
Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care - nkurz
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-teaching-class/
======
x0054
It is stunning that a public school teacher apparently makes almost 2x what a
college teacher makes, at least in California. Mind you, I am not arguing that
school teachers should make less, collage profs should make more. This is
amazing though, were is the money going.

Anecdotally, I think a lot of the money is spent on outside services through a
corrupt bidding process. Back in 2008 I used to run a document scanning
company. We did large contracts for the state of California and the Four
Seasons Hotel chain. We had glowing recommendations from all of our customers,
including a lot of large businesses in San Diego. So, foolishly, we thought we
could toss our hat into the ring when UCSD started looking for a company to do
their document management. Our bid was (based on what we could find out)
roughly 1/2 of the winning bid. We had all the required bonds, same quality,
faster turnaround time, and we offered more services. We didn't get the job.
So UCSD paid twice as much for the same document scanning service, meanwhile
some poor adjunkt professor is eating cat food! Great!

~~~
Aqueous
Yes. I worked for a university briefly as a staff member. Our university sung
far and wide about how it just raised $400 million for its endowment in its
most recent fundraising campaign, and yet, it couldn't afford to pay me more
than a $25,000 salary in the IT department. How on earth is this possible?
It's probably in all the unseen costs they pay out in contracts to
subcontractors. But another clue might be this: during the time of my
employment, there were several ongoing, large construction projects.

Universities are obsessed with the rankings of US News. And for some reason,
they feel that campus renewal and renovation construction projects are the
secret to mastering them. So instead of paying a decent wage to the people who
actually comprise the "college experience" for their students, they pay
outsized amounts to further improve their already glittering campus so that it
looks better on the 15 minute admissions tour that prospective students take.

Somewhere the priorities are out of whack. I think if universities stopped
spending so much money gaming the rankings, they might realize that paying
their staff more and paying their faculty more would translate into a better,
more involved college experience for their students. And that, in turn, would
make their students evangelize to other prospective students about how much
they love their college...

Improve the product, not the marketing.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Once upon a time, administration was 20% of college budgets. It's now 50%
(guess who does budgeting?). You need look no further than that to find your
answer.

~~~
aianus
They also have to spend a lot of money on computer labs, stadiums and gyms and
such to boost the reputation and attractiveness of the school. It's much
easier to judge how beautiful and modern a school is during a quick visit than
it is to judge teaching quality.

Furthermore, 18-year-olds with guaranteed loans don't look at the price tags
for those gimmicks rationally. When you're a kid with $300 in the bank the
difference between a $50,000 loan and a $80,000 loan is so abstract it might
as well not exist.

Combine those two factors and you get runaway spending and debt with little
emphasis on teaching quality.

------
ForHackernews
Slightly ironic, but Guernica Magazine has a "jobs" page on their site:
[http://www.guernicamag.com/jobs/](http://www.guernicamag.com/jobs/)

If you click through, you'll find that all of their positions are unpaid. It
seems that magazine editor is no longer a middle-class job, either. You have
to be rich enough to be able to work for free.

------
soup10
So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and
less. Where is the money going??

~~~
cheepin
Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides
teacher's salaries.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
I thought sports were mainly profit centers.

~~~
cheepin
Not exactly true:

[http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-
Ar...](http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-
Cow2.aspx)

------
pattisapu
Good point on how the pay problem for adjunct faculty is intertwined with the
"everyone gets a trophy" problem for students:

> “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places
> to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct,
> and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.”
> Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca
> Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,”
> “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”

~~~
rdtsc
Saw that happen.

Adjunct instructors went out of their way to be friendly, and non-
confrontational. They would let stuff slide, exam do-overs, class meetings
held at coffee shops etc etc.

Tenured professor not giving a damn about teaching, or being at least socially
cordial. Some are just complete assholes.

Even saw the the behavior change when a professor got tenure. It was a pretty
sharp switch to "don't give a fuck about anything" in a matter of a semester.

I am saying this as an average pattern I noticed, at one particular place,
there are exceptions of course...

