowing student loans. The guarantee that students would be able to get loans allowed (mostly private) universities to raise tuitions, that in-turn fed the bloat of university administrations. Universities have become big - some of the biggest - businesses as a result. In order to compete (for people, students, donations, grants, etc.), public universities have bloated their administrations as well, but usually at the expense of faculty, infrastructure, and elevated student fees. Further exacerbating the problem is the tightening of Federal purse strings on coveted grants. The only solution I see - and it will not be easy - is to regulate higher ed tuition and eliminate predatory student loan practices.
3
Good survey of events, but it needs to be backed up a little bit. In 1986, according to that same survey quoted, something close to 97% of people in my field of history were working full time in that field - as tenure track, or secondary schools or research tanks - but in real careers suitable to their training and degrees. In 1987, when I finished my PhD, 49% of people in my field were following that path and instead of working within an academic setting a fair number went to work for the government. That was in just one year - my field never recovered. Instead, the remaining 51% found work driving cabs, programming computers and in some other graduate program as an MBA or lawyer. The lack of a career for PhDs has been going on for more than thirty years now. It's not going to get better.
3
I am an immigrant living in the US. Growing up, I was greatly interested in political science and wanted to do a PhD in it. Very soon I realized the futility of this path and ended up doing a PhD in Management which pays me a high six figure salary in a tenured faculty position. Now, I rarely work 20 hours a week and spend rest of my time reading and following politics.
2
There are two solutions - (i) take tenure away completely and (ii) institute mandatory retirement age. When tenure goes away - the supply and demand will balance itself because professors will realize that the new Ph.D. is a competition to his own position. Mandatory retirement will enforce cleaning of dead wood.
4
"Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."
I have a Ph.D. in a liberal arts field. The situation is heartbreaking. I would apply for jobs, along with 100 other applicants. When a full time opening came up at the college where I taught, we all pounced on the tiny crumb that was offered.
Your piece states the facts, but it comes nowhere near reflecting the pain of the whole experience.
12
I'm glad that Kevin Carey addressed the removal of mandatory retirement age as a major problem in the academic job market. So many of my colleagues intend to teach until they drop dead in the classroom despite the fact that they have generous pensions and flush 401K's they built up since the 1980s. They have no regard for freeing up salaries and opportunities for people coming into academia even as they suck up salaries that would easily fund two to three assistant professorships. Universities must reimpose a mandatory retirement age and for those faculty who want to still teach and conduct research, universities should bring them back as emeritus faculty and pay them part-time salaries.
What Carey did not address is the even worst practice of double-dipping that runs rampant in American higher education. Professors routinely retire at public universities and take their pension and get full salaries at private universities or, alternatively retire from private universities and take their flush retirement accounts and draw full salaries from public ones. The list of these professors is impossibly long as universities ranging from City University of New York to Duke University engage in this practice in their hunt for prestige. Even those Nobel Prize-winning economists and sociologists who devoted their lives to economic inequality can't resist double-dipping. This is an absolute scandal in American higher education, and we must put a stop to it.
7
To Times readers:
Simply put, the use of adjunct profs is predatory exploitarion. But it can work reciprocally. The adjunct gets free parking, use of a computer, the library, and discreet use of the copy machine.
Sincerely, Roger Latzgo, former adjunct prof
Www.rogerlatzgo.com. Germansville PA
5
Forty and fifty years ago, large and small businesses were willing to hire humanities graduates and train them in-house. I graduated in a college class of about 500. Just recently I found my old commencement program, and saw that only two students in that class had majored in business.
When I went back to my alma mater ten years later as an adjunct, business was such a popular major that it was distorting the rest of the curriculum, because the business department decreed that its majors could meet their general education requirements only with certain courses.
I went to the placement office, since I was trying to escape adjunct hell. The job interview notices posted on the bulletin board all asked to see business or computer science majors only.
I'm a big fan of learning STEM subjects, but perhaps students have seen what happened to their parents or older siblings in high tech--being replaced by an H1B because "their skills are not up to date," as if it would be so hard to teach an experienced computer scientist or engineer a new technique.
7
The difference in Engineering and some other job-related disciplines is that the temptation to just take the professional job that you can get with a BSc is always there, and it re-doubles after a Master's. (The MSc or MEng may not get you a much better job, but you do go to the top of the pile for an entry-level.)
So it's harder to really mistreat them, they have options.
In the humanities, "Doonesbury" said it best when he had a professor upbraiding the U president for budget cuts to his department:
"President King, one more cut like that and I'm finished! I'll got to private industry!"
"Private industry? Herbert, you're a Latin teacher."
"And a damn good one! I'd be snapped up in a minute!"
5
When I was a kid I remember people in my rust beltish town saying things like "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."
This is symptomatic of our culture. Money over knowledge, and certainly over wisdom.
4
Fire an administrator (they rarely help with the actual education of undergraduates) and hire two professors. Problem solved.
10
In the past 4 decades, college tuition has increased 400% above inflation yet faculty salaries have been tracking inflation. Flat salaries. Where has the tuition -sourced
income gone? To administrators who manage federal student loans that only prompt colleges to raise tuition further. These loans do not come from the colleges so they have no skin in the game. The students are now in debt to the federal government and can not declare bankruptcy. We do not need free tuition. We need reduced tuition and college based student loans.
3
I empathize with the these graduate students, but at the same time, nobody forced them to get a PhD in the humanities. They can’t come out and expect taxpayers to foot the bill.
4
Maybe you don’t love reading, writing and research as these grads do.
The question at the heart of this debate is pretty simple: if the cost of college continues to rise, why do colleges need to spend less on professors?
The Sanders approach doesn't go far enough. The objective should be to force schools to spend their money on professors rather than waste it elsewhere. First, I'd ban for-profit higher education plain and simple. It's immoral and exploitative. Second, put proportional caps on how much any school can spend on administration, because that's another avenue a lot of money escapes down. Third, put in place Bernie's plan to increase the percentage of tenured profs. Every single student will tell you it's the professors that make a school good; administration just does not seem to understand that.
6
The decline over the past 50 years of the fraction of the federal budget spend on research and development is the cause of much of this hardship. This decline also is why the US is falling behind China in science and engineering.
9
What this article doesn’t discuss is one of the reasons for the higher number of non-teaching employees at colleges and universities. Students with emotional issues and mental health concerns that would not have been able to attend college decades ago are now able to do so because of a wider range of (still imperfect) pharmaceuticals— but they need to see therapists and medical personnel regularly. The huge increase in STEM enrollments has brought a need for technicians to make sure equipment works properly and to teach how to use it, bc it is that complicated. Students with genuine dietary restrictions need special dining areas where their food is prepared. Controlling temperature and ventilation in the high-tech STEM buildings takes trained technicians and has high energy costs. And so on. None of this justifies how poorly adjuncts are treated and paid, but there are costs that just didn’t exist 20 years ago. My sister, a non-tenured humanities adjunct, only saw decent pay and benefits when the adjuncts at her college joined a union.