~~~
Steuard
Interestingly, I saw more than one fantastic teacher get _denied_ tenure in my
graduate department (a top research university), and there was always a rumor
floating around that it was because they spent effort on teaching that could
have instead gone to research. (One of them had written a textbook, and was
told pretty explicitly that doing so had been a major mistake.) I've never
heard of anyone getting denied tenure there or in any similar program for
mediocre teaching evaluations.

Meanwhile, at the private liberal arts college where I teach, most of my
senior colleagues are just as committed to good teaching as my junior
colleagues are. (The younger folks may be more innovative, but by and large
they don't _care_ more.) I've never seen someone's teaching go downhill when
they get tenure; if anything, the research pressure eases up a bit at that
point and they feel free to focus a bit more on the classroom.

So maybe what you've observed about tenure is accurate in some places, but
it's at odds with the places I've been.

------
xarien
Let's change the terminology a bit here. A professor is someone with tenure is
on a tenure track. A lecturer is someone who is not. The article isn't talking
about professors, which in the USA relies on research, publishing, obtaining
grants, and tenure. Yes, a lecturer teaching a low demand subject is going to
have a hard time. Just like most positions, there exists a hierarchy. The
reason why this doesn't exist for primary and secondary educators is because
of unions and that can be argued either way.

------
hibikir
I think this is a natural result of having so many kids that have no idea of
what to do in life.

Take a snapshot of the labor force of a country. Then try to figure out how
many of those professions a high school kid understands. Do they know what
those people find rewarding about their job? What they don't? Do they have any
idea of how an entire career might look like? They don't. So when you ask one
of those kids what they'll want to do when they stop formal education, they'll
go back to the few things that they are taught are desirable, and the few
other occupations that are close to them. One of which, for every single kid,
is to teach, since they've been surrounded by them all their lives.

Keeping studying after getting a Bachelor's is also a very tempting option for
kids that are afraid of change. Think of something very different from
college, or get a master's? Go look for a job, or get a Ph.D? Inertia makes
some people go for advanced degrees, even though they don't really understand
the road they are getting into.

I know plenty of people who finished a Ph.D, started doing post docs, then
realized that now their options had narrowed significantly, that the tenure
track was not going to happen any time soon, so their options were to become
adjuncts, study even more to consider teaching at a high school, or accept
that 5-10 years worth of education was completely wasted. This leads to a
major glut of qualified people, which then get paid very little.

I believe we should spend a whole lot of effort teaching kids what odds they
are actually facing when they make their career choices. I still meet interns
that are doing post graduate education at the same time that don't realize how
terrible the odds really are, and that's with them working in a company that
is one of the few industry outlets out there for people that went into Ph.Ds
and then saw how scary the teaching market was, so it's not like they cannot
hear plenty of stories.

Bad information just leads to bad resource allocation for all of us. We should
help with that.

~~~
btown
Passion is a weird thing. If a prospective adjunct walks up to you and says
"I'm passionate about teaching in higher education," or "I derive what I judge
to be a large amount of utility from the prospect of teaching in higher
education," is it bad resource allocation for him or her to enter that market,
because you think that if they had had a different set of inputs (information)
earlier in their life, they may have become passionate about something else,
or had a different weighting on their utility function? Who are we to say our
ideas for what they should do are better?

By all means, we as a society should discourage people who don't know what
they want to do from taking post-graduate education as a default choice, and
we should discourage people who don't derive utility from teaching from being
in the adjunct labor market. But I think that the majority of people in the
adjunct labor market would actually say quotes like the ones above - they're
not just "kids" without agency or passion for the work. And they would
probably find it demeaning for the top post here to deign to "help" them to
choose "rewarding... career choices." I'm pretty sure they've already chosen.

If we're going to spread information, let's focus on spreading transparency
about hiring practices at universities to the students and grant-givers who
fund their budgets.

------
steveklabnik
I was once offered an adjunct position to teach a class at my alma mater. They
were excited to let me know I'd be paid $3,000 for teaching the class.

I had to turn them down, as I was already doing private corporate trainings,
where we charged $3,000/day.

I didn't get paid that much, obviously, but I thought it was really amusing
that the amounts lined up.

------
goldfeld
These basal, fundamental flaws in the educational system give me pause to awe,
and a gut feeling the US is gonna get trampled many times over by the likes of
China within some decades. So little regulation and such harsh capitalism is
eating its heart out bit by bit. I guess what keeps America bright at this
point is a legacy from the past century, that's slowly eroding, and the brain
drain sucked chiefly out of Asia and Eastern Europe--at least the same hands-
off market attracts those people with today a stronger educational background
than the average educated American, but how sustainable is it to keep
importing talent? Is the power of capital enough to keep the american
infrastructure and investment momentum on american grounds indefinitely?