5
If you want to know why there are so many administrators, watch your state legislatures pile more requirements on universities every year. Book keeping requires book keepers.
6
I only see one comment here that refers to grade inflation and the increasingly poor quality of undergrad education, but it is an important concomitant of the growing power of administrators with a market-focus above all else.
Yes, many admins are, in fact, either cynical or ignorant about effective teaching, and they don't mind pressuring faculty to elevate the grades of students doing failing or sub-par work.
And administrators really don't care about the powerlessness and cynicism this inspires in faculty. Faculty are unable to honestly critique student work because, if they don't have sufficient "retention" and good teaching evaluations (which students will supply as long as they are given A's and B's, research shows) they won't get tenure or promotions.
At lower-level universities it is all a massive scam. The message admins pass on (to state legislatures and to marketing) will be how successful the university has been at graduating students, students who weren't prepared for college in the first place and, unbeknownst to the public, still aren't.
Administrators are, in fact, corrupt, and many will move from campus to campus in a short span of years, getting salary increases with each move.
2
It's really unfortunate that we as a society have decided that humanities degrees aren't economically valuable. There is value in studying the humanities! The humanities are important! Our values should not be shaped by capital, and people shouldn't have to spend their lives in meaningless jobs they hate simply because they generate wealth for a select few.
14
@Ryn! Clearly you don't understand the precepts of supply and demand. Essentially there is no demand for people with humanities degrees and there is an overabundance of the same. What you want is socialism that disregards the market and provides jobs with other people's confiscated money.
A critical side story is the rise of highly paid administrators that, as a class, have siphoned billions of dollars away from the academic side of the University. The Administrative class is a cancer in the system, one that is largely invisible, unaccountable, and ever expanding. As the power of the Professors has waned, that of the Administration has increased dramatically. The entire mission of the University has suffered.
9
PhD students are cash cows for the education racket. If you spend a long time studying an impractical subject, and are unwilling to work in the real world (industry), do not expect an easy time career-wise.
5
From their academic employees to theIr Division 1 athletes, universities are the last American institution to rely on indentured servitude to function. That the smart people who run them know this, as the story says, flies in the face of the idealistic claptrap they spout during recruitment and at commencement.
2
After graduating from MIT (SB) and Caltech (PhD) and post-doc'ing for three years, I saw the writing on the wall and went to law school (UCLA). Best damn decision I ever made. I retired in 2015 after having spent decades having fun and doing good practicing law. No regrets whatsoever for having begun in science (molecular genetics) and ended in law (estate & probate).
6
Nowadays we would recommend that you do the reverse.
At a university near where I live, too many tenured faculty members will NOT retire.
One reason is that not much is expected of them.
They teach two or three classes a semester and serve on a committee or two and that's it.
Not bad for $100,000 a year.
This is not an indictment of all elderly tenured faculty.
6
Great article. I guess I should consider myself lucky to be one of less than 500,000 tenured faculty in the country. This paragraph holds the key to the problems in academia: “Yet at no point did universities seem to consider slowing the flow of students into the Ph.D. pipeline. The opposite happened. In 1988, the number of doctorates in the humanities conferred was estimated to be 3,570, and it increased to 5,145 in 2018.”
I started graduate school in ‘94. By then it was already such a precarious career track that the professor who welcomed us into the program told us to look for jobs outside academia if we didn’t find academic jobs within two years of completing our doctoral dissertations. And yet the number of doctorates conferred in the Humanities has continued to rise since then. This, as the article makes clear, is not a misreading of the market but a deliberate attempt to flood it, to cheapen the overall value of academic work. So malicious.
9
In biomedical sciences, tenure faculty must earn their salaries from research grants. The University and the Department depend on the indirect costs from grants to feed the administration, and use the direct costs from grants to pay our salaries. The non-tenured and the tenured faculty are not treated differently. Although the tenured faculty are supposed to have guaranteed pay from the University, such guarantee is only on paper. When our grant dollars fall short of paying our salaries, the University or the Department will do everything in their power to avoid paying us the guaranteed salary. Since "tenure" in biomedical research only guarantees a Title but not the salaries, Bernie's proposal would not change our reality. The overwhelming majority of biomedical sciences PhDs trained in the US no longer seek faculty positions. Most of the faculty job applicants now are PhDs who are trained in other countries but come to the US for their postdoctoral training as immigrants on J-1 and H-1 visas.
6
the underemployment is one of the main reasons this group turns to left winged politics. However, if they were responsible, or capable, instead, they would follow a different tact in their education and train for employment and success. For example, their major could have been engineering instead of literature.
2
Just exactly what IS the economic value of a PhD in some (most) of the fields discussed in this article ? I am in my late 60's, and I have been ruminating over this question since I entered university. I when I first started my university studies I noticed that the vast majority of classes taught and degrees awarded were in subjects like English, History, Art, Psychology, Education, Geography, large-organism Biology etc. While I would never assert that the labor force needs zero people with this sort of training, I know that very few are required. Over my lifetime, the knowledge that has been in economic demand is that taught in engineering, physics, math, molecular biology and, to some extent, chemistry. I just don't recall ever seeing a job posting for someone in the "hunanities". Except of course in universities. But that is just a dog chasing its own tail, isn't it.
The solution to this is for universities to trim WAY down and stop teaching these subjects for which there has been, is, and never will be an economic demand.
4
@Iman Onymous , the smartest people most of us know are not engineers, or even doctors. The smartest are those who have deep knowledge of history, literature, and similar. Critical thinking and the ability to read, speak and write intelligently are the valuable skills one learns in these study areas. And to put a finer point on this: our need for well educated citizens is urgent. College is not a future employee training ground to be used by corporate America—rather it is designed to nurture and foster the learned people our society requires.
32
@karen Ah, wouldn't that be nice. But college is ideally supposed to do both--enlighten and improve employment prospects.
1
@karen I guess it all depends on how you define "smart". American universities have been pumping out a biblical flood of people with deep knowledge in the fields you list, and what has it produced, other than 47% of the U.S. electorate who wear "MAGA" hats and vote for you-know-who.
The smartest person I am familiar with is Richard Feynman. The rest of the smartest people I have known are all in the fields I listed. I don't buy the "well-rounded" argument. Not any more. Not after November 2016.
I am 62 with many years in both academia and industry from around the world.
There is extremely tight funding in almost all countries, except for China, for universities from the government. Vice Chancellors etc want all the faculty to write research grant applications and use all the graduate students. These research grant applications, when approved, bring in much desired and needed money to the university that is then used to fund other parts that don't receive much money.
They don't care all that much once the graduate students finish as long as money is brought into the universities. And if the faculty don't bring in enough money, no tenure or even loss of tenure. Definitely no promotions.
In Industry, despite the R&D tax deduction in the US, PhD's are not desired because Industry doesn't want to pay anything for experience. There is also a negative attitude in industry that PhDs are useless and lost in their minds. Managers get their jollies bullying PhDs because they can and can get away with it.
Yet Industry wants patents for new technology and patents require original research, otherwise you can't get a patent. Original research takes time and work.
There are decades old problems out there that can be solved but not in the one year time frame Industry expects.
Living around the world was wonderful. Working around the world and in the US as a research scientist / engineer has not been easy.
6
Since Bernie Sanders was mentioned in this article, I think his revolution would add to the crisis. Not all private institutions are for the wealthy. Many cater to first generation college students and students with modest means. If all public colleges become free, what would happen to these private/religious colleges who do not cater to the wealthy? My guess is they would be forced to close. Then more faculty would be out of jobs, only the brightest students from the best districts and schools would qualify for admission to these public universities, and those of modest means would be excluded from obtaining a college degree. I would like journalists to ask Mr. Sanders' campaign about this.
2
I am a tenured professor at a school with a two-tier system. I am fortunate to have tenure, but this article is off-base when it suggests that I have any free time for research. I spend my time teaching and providing a good education for students. There is a two-tier system, but the notion that those with tenure are somehow enjoying benefits at the expense of the adjunct faculty is incorrect.
If my school were funded at a level commensurate with the local public K-12 school district, the college could afford to hire and pay more faculty at living wages. The problem is that states like New Jersey have essentially abandoned funding public higher education and colleges are struggling to survive on a minimal budget.
10
"The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s."
The ratio of Gen X and Millenial professors to boomer professors at my college has finally tipped! In fact, there was a moratorium on hiring for about 30 years, until 2006.
I taught as an adjunct for 12 years before I landed a tenure-track job. I drove, literally, over the mountains and through the woods, to my 3 credit per semester, MWF, single composition class. I was so grateful that I accepted the $11 per hour pay, with no travel reimbursement. Things got better, 3 years later I was teaching 4 courses for a local community college. I also taught software courses for supplemental pay, and I earned a second master's degree along the way. Now I'm gratefully tenured at a large community college.
On my financially delicate journey, I discovered:
1) It didn't matter if I had an MA or PhD, I'd get classes either way. I delayed the PhD. When I do undertake it, my college will pay the costs.
2) My second master's degree in instructional tech was a smart call. I'm a hybrid English associate prof with the right skill set to pioneer high-quality online courses, and that's what caught my hiring committee's attention.
3) Maybe one day, I'll pay off my student loans...
Our applicant pools are low, and it's hiring season. Apply now!
4
Sanders has said: "at least 75 percent of college courses would have to be taught by tenured or tenure-track professors."
But why not add that the pay grade for adjuncts should be at least 75% of what tenure-track and tenured professors make? Adjuncts offer an invaluable service and are routinely exploited. Instead of puffing up the tenured, why not help adjuncts?
2
There is an illusion by some people that getting a PhD automatically means that you should teach at a university, etc. Getting a PhD is about developing skills in higher level reasoning, and at the end of a PhD, this really should be celebrated, it is no easy task.
However, as someone who did their PhD at a top ranked school in the US and is now teaching at comparatively middle of the road university (which I absolutely love, even it if was by this article's implication, a "step down"), I have experienced a wide range of students that have gotten their PhD's, and there are only a few that I think should continue in academia (and this is true of the students at the top ranked uni as well!). To have the best chance of getting an academic job you always need to be at the top of your game, whether it is your GPA, choice of graduate school, how hard you work at said graduate school (ie you need to set yourself apart from other students) etc. If not, then please still enjoy immersing yourself into your PhD topic, but figure out how to use your skill set elsewhere.
11
The idea that you can rise by setting yourself apart show how the academy uses people, though, and feeds the delusion that it's a meritocracy. Professors used to get tenure for publishing one article! Now, you're expected to absorb the toll of writing a thesis and publishing single author papers - often while working to make up for inadequate pay. That bar is even higher for scholars of color who must do more than anyone else for half the recognition. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate who 'should' be in the academy.
3
@female AProf (expat)
I agree. My parents (both professors) said “study what interests you.” I did just that, and have a PhD in art history. I’ve been a fundraiser for more than 20 years. My colleagues—who studied opera, English, history, etc—and I have created exciting careers for ourselves. Study what you love, learn to think, and the rest will follow.
Tenured faculty remaining on the job after age 70 is a scandal. If they love research, give them small offices and let them hang around, but without pay. Another solution is to set a salary cap after a faculty member has had tenure for a number of years, say 20. After that, salaries should be docked on a yearly basis. I worked in academia for 44 years, starting at age 25. I was a department head (chair) when mandatory retirement was still in force. I never saw anyone reach it whose departure was particularly unwelcome.
4
@William Benjamin —were you in mathematics? Most people in the humanities and social sciences don’t begin working until they are closer to 40 than 25.
3
So you would have been ok with your salary being docked every year for 24 out of the 44 years you were in academia? Seriously?
The author leaves the most important aspect of the use of adjuncts out of this article. People are paying big money to have their children (or themselves) taught by people who only make a few thousand bucks a course, don't have any benefits, and often aren't even entitled to an office and a phone.
You can't provide an excellent educational experience under those conditions AND parents and their students do not understand what adjuncting is, nor do they know if their teacher is an adjunct or not.
Many public K-12 schools are required to tell parents when classrooms are over certain limits. If universities are saving money by paying their teachers an extremely low wage, no benefits, and providing no paid office hours, training, office supplies, employee information, etc., they should be required to post this information publicly. Parents and students should know exactly what they are paying for. Basically, most of today's students are being taught by temps.
51
@Elaine
Most people don't care because what's taught at universities isn't necessarily applicable to the the real world. It's the piece of paper with "diploma" written on it that's important. They're checking a box needed for gainful employment in the future.
2
A complete overhaul (revolution?) is needed in higher ed.
Looking beyond the pay and status of faculty, what does increasing reliance on gig faculty mean other than deterioration in quality of instruction and mentoring for undergrads..
Meanwhile, college cost has increased at a higher rate than that for medical care. In medicine, we get new technologies, devices and medications. And there are measures of outcome for care. For higher ed, there is nothing new in educational methods and steadfast avoidance of accountability & evaluation of outcomes for courses, programs of study and for the overall college experience.