~~~
jdreaver
Such little regulation? Harsh capitalism?

Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Most of the
US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. Most university
students go to public schools. Students get ridiculous loans they can't
default on, courtesy of the government.

Harsh capitalism would be harsh on the universities who cling to a dying
lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries. It would punish
universities who don't produce results, instead of giving them students with
free loans from the taxpayers. Harsh capitalism would see universities that
can't evolve disappear.

I feel like blaming things on capitalism and lack of regulation is so
overplayed and fashionable that people can't take a second to think that maybe
regulation and government caused the problem in the first place. Everything
the government does right is lauded while everything it does wrong is blamed
on "corporate interests" and capitalism.

~~~
rdtsc
> Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government.

Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students
need 6 figure loans to graduate.

> Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government.

As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a
degree?" \-- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from
Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from
Lockheed".

> Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the
> government.

The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to
universities without needing loans. If Universities are public, they should
admit based on merit. And instead of cycling money through govt to student to
university, just subsidize the university and make sure it doesn't spend money
on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers
and other crap that is not needed. Maybe if it is too hard, just increase % of
admitted students based on merit, some that couldn't quite make it and are
rich perhaps could buy their way in.

> maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place.

Can you point to an example of an attested and well functioning higher
learning system not regulated and propped by a government?

~~~
jdreaver
> Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students
> need 6 figure loans to graduate.

I argue that it is precisely because of government intervention that these
things happen.

> As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a
> degree?" \-- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from
> Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from
> Lockheed".

Are you implying that without government, we as a society would be unable to
educate people?

> The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to
> universities without needing loans.

That will make universities even more inefficient. Do you know what will
ensure "make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of
bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed?" The
fear of failure that universities don't experience now. The fear that if you
don't do your job, students will not willingly give you money. "Harsh
capitalism" solves that problem.

~~~
rdtsc
> Are you implying that without government, we as a society would be unable to
> educate people?

Well I don't have to imply you just have to show a few example of a successful
world renown university run completely outside the control of a government.
There are example of successful higher education institutions controlled and
sponsored by governments. Western Europe has those example.

> The fear of failure that universities don't experience now.

Again, can you show one single example of a university outside the control of
government that accomplishes and is driven by this mythical fear.

> "Harsh capitalism" solves that problem

Be honest now, have you been reading some Ayn Rand? That is fiction you know
that, right?

------
carsongross
The education meat grinder destroys adjuncts, it saddles many students with
crushing, non-self-liquidating debt and it outpaces inflation faster than any
other major cost category:

[http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/April/130430/6C71...](http://media2.s-nbcnews.com/j/streams/2013/April/130430/6C7154731-allison-
linnmsnbc6B6BD59F-9F84-0E5A-9652-32F626A03B51.blocks_desktop_medium.jpg)

A bad product, the employees and customers are treated poorly, and prices are
skyrocketing. Hmmm.

~~~
mabhatter
It begs the question "where the hell is my tuition going?"

I was taking at a private "degree mill" part time classes at $180 per credit
hour. The school required 7 students to teach a 4 credit class during normal
hours. So at the minimum number of students the school was just making enough
money for overhead... Most clases were 10-15 students. It was a private
school, so tuition covered almost all their bills, no state funding.