As a start overhauling, paying faculty who teach, whether on the track to or tenured or gig for their effectiveness in teaching as measured independently for achieving increases in knowledge and skills so that faculty and students would be allied in the learning enterprise.
Effective teachers would merit more pay for outcomes, and the consumers -- students and parents who pay the tab, would want these teachers, creating pressure for adequate pay for "top talent" teachers. Colleges would have to recognize that consumers want a product (increased knowledge and skills) worth the cost.
For those who don't want to or are not effective teachers, there's the research track of securing grants and publishing through which they can earn their outcome generated pay.
All faculty working effectively, with no early retirees in the ranks.
2
At a time when ignorance can be worn like a badge of honor -- and even catapult a person to the presidency, with the most power of anyone in the world -- it's no surprise that expertise has been devalued so alarmingly. It's also a strong argument against the concept of human evolution, at least in the United States.
20
In the Humanities, the wrongs mentioned here are especially offensive.
Many blame the administrators, and rightly so. But the most egregious bad actors here are the tenured faculty. Many of them dedicate a fair amount of their scholarship to matters of "social and economic justice."
Yet daily, these same arbiters of what is just and right walk the halls of their schools and largely ignore and avert their eyes from the growing army of exploited "colleagues" (often with better degrees!) much like a callous wealthy person steps over a homeless man.
Most tenured faculty actually feel the system is just, and that they, the tenured few, are simply the cream of the crop.
And in their closed door meetings one can hear them squeal, "All Ph.D's are equal, but some are more equal than others."
They are all of them traitors to their disciplines and their profession, and soon enough, the cost-cutters will come for them, as tenure itself slowly disappears.
Remember, my tenured friends: silence = complicity.
51
Part of the current problem that this article doesn't discuss at all is academia's continued insistence on combining research and teaching. You do research to get a PhD; then you try to get a position that involves teaching, a skill in which you may or may not have any experience whatsoever. This produces a workforce that's ill-suited to the demands of higher education and research.
I went into grad school in a STEM field because I wanted to teach. I left grad school before finishing my PhD in part because I found out that my job as tenure-track faculty would be to get published and grub for grant money, neither of which interested me in the slightest. Teaching was considered unimportant, and I got the message that if I focused on it in my career, I'd be consigning myself to a backwater. BTW, I have an adjunct job now, teaching one course a semester while doing other things professionally; I love it.
It seems to me that at least some (not all) of the problems with the academic job market would be solved if academia let the markets for researchers and teachers develop on their own. Researchers can focus on bringing $$$ into their universities without having to "bother with" teaching, and those who like to teach can focus on that as a profession the way high school (and community college) teachers do now. Seems so much more sensible.
7
@Bill Rosenblatt I agree with you 100%. I have a doctorate in nursing and I wanted to teach. Even at colleges and universities that are not research intensive, teaching is not the primary focus for professors. Research, publication (which depends on research) and obtaining grants are the ticket to tenure, job security and higher pay. Most PhD programs don't even train candidates on how to be good teachers. Those commenters who mention the high cost of tuition have a good point. They are paying for research, fancy dormitories and great athletic facilities. Those who actually teach are working in an academic sweat shop.
3
Well, it is very much the same case in the sciences. We do have brain scientists and biochemistry post-docs doing Uber here in Boston.
8
Charles Schwartz at Berkeley used to keep stats on not just the types of academic laborers, but also on all the staffing.
Centralized staffing at the University of California increased a huge amount too in the past decade, all with better job security than the front-line instructors.
The old joke... there are 5 people standing around watching the instructor teach (but not helping with managing students who have issues of enrolling, missing classes, etc)... the bystanders all have better job security than the instructor. And the tenured professor? They are off at a workshop or a conference.
6
I love it. Humanities students say both of the following. 1) studying humanities gives me superior reasoning skills and intellectual insights that others lack. 2) what do you mean I’m unemployable?! Why wasn’t I told?!
6
@Andrew Nielsen
Umm... maybe they want to utilize their reasoning skills in what they love doing most?
That is teaching others and producing excellent research useful to humanity.
And not being slave to a corporation where one spends ones life adding and deleting numbers from an excel sheet.
1
This is an interesting article. My PhD. brother, 31 years at his very well known land grant university, retired about 4 years ago. The 10 years prior pay raises had been meager or non existent. His lab didn't even have running hot water anymore. The focus from administrators was how much grant money he brought in so they could scarf off 25% for "administrative" costs. My brother loved teaching - little credit was given for that. When he retired they filled his position with a Master's level contract person and paid them less than half what he was earning. My brother and I were discussing this situation interestingly just yesterday. He is aware of PhDs have turned down positions because the contract requires them to bring in 5 times their salary in grant money - which has been drastically reduced in recent years. Meanwhile, what this article fails to address is the top heavy administrative staffing and costs at many universities. It also fails to address the higher and higher fees being charged and the longer time it takes to get a degree. Universities spend far too much on Administrative costs, and states have drastically reduced funding - requiring professors to scrounge for dollars not for research, but to maintain a bloated bureaucracy. Convincing students to get a PhD. and not being honest that the very institutions pushing these degrees will refuse to hired them on a tenure track is disgusting.
33
A comparative perspective is required to show the regressiveness of the USA on yet another fact of human living.
I have a PhD in political science and no permanent job. In India I would have been a professor right after my M.A. with a great pension after I retired at 60. India values education and the government funds most universities and colleges.
The problem in the USA is leaving everything to the free market, reducing some professions and skill sets to nothingness. Why is a science degree alone worth of human dignity in this country?
In India you become an assistant professor once you pass a national eligibility test, right after your masters degree. Everyone who passes the exam, which is very passable, gets a guaranteed assistant professor job for life. A PhD is earned as you teach as a professor, there is no fixed timeline for it.
If USA loves its Ivy leagues alone, why does it maintain other state and sub- state institutions, please do away with all of them. Do not give false hopes to your PHD students by offering courses.
And why don’t professors retire in this country? My supervisor is 81 and still working when he should be enjoying retirement on a pension.
7
Well yeah, if you get an advanced degree in the humanities you're really narrowing your marketability.
If you've invested years and years of your life in an education that is so narrowly valued, you're going to risk job instability. How is that a shock?
Every computer, engineering, econ, or biotech doctor that I know is doing fantastic in the private sector. (As are the MDs I know.)
Ray Stance's words really apply here: "You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*."
4
Important to also include the defunding of public higher ed. by the states.
4
Adjuncts were among the first to get slapped by the gig economy. Even the Ivys use slave labor.
5
Too many administrators and spurious job titles " the vice dean of equity" etc.