Now ask where sutdents in State Funded Colleges money is going when there are
50 students (and more!) in a class? Where the hell is the undergrad tuition
money going if the school only pays "minimum wage" for adjunct or grad school
staff?? Where is State and Federal dinging going if Undergrads are paying more
than their share of the university bills? It's not gping to TEACHING... And
it's not going to "student contact" professors either, and its not
"healthcare" or "retirement"... There's a giant money hole in the system.

~~~
nmrm
You sound like you're trying to justify a bad decision...

Outside of the top-ranked flagship state schools -- which carry as much
prestige as an ivy in some fields (e.g. in CS uiuc, u.w., austin, etc.) --
state schools are actually by far the best bang for the buck around.

For example, $180/cr is actually not far off from what most non-flagship state
schools cost. In fact, there are schools in my state that cost within $10 or
so of that. Crucially, all these institutions have quite good reputations in
the region, no one perceives them as diploma mills, and they all have great CS
departments with a sense of continuity.

------
danso
This doesn't invalidate the OP's message in a meaningful way, but if you're
interested in the opening anecdote, a reporter from Slate delved deep into the
circumstances of Ms. Vojtko and found a more complex story than one just of
woe:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/20...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html)

------
CurtMonash
There's a deeply-established credentialing systems that would blend very well
with MOOCs and the like. That said, it's not the US undergrad one, and there's
a worldwide belief that US university credentials are a big deal.

I don't know what things are like now, but in my grandfather's day European
universities had a very different credentialing system from US undergrad
institutions. In lieu of course credit, course-based grades, etc., they simply
had a battery of (oral) examinations at the end.

US grad schools can be much like that. In essence, there were no course
requirements for a PhD in mathematics at Harvard, but rather a three-day
Qualifying Examination, a Minor Thesis (don't ask), and a traditional
dissertation. Much the same was true of a physics PhD at Princeton then (the
1970s), except that there was an experiment in the mix (even for
theoreticians). And in the Princeton math department, the joke was that
students were asked the first day "Does anybody wish to submit his thesis?",
and the record was 3 months.

------
javajosh
The first issue I'd like addressed is the outright _fraud_ that is going on
here: schools are hiring adjunct professors to teach class, and then _don 't
pay them to grade papers or meat with students_?

The other issue is the potential for market dynamics to correct these problems
with college, if they exist: spending too much on admins, and skimping
terribly on the teaching. Essentially kids are getting stiffed, and then
employers are getting sub-par employees. If kids are going to college to get a
better job, then these decisions on the part of schools are hurting them.

That said, if the economy really is all "bullshit jobs" (a sentiment that has
floated around here recently) then the college admins know it won't matter how
badly they educate the kids, and they'll never be found out. If that's the
case, then I'd argue our larger concern is the fact that so many jobs are
bullshit.

------
jessaustin
This is a direct and entirely predictable result of the publicly-administered,
nondischargeable-through-bankruptcy student loans. We can't have everyone
going to college _and also_ have all colleges be nice workplaces. Society has
recently taken the former option, but one can imagine that decision changing.

------
tn13
This just means that college teachers in certain cases are in high supply.

~~~
neolefty
One of the callout quotes from the article:

    
    
        Of course it’s possible to love what one does, be good at it, and still be exploited.
    

A job that people love, with a glut of qualified people. "I always dreamed of
being a professor."

~~~
tn13
The left liberals put themselves in high seats and decide who is being
exploited and who is not. This is absolute thuggery. A Job and salary is the
contract between two parties and everyone else should stay out of it.

------
xrange
>“The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I
said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person
for whom she was called in to help.”

So it is unusual now, but it is going to become more common in the future?

> So adjuncting is decidedly not a middle-class job. But it does sound like
> one, probably because, before the adjunct bubble, it was.

..."Professor" sounds like a middle-class job. I'm not in academia, but when I
was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded like a grad student on a stipend.

~~~
nmrm
> I'm not in academia, but when I was in college in the 90's, adjunct sounded
> like a grad student on a stipend.

This attitude was perhaps more appropriate a decade ago, before adjunct
faculty were covering a significant portion of the course load and students
could reasonably expect most of their courses to be taught by people with the
word "professor" in their job title.

------
mgback
It is stunning to me that such well educated and hard working people would
want to work in such a corrupt system instead of striking out on their own for
the betterment of society.

~~~
lilsunnybee
A poverty wage is more livable than no wage at all; most adjunct faculty don't
have the financial security to do some sort of revolutionary startup, and
there are also only so many "radical" ideas that would attract investment from
moneyed interests / hold the promise of huge profit.

------
santaclaus
Do college rankings take the percentage of classes taught by tenure track
professors into account? US News should dock schools with greater than X% of
courses taught by adjuncts.