7
I you are a tenured professor who is getting ready to retire at age 65 and have taught fo over 35 years you TIAA-CREF as gone down over 10% in the last 2 weeks. You will reconsider about waiting 5 more years to retire.
5
The academic job market has been lousy for over 40 years already. When are young people going to get the message? You will not get a job. It's a market and there is an oversupply of people with Ph.Ds. Don't get one if you have to work for a living. It's a poor choice.
7
There are barely any 'good' choices available in the labor market. Avoiding precarity is incredibly hard for anyone without generational wealth.
3
@Chevron2000
Exactly. A childhood friend had formidable skills in the graphic arts, but focused on music and earned a record deal, which collapsed during the Napster era implosion of the record industry. Moved on to using his formidable carpentry skill and ended up a Foreman running framing crews. The 2008 recession drove him to addiction. “Having given up on the arts, I find myself where the ability to build a house from the ground up won’t earn me a paycheck.” Ten years sober, seven of those as a line cook,he’s framing houses again. What, exactly, are non-mba’s supposed to pursue, apart from marrying money?
1
This is not news. Also, why do so many writers just jump from Boomers to Millennials. Generation X needs to rename ourselves the invisible generation. There will never be an X President, jump from Boomers to Millennials. Sandwiched between Boomer triumphalism to Millenial entitlement, gawd. Anyone dumb enough to think an advanced degree in the humanities is a career choice needs to wake up and smell the coffee. It's like fine arts, if you ain't connected, rich, or insanely smart, hardworking, and talented, i.e., an average kind of smart, kind of talented human, welcome to finding another career path. It'll all work out, but please, get up off your knees and stop worshipping the likes of these. Best choice I made was walking away, it's better pay anyways.
5
Just want you all to know , it's not all peaches and cream in the STEM fields either. If you were an unfortunate grad (I was , Winter 2007), during the economic downturn, there were no post-docs. As a STEM PhD, you have a small window of 5 years to post-doc and then move to academia or private industry. Neither were hiring..... and now we are considered obsolete, toiling away in non-field industry jobs for 1/3 of what we thought we were worth, while watching the new grads snap up lucrative post-docs that we are still very qualified and desperate to do. I would give almost everything to conduct research in my field again....I am not too OLD!!!
-Frustrated and heartbroken GenX Phd Chemical Physics
18
At many universities if they created a College of Deans, it would dwarf Colleges of Journalism, Law, Education. and more than a few others.
All hail the mighty MBA.
7
The University of Illini "Common Ground Publishing" refused to publish my "Academic Ramp-Up to Fake News" romp into Northrop Frye's plagiarisms though it took my money and let me read my paper at the University of Pennsylvania during one of UI's sponsored fetes in 2017. Humanities? More like professorial uber-alles considerations of mortgage payments/car notes and considerations of free tuition for their kiddies prevail over junior collegiality.
1
New America is a right-wing foundation. No wonder Carey doesn't consider declining public support for education.
1
Would have been nice too, if he'd mentioned the ever expanding ranks of admin to service the decoupling of tasks actual professors used to do, and the bloated construction budgets for legacy buildings, and the bloated salaries of aforementioned admin. This is not just about having too many Ph.D.s in the pipeline. It's about greed, too.
6
I have a PhD in life sciences with over a decade of experience in post doctoral research. I have hard skills including programming, hardware skills, etc. My prospects for a steady job within academia is close to zero, unless I were willing to move every few years. That's hard to do for people with young families. Industry is the only option. What we need are non profit research institutes (like they have in Europe), where appointment is not tied to teaching. It will also reduce burden on universities trying to handle huge budgets and both UG and graduate programs. Who will fund this? Gates? Buffet? Anyone?
6
The problem here is thinking that today's universities are primarily educational institutions instead of the going business concerns they actually are.
12
This is an old story. Grad students these days understand the dynamic much clearer now. Nearly all of them have better contingency plans. Many explicitly come in with the intention early on to move to the private sector and direct their work to something that is salable. It should also be noted the number of foreign students from developing countries have come to fill our ranks, probably because that American PhD gives them a better chance at Tenure at home than an American student wishing to stay here in the States. As a person who's stayed in the academy without Tenure, I dislike any kind of top down fix. People talk of the good old days that never existed. Sure there was more tenure, but there were a lot of professors that didn't do much and probably deserved to have it rescinded. Now the tenured are by-and-large very productive at what they do, and if they stop being productive, tenure doesn't provide much protection either.
5
Perhaps someone has mentioned it, but public universities (like UCSC) also depend on growing numbers of undergrads for tuition revenues, since states have significantly reduced support for public funding. At the same time, the resources available for capital construction are limited, which means low growth (if any) in classroom and dorm space. In Santa Cruz, this has driven up rents, impoverished grad students and adjunct lecturers, and made it more difficult to hire new tenure track faculty. The costs of all this rise more quickly than does income from the state and tuition (which is why out of state students are valued). So, the perfect storm (I'd use a vulgar term including "cluster," but I don't think that is permitted).
4
@Ronnie The pipeline of students is also drawing in those that are not prepared for a 4 year university (psychologically or academically) Education has become a commodity to be consumed instead of an intellectual exchange. It's been dumbed down which in turn devalues the degree.
1
Just a quick note. The article says, "Some adjunct postings don’t require doctorates." I've worked for 40 years at half a dozen schools as a part-time adjunct, and holding only a masters degree has never been an issue. In fact, I don't recall meeting too many of my fellow adjunct instructors who had a PhD. And if you think about it, at least for the part-timers, it would be odd for someone with a day job to happen to have a PhD. What's more important for the schools is that besides our degrees we have expertise in the often-narrow subject areas that the courses are in. But of course this is one more factor undermining the status of the full-time PhDs.
4
"only the graduates of top-ranked programs have a realistic chance"
(of tenure at top-ranked research universities)
Hasn't this remained constant since at least the 1890's/early 1900's?
2
Of tenure anywhere, not just at prestigious institutions
1
@Laurie Cubbison
That's good I at least remember something from this source on the subject read many years ago:
The Academic Revolution by Christopher Jencks, David Riesman
1
I have been an underpaid graduate instructor. I very much sympathize with all these adjuncts who worked very hard but cannot find employment.
Systemic, foundational reform of higher education is in order. First off, there should be more federal subsidy of State universities as they had in the 1970s. Abatement of administrative bloat is necessary.
Historically, tenure hinged in many disciplines on research. Research and teaching are two distinctly different skills. Many tenured individuals make their bones with research, receive tenure, then teach 2-3 classes per week in what amounts to a near sinecure and carte blanche to pursue research as they like it.
A second track for tenure based exclusively on teaching should be designed. Then these teaching professors could lecture 4-5 hours per day, and use the rest of the time for preparation.
That would be a difficult job. But with decent pay and benefits, many would take it. More efficient use of faculty could get more students through the system at a lower cost.
10
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth It's worse than that. Lead researchers at major institutions rarely if ever teach more that one class per semester. And that class is typically a small section of their own graduate students.
1
We all make choices, and reap the benefits (or not) of said choices. The key here is personal decision-making, as well as personal responsibility.
5
Where is the personal responsibility of professors in the humanities and social sciences?
Shouldn’t they be telling incoming PhD students: stay away, there is no job, no dignity after your degree?
5
@Vandana
Education is still worth while. It is up to the Individual to calculate ROI.
1
The job market has always been tough for PhDs even in the sciences. There are too many second and third tier graduate programs that need a steady supply of cheap labor (foreign graduate students) to support the faculty. Most of these programs do not prepare the students adequately for careers in industry and there aren't enough tenure-track faculty positions to go around. So, many of them languish as permanent postdocs in medical schools or end up in non-tenured positions teaching and not doing any research. With the proliferation of online teaching, wages have sunk and these sorts of jobs offer no benefits.
I got my PhD in Chemistry in 1987 and after a postdoctoral stint was fortunate enough to get a good position in industry. I retired after a long career which was reasonably productive and very fulfilling to me. During my career, I have seen my share of PhDs who couldn't write a manuscript, make a presentation or formulate a simple research problem to save their lives. It seemed that all that was needed was needed to get that PhD was to spend the requisite amount of time in the lab to satisfy the faculty advisor. I have also seen PhDs who were eager to get out of the lab for managerial positions.
I think anyone contemplating a PhD should first question their own motivation, try to get into the best possible program, have a deep commitment to doing research and contributing to teaching. A PhD degree in itself is not and should not be an automatic ticket to a good job.
9
Not unlike the two tier union arrangements that came about 20-30 years ago in manufacturing.
3
More education is a broad trend. Banks ask for a degree to be a bank teller these days! In many areas it is not warranted. However, to many people the college experience is life-enriching by itself so its worth it regardless.
A Ph.D. in STEM in particular is personally engaging and a ticket to a good non-academic job. This is the right way to see a Ph.D. -- it has never been the case that you were likely to get a professor job, not even 60 years ago. Do the Ph.D. because you love the subject and want to do unique research with interesting people (and as an open-eyed adult, work to make sure you get this experience and spot pathways to industry while you study). You will get lower pay short term (as a student) but somewhat make it up when you go to industry. You will have rich experiences while studying and also find a more interesting job afterwards that will pay you more than a professor quite likely (Again: as an adult -- you should expect to work to find this job).
This is *exactly* what I tell grad applicants who want to work with me.
-- Physics Prof
12
@JW unfortunately not the case everywhere, and a startup would never hire a PhD, not even at entry level salaries because they are afraid the rest of the workforce will be intimidated.
We are in the age where knowledge, expertise, and smarts (see our President) are all considered liabilities rather than a plus
2
@JW. "A Ph.D. in STEM in particular is personally engaging and a ticket to a good non-academic job."
I disagree. Just because a STEM PhD holder has a better chance of getting a non-academic job than an academic job, it doesn't mean that a STEM PhD is automatically "a ticket" to a job, academic or otherwise. (Maybe it depends on the field?)
2
@Canadian This is where the open-eyed adult part comes in. If you don't have any math skills and in particular no programming, what you are doing isn't really STEM (as far as industry is concerned). So -- pick those up any way you can. Most people find them useful for their research as well but they are invaluable for the job market.
2
This article might lead one to believe that a PhD is only for a career in academia. This is hardly the case. Both industry and government need--and hire--people with well-honed analytical skills, and the deep research of PhD-level training is especially good for this.
The fact is that most universities do a very poor job of connecting their newly-minted PhDs to anything but an academic track. Of course, this has never made sense--one single tenured professor might supervise many dozens of graduate students over their academic lifetime. It's impossible for them all to go into academia. Universities owe it to all their PhD students that they are shown a wide choice of career options, not just the tiny market of academia.
16
@Stubborn Facts As someone who went through many years of PhD and postdoctoral training before ending up in industry for 20 years, I would agree. My grad school did have a career development office, and we would have meetings, talks by scientists working in industry, etc. and this was very helpful. One problem of course is that people's training tends to be fairly specific and narrow, because you usually need to become an expert in your particular topic. So I think it is important to have opportunities to learn about industry jobs and then you have to be sure that your education is broad enough that you can switch to a new area of research. In my industry career, I have switched among a number of different fields, from DNA-based research to immunology and later developing biochemistry assays that can be scaled down for robots to screen thousands of drugs, and later to neuroscience, something I had zero background in to start. Ideally, you college and graduate degrees should prepare you to be more than a specialist, it should teach you how to tackle new areas.
5
It doesn't help that regional and national accrediting bodies almost entirely ignore the adjunctification of the faculty workforce. Middle States, for example, deploys and applies its standards on learning outcomes assessment and deemphasizes the input/resources side of the learning equation. In other words MS is happy to accredit as long as a college proves students are learning; who cares what the instructors are paid.
Accreditation is the gateway to federal financial aid. So maybe accreditors need to step up and call some of the more exploitative schools to task as a standards violation.
14
I have not looked at the demographics for faculty in STEM, so I have to limit my comments to my own experiences. Years ago I understood that I had some kind of unwritten obligation to "move on" at 65 or thereabouts. I was probably 40s when I developed that notion.
I'm now 66 and still going at it as a long tenured full prof in a life sciences department. However, I intend to finish up existing grant and student obligations over the next year or two, and to step down. It's time for "new blood," but given the nature of university budgets there is no assurance that I will actually be replaced as a slot opens up.
Unfortunately, I see too many of my colleagues who are doing too little yet still hanging on well past 65, well past 70 even. This isn't healthy. Though there might be no legal obligation to retire, we would do well to follow Europe and Japan and provide exceptions for employment after 67-68 to only those of the very highest caliber.
Those of us who have been fortunate enough to enjoy a productive life in academe ought to recognize a moral obligation to pass it on rather than to hang on.
20
@Gdawg
The US military actually has had a long standing weeding out policy. If you haven't made rank of enlisted E-6 or the officer grade equivalent of major you can't stay past 20 years, and need additional rank to continue to 30 years.