~~~
cpwright
From a student's perspective that doesn't necessarily make sense. Tenure track
professors could be great researchers, but that doesn't mean they are great
teachers. Instructors, adjuncts, or graduate students can all teach well,
oftentimes as well as a tenure track professor.

------
jal278
You would think with so many colleges in existence, that some of them would
resist this sort of policy -- are there counter-examples to the trend towards
increasing 'adjunctization'?

Also, if the cause of adjunctization is rising administrative costs in
colleges -- are there any universities that have figured out that problem?
That is, how to prevent a bloated bureaucracy of overpaid administrators?

------
re_todd
I knew a professor who was an adjunct. She was nice, taught the class well,
was very intelligent, and even wrote a textbook used by other universities.
She still had trouble finding steady teaching work.

------
hershel
Teachers would probably have bigger problems.

According to clay christensen , the guy behind "the innovator's dillema" ,
more than 50% of colleges will go bankrupt soon(until 2020/2024).

~~~
DennisP
I found that pretty startling, so I googled and found this article:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-
colleges-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-14/small-u-s-colleges-
battle-death-spiral-as-enrollment-drops.html)

------
grimmfang
>Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are
adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health
insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in
1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this
percentage had shrunk to 33.5.

Would be interesting to know if college prices began rising at a higher ratio
to the CPI around this time.

------
aosmith
And college is viewed by some as having dubious value. I know plenty of kids
who racked up $200k in loans and can't find a job for the life of them.

------
TheMagicHorsey
American education is such a mess. First, it feels like the majority of
American college students graduate from college after spending four years on
material that makes them no more appealing to employers. Second, there seems
to be a thick layer of insulation between market signals and students, so that
students can't even figure out what they should be learning, even if they were
motivated to do so.

Third, colleges seem to teach whatever garbage they feel like, slap a "major"
label on it, and charge a ridiculous amount for it. As institutions you would
be hard pressed to find more inefficient organizations in the economy. I can't
for the life of me understand where all the money is going. It shouldn't cost
$100,000 to turn a bright high school student into a programmer in four years.
In some European countries they do a better job in two years, with one third
the budget, even though labor costs are higher (see Sweden).

We have to face the fact that a lot of college lecturers are zero value-add to
their pupils. This is a big problem underlying the salary issue that is hardly
ever discussed. Moving outwards, many college programs are zero value add too
... outside the stamp of a degree which they confer. Which if you think about
it, you could get cheaper abroad.

Only a matter of time before India or some Baltic state makes cheap degrees
available to US citizenship holders at cut-rate prices. I don't think American
employers care much where your degree is from ... at least for engineers ...
so long as you have the right to work in America ... which a citizen would
have.

~~~
gaius
_I don 't think American employers care much where your degree is from ... at
least for engineers ... so long as you have the right to work in America ...
which a citizen would have._

Sure they do. Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford.
The name is more important than even graduating, even "Harvard dropout" has a
certain cachet.

~~~
eshvk
> Try getting a job at Google without a degree from MIT/Stanford.

I know a lot of people working at Google who don't even have degrees. There
are over 5,000 Engineers in Google's American HQ. Thinking that everyone of
them works there purely because of the brand name of whatever college they
went to seems to be a rather self-limiting belief.

------
KoalaOnesie
The author is correct, "adjunct" perfectly describes the fact that teaching is
an add-on at most universities. Those institutions exist to obtain grants for
research and donations from alumni. Educating undergrads is an unfortunately
coincidence from the perspective of most tuition-gathering organizations.

------
worldpeace
All of these brilliant people have driven their institutions into the ground
chasing rankings and fads like diversity and prestige buildings. Universities
have taken on mountains of debt, and just like the portfolios of those
university trained traders on Wall Street that destroyed the world a few years
ago, they are very susceptible to unthinkable events like young people no
longer finding college worth the money. It will only take a small decrease in
enrollment rates for the wheels to come off. Bankruptcy is all but guaranteed.

~~~
dgabriel
Diversity is not a fad, and college entrance is more competitive than it has
ever been.

------
Codhisattva
RCA takes this back to Reagan's War on Education. It's ongoing and it's
destroyed the most important institution in the nation.