1
@slangpdx yes, i'm familiar with up or out... that doesn't exist in academia except for the jump from asst to associate prof with tenure
with the advent of laws prohibiting age discrimination, past policies for retirement flew out the window
in the uniformed services, it's not so much age that drives one out as rank, and i can't even think of anyone who's been active duty at 65
I would like to share my experiences and reflections on a failed academic career (but a moderately successful scholarly one), but I’m pretty sure it would do no one (especially me) any good. When I dropped out of law school in the mid-80s, I did do some research on the future of academia. The coming population bubble and retirement of an aging professorship convinced me of the viability of a career in the humanities as a college professor. What our author fails to mention is the shift in so many state legislatures to a fiscal conservatism that strangled higher ed budgets and demanded the short term solution of adjunct teaching. And the consequences of this short-term thinking, along with public demands for “accountability” and the growing sense that higher ed is a service industry, are run-away grade inflation, coupled with a dumbing down of the curriculum, to the point where college grads now write in emojis. In short, it’s is not just that there are a lot of hard luck PhD’s on food stamps; it is that, as a democracy, we have stopped demanding the critical apparatuses that would ensure our success. I need only point out the current political climate to underscore this last point.
1373
@Daniel Connolly "short-term thinking" across the board has taken over vast swathes of American life, government policy and business strategy. Make Money Fast is the American ethos.
104
@Daniel Connolly, and here in Vermont, every night during Jeopardy, which is the only TV I watch there are countless PSAs about STEM education. Math and Science, Math and Science, Math and Science, Math and Science, Makes me ill. I will hate you now but I will love you later!
11
@Daniel Connolly
welcome to the real world where there is no unlimited pot of money to pay for everything you want. every business and government, not to mention individuals, have to deal with it so welcome to the club
16
Meanwhile, the College Presidents, Deans and Department Heads have decided they all deserve CEO type salaries. I am wondering what will happen to all these adjuncts when the student loan bubble bursts. There are people who are near retirement and have still not paid off their student loans. Even Bernie Sanders, if elected President, has no magic wand to make $ 2 Trillion in Debt go away.
996
@Rahul Exactly. And we need seven assistant deans who in turn need support staff.
52
@Rahul Also, the state university football coach (or, in some states, basketball coach) is usually the highest paid public employee any given state.
52
@Rahul In Canada it's the person who manages the school's investment portfolio who gets the top salary. That guy's salary was about $700,000 at U of T I think. The President only made half a million or so.
19
I did not consider my employment prospects when I started my Ph.D. program 35 years ago. I was one of the lucky ones, demand for my field turned out to be strong. I would urge anybody who is considering a Ph.D. today to consider not only their interest in the field but also their employment prospects. This is not only a problem for humanities, it affects some science fields too.
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No one article can cover every aspect of a complex situation, but another thing not mentioned here is that there was reporting, backed by government research, in the late 70's, early 80's about the coming "wave" of professor shortages expected when the profs hired after WWII retired. Many Ph.D.s in that era went to get a doctorate thinking their employment situation was quite good. They didn't know administrators would simply let profs retire and then gobble up the positions into administrative salaries, or close or downsize departments instead of hiring replacements. Administrators knew. Prospective Ph.Ds did not. So don't blame yourself; if you'd had access to that information (in a pre-internet age), you would have found yourself in the same boat - as many of us did.
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@Sara I had forgotten that! At my undergraduate graduation ceremony someone told us that it was the perfect time to get a Ph,D. because there would be so many opportunities for us due to the wave of professorial retirements.
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@Joel Rudin I agree with you. My field is academic medicine so not as economically pressed as other fields. Nevertheless, when I was younger, I made it a point to seek experiences outside of academia, e.g. in private practices and HMOs, etc. For a while, I worked for a large private multi-specialty groups which had much better pay, benefits, and partnership options (pretty much guaranteed if you didn't mess up, unlike tenure where you didn't have any guarantees beforehand) than any academic position I was offered/ considering. These days, I have 1 foot back in academia but my private practice days provide me with a nice financial cushion.
When I speak to younger people, I advise them to look beyond academia keeping in mind that their professors may not have any or substantial experience outside so they may need to seek out opportunities themselves. For the PhDs I encounter, I suggest they speak to people working in government, industry, nonprofits...etc.
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Although the data are difficult to ascertain (some adjuncts have full time jobs elsewhere and simply want to teach only a course or two on the side), AAUP data indicates the shift from tenure/tenure-track began in the 1980s, especially in Rust-Belt states like Michigan and in California where tuition to U. of California and the Cal State systems were kept artificially low by hiring adjuncts. Baby boomer Ph.D.s were also flooding the markets. State funding began to shift away when Medicaid expenses began to soar, also in this period. As I recall, only about 30% of faculty position were full time by 1990s, according to AAUP data. Frankly, university grad departments did a lot of lying for decades. Today, they are more candid with grad students about grim prospects. (I discourage the undergrads I teach from going to grad school in arts and sciences.)
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@FrederickRLynch
I think the point Mr. Carey is making is the Great Recession took a trend and drove it over a cliff. Now ten years later, there are quite a few dissatisfied PhDs who are saddled with unmanageable debt and no job prospects. That's a problem.
"The unemployment line isn't just for philosophy majors anymore; useful people are beginning to feel the pinch."
Or so the joke goes...
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@FrederickRLynch Medicaid is an example of the many new programs governments have started since the 50s, and reluctance to raise taxes to fund them led to cheese-paring pre-existing obligations like education and highway maintenance. Since we Americans apparently won't pay sufficient taxes, we need to curb our appetite for government functions of all sorts. Or prioritize and not have so many functions. Or pay more and have fewer new electronic devices to amuse ourselves. Or continue our descent to decay.
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@Jim, or consider a thoughtful reduction in the military industrial complex, with massive amounts of troops stationed all over the world and military bases still located in too many Congressional districts. And as if that weren’t enough, now a Space Force!
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I'm put off by some of the comments in this thread. I don't want to live in a society that denigrates other people for pursuing higher education, regardless if it is in a STEM or humanities field. That goes to the very bedrock of whether our nation values education and speaks to the insidious nature of anti-intellectualism.
I see way too many people who scoff at someone pursuing a humanities or arts degree because of the perception that those folks will never be able to support themselves. I see that view as incredibly narrow-minded. As someone with a very job-specific degree, I still can see the value in a humanities degree. It speaks to versatility and being well-rounded. As a military member, I know our community highly prizes the idea of warrior-philosopher and that is backed up by the high numbers of officers up and down the chain of command with humanities degrees.
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@Cory I think the main issues is will they earn enough to pay off their student loans...which of course begs the question, why do you have to choose a field that may not interest you because you have to pay back student loans.
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@Cory You are right. STEM is an ideology intended to exclude vital sources of knowledge and critique. I say this as a college professor. When industry can drive down the salaries of tech workers due to a saturated market, they will. To have people with little knowledge of history, civics, or humanist values in technocratic ranks won't serve the US well in the long run. We'll be making the same mistakes as we have in the past.