------
baxterross
dying industry, dying profession.

------
__xtrimsky
At my computer science university (private university with HQ based in France)
in downtown San Francisco, teachers were paid between 100$ and 300$ / hr,
which I find decent.

100$ was mostly for teachers with not much experience, mostly students that
graduated last year and were helping out as teachers.

~~~
ryen
Do you have a source for these numbers? $100/hr is highly suspect for
"students that graduated last year and were helping out as teachers".

~~~
bsder
Define "hour". Hour in the classroom? Possibly. Assume a 12 week semester and
6 hours per week. Last time I taught a semester, I got about $5,000, so that
is _nominally_ $70 per hour.

However, that doesn't count time answering student questions. That doesn't
count office hours. That doesn't count making up homework or tests and grading
them.

For me, each class I teach is about 40 hours of work per week. If _that_ is
your number, then I got paid about $10 per hour. And I would have been better
off at McDonalds as I would have gotten benefits for being full-time.

For those of us who like to teach, this is a Catch-22. It is good for students
to have teachers who have been in industry--however, the pay is lousy relative
to that same industry. At the same time, I would also be providing cheap labor
to the university who _should_ be paying someone a reasonable amount of money.

~~~
clintonc
40 hours of work per week!? Eight hours a day, five days a week, for every
class?

~~~
bsder
Yes.

I have to prep 2 3 hour lectures per week. Each lecture _easily_ takes 8 hours
to prep. 6 assignments--have to make them up, set up automated tests, get
things set up in source code control, and help students when things come back
wrong if they can't figure it out. A midterm and a final--have to make it up
and correct it. Add in office hours as well as replying to students via email
and I'm easily at 40 hours per week.

This is why so many teachers just prep once and regurgitate each class
(including assignments and tests). It's just _sooooo_ much less time
consuming.

Don't feel bad. My poor TA (who was a student in a previous class I taught)
was stunned too--"It takes this much time?!?!?! And you did this _by yourself_
for our class?"

------
webhat
I'm often sad and happy when reading this problem. Sad because it's the state
of things, which sucks! And happy because the more that it's said the more
chance there is that instructors will actually be paid well, and students can
learn in an environment that doesn't treat their faculty as cheap throw away
labor.

This addresses many of the issues that we are solving with our startup
Oplerno.

~~~
crpatino
Exactly why do you think that discussing this issues in the open will
automatically result in "instructors will actually be paid well, and students
can learn in an environment that doesn't treat their faculty as cheap throw
away labor."???

If the information in this article does not result in behavior changes (non
tenured lecturers walking out of raw deals, or students requiring their
University to disclose and guarantee a minimum percentage of courses taught by
full time professors, or employers refusing to hire candidates coming out of
degree mills) for a significant percentage of the incumbents, absolutely
nothing is going to happen.

~~~
webhat
As a student, or parent, knowing that many universities are paying their
adjunct instructors poorly meaning the instructors are turning their classes
into popularity contests - by inflating grades and making the class 'easy' \-
to ensure that they have a job next year would worry me. I interpret it to
mean that a degree from some 'reputable' universities might be as good as one
of the degree mill universities. My hope is that this will worry people who
are taking on huge debts for degrees which might turn out to be worthless.

The adjuncts in the article and the ones that have recently been in the news,
such as the homeless professor in the NYT, are the tip of the iceberg. And
without adjuncts talking about it in the open nobody would know.

The kind of behavior change you are suggesting doesn't happen overnight, and
certainly doesn't happen without there being viable alternatives. This is why
we are trying to create a viable alternative.

~~~
crpatino
I do not know if this will "worry people", but I am already worried and
planning accordingly. I send my kids to private school (strong academic
quality, not overly posh) in order to give them a good foundation to start
from, but the assumption is that there wont be a "college fund" and they might
end up going to the State University if (a) they get a full scholarship (not
the credit sham that passes for it nowadays) or, (b) they get their act
together as young business man and pay full tuition on their own. My wife
knows how I feel about this and is fully on board, while my parents and in-
laws think that I am a cheap bastard.

Being children, I have not yet discussed this with them. However, I plan to
have this topic fully explored with each of them well in advance of their
freshman year on high school.