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I just want to write about 1 corner of this topic. Today our universities , except perhaps for the very top patina, are run by managers often who received their degrees from insignificant universities but whose major qualification is that they are able to follow orders from state or provincial governing boards. Management has greatly changed and faculty, even tenured faculty, have to be very careful about what they say in or out of class. The people running universities went to inadequate universities themselves that it would appear that they have no idea what a university is supposed to be about. They'll blame it on squeezing budgets, of course. There was a time when a knowledgeable president of a university would sit down with members of that University's board and explain to people who often what chosen for political or other reasons what being a University was about. Today the people on those boards have more and more become entirely political appointees and they just follow orders from the government. This, too, is what's killing the creativity of our universities.
It's not just about Job insecurities. since salary increases and universities have not kept up with inflation over the past 40 years. The only way for even a tenured professor to keep his or her salary above inflation was to move. In order to move this professor would have to show amazing strength in a field. So even tenured careers have changed.
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Adjuncts need to form or join labor unions and demand better pay and benefits. Going on strike would probably actually HELP their bank accounts rather than hurt them, since working as a barista at Starbucks would pay better and require a lot fewer hours, leaving them time to picket their academic workplace and look for a more remunerative job in business or another profession. Don't agonize, organize!
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The curse on the US universities is the insane amount of funding that goes to football stadia, coach salaries, etc.
To all the jobless PhDs, consider what many highly qualified immigrants do coming to the US, get faculty positions abroad in countries where funding is available. China for example. Emigrate until conditions improve.
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The 'bleak landscape' depends entirely on what field you enter. In contrast to the humanities, there is a looming shortage in new accounting doctorates.
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i have a psychology PhD from an ivy league university and have taught both there and in the UC system. my PhD wife taught in the state colleges of missouri and california.
i don't really understand this article.
what is the gravamen? the issue of pay equity in adjuncts is conflated with the decline in tenured positions and in tenure turnover, which is conflated with a recession, budget policies, educational debt, federal law, the academic job market and a peculiarly malign interpretation of university administrations.
you're aware, right, of how long it takes to conduct a tenure track hiring search, and the politics involved in every case?
i found "boring" undergraduates the most fun and stimulating to teach. not only are they curious and armed with insightful questions, they bring you the excitement of learning with a life course still uncharted. graduate students tend to be grinders inside a very narrow lane.
it's true that "humanities" in general are much less sought after degrees today than generations ago. (i have an BA in comparative literature from the 1970s.) well, look before you leap.
for the secular decline in tenured positions, see under: wall st., bioresearch, government work, start ups, corporations, the general rush for more money.
job markets can be brutal, true. also: an evergreen fact of life.
finally: "8 years or more" to complete a doctorate is wildly wrong. the typical range is 4 to 6 years. (i did it in 4.)
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@drollere "8 years or more" is absolutely not wrong, depending on your field. If you are pursuing a degree in history, for example, and are writing a dissertation that requires extensive travel overseas and archival work, I know many who have taken 10 years to complete their degree. Personally, I was required to complete 3.5 years of coursework before even taking exams, and writing a dissertation, making a 4 year, or even 6 year completion goal entirely unrealistic. You seem to be speaking from a place of privilege, and might need to explore the challenges that many PhD's face who did not have a quick, sweet, ivy degree in their pocket to tackle the job market with.
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@drollere To borrow a phrase from my (CSU system) students: ok boomer! Your take on this sounds symptomatic of your considerable generational privilege and I would encourage you to reflect on that. The involved and political nature of tenure track searches is not the reason we don’t have enough tenure track positions for all the deserving phds out there; the neoliberal university and late stage capitalism turning education into a commodity are. I am one of the lucky ones to be on the tenure track just a few years out of an international phd program. My myriad friends and colleagues, adjuncting themselves to death, are not. It is not because of search committees. I love that Bernie is targeting these issues at a structural level.
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To those complaining about the increase of Administrators replacing faculty positions.
Does anyone think those "new" administrators don't have MFAs, JD's, and PhD's? - of course they do, so while full time teaching faculty may be lessened, the number of FULL time employed in academia should include total hires, not just full timers.
BTW, they are also your colleagues, who aren't just hangars on who do nothing. Would any of you send your precious and brilliant kids to a school that didn't have an art gallery, office of advising? or career services? or a multicultural center? If they answer is yes, then complain on, but if the answer is no, the stop complaining you hypocrites.
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We know universities have two missions. One is to create knowledge and the other is to teach. The vast majority of college professors teach 3 courses a week.
Most should teach 5.
Many but not all, have reached tenure and lost their energy, passion, and drive to break new ground in their field.
Again, many but not, all are this category. They are not creating new knowledge.
The university needs to develop some reasonable criteria to sort out the mediocre from the best and the brightest and put them to work teaching classes.
This will either create more tenure track positions or help cut costs.
The days of the pamper professor are gone. College is a rite of passage for far too many disinterested students attending because that is what you do after high school. The truth is most college classes are less challenging than a high school AP course.
So lets get off our pretend horses and teach!
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Like show business, music business, or pro sports, tenured academia is a long-shot. Either accept being an extra, doing gig work, or playing in the minor-leagues, or find something with better prospects. Adjunct work would't exist if someone weren't willing to do it.
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I left a physics undergraduate program to get into industry on 2005 recognizing the magnitude of the problem. I had nearly 4.0 GPA on my fields of study, had research experience hence I had references beyond belief. And I left... why?
Endless supply of immigrants run STEM PHDs (most programs are over 80 percent immigrant), driven by immigration laws, universities' addiction to cheaply drained brain power and immigrants' own desire to get a leg up on eventual green card applications. Yes I was an immigrant back then so I know the story inside out.
Can this change? Foundations of drive... universities need research for rankings and funding, professors publish or perish and immigrants want to be come Americans... so let that sink in for a second... answer is a definite No.
When I left Physics program, average PHD spent five years as post-doc... now it must be around 50 years, indefinite post-doc/adjunct.
Academia's role in preparing students for a real future in industry is highly debatable, combined with this PHD trap makes me believe we are ready for a disruption in Academic model of education.
If you are like me, a rock-start undergrad, thinking of your PHD options... please note that I saved myself from this humilating future, and now am rocking and rolling... made insane money, started startups... so could u. Avoid PHDs, not even for data science... there are better alternatives.
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Aren't more people getting Phd's in useless fields? It seems like it. This probably has to do with why it's lost its market power.
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As long as adjunct faculty bear this unfair burden, it is unconscionable for any politician to promise free tuition, as our governor in California is doing with community colleges.
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Would be a better article if it tracked where the exponential increase in college tuition is going.
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