
How did we discard the idea of college faculty? - pseudolus
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/2019-03-27-childress
======
jimrhods23
"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded local auto
mechanics: by making all of the systems and regulations so sophisticated that
they now require an army of technicians and specialized equipment."

This only means that technology changes and many industries are maturing. This
is a good thing.

"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers:
by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and
then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that
women could, in fact, do it well."

I never saw any supporting evidence that we are suddenly paying professors
less because we know more women are getting positions.

Once a professor is tenured, they can pretty much do anything they want and
have a job for life. I can't really say that about any job I've ever had.

I also don't think being a professor was ever a path to riches and wealth. It
was a way to do what you love and still make a living.

~~~
asaph
> We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded cab drivers:
> by leveling the profession and allowing anyone to participate, as long as
> they had a minimum credential and didn’t need much money.

This is hardly an apt comparison. The skills required to drive a cab were
never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background
check. The ride sharing companies didn't lower the bar for this job at all.
They just rightly opened it up to a lot more people.

~~~
oarsinsync
> The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a
> driver's license and and a background check

In some cities, taxi drivers were expected to know the vast majority of the
streets, such that a passenger could get in, say where they wanted to go, and
the driver would know where to go and how to to get there. No looking up in
maps, or using an A-Z, just go. They would be tested and certified in this
too.

Ride sharing companies + navigation/route planning apps have reduced the
barrier to entry tremendously, but they have also reduced the quality of the
drive, as drivers no longer actually know where they're going. They have also
reduced the ability for abuse, thanks to being permanently tracked.

------
opportune
It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and there
are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly, highly
prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to attain that
position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to get some of
the few spots available.

Also the commoditization of education has made full "professors" less
necessary from the perspective of the college/university. For the vast
majority of students at the vast majority of colleges who just need to take
the required classes to get their chosen major so they can get a certain type
of job, they don't need research professors, they need someone who knows the
material and can teach a class. I don't think adjunct teaching positions
should pay as little as they do but since so many people want to be adjunct
professors as opposed to pursuing careers in other fields, it drives down the
cost of hiring adjuncts.

What can we do to fix the problem? The federal government can require a
certain ratio of PhD student:professor positions to receive federal research
funding, so the ratio balances out across all the school. Decouple being a
research professor with being a teacher of tertiary education (adjunct
professors aren't really professors in the same sense as a full professor
anyway). Get rid of tenure so universities don't perceive giving out full
professorship positions as risky.

~~~
ardy42
> It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and
> there are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly,
> highly prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to
> attain that position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to
> get some of the few spots available.

The real problem is that the people who should know better, the people who run
Ph.D programs for disciplines whose only career prospects are in academia,
decided to graduate more Ph.D's that they were willing to hire. Those guys
control _both_ supply and demand, and are perfectly capable of balancing them.

~~~
opportune
I don't really think it's on the onus of the individual lab to ensure there
are enough jobs for all their PhD students _within the same lab_. It's kind of
both a tragedy of the commons (individual labs/departments don't want to hire
more PhDs and less full time researchers/professors because it reduces
output/$) and externality (research groups have no responsibility to ensure
it's actually a good career move for their students to get PhDs) issue. That's
why I think part of the solution needs to come from the top down to balance
things out. Can't happen at the scope of the individual university

~~~
ardy42
> I don't really think it's on the onus of the individual lab to ensure there
> are enough jobs for all their PhD students within the same lab.

I didn't mean the department should hire its own students, just that it
shouldn't graduate a higher number than it's willing to hire. So if they have
5 open positions, they should hire 5 from the market, but then only train and
graduate 5 or so students (who can find jobs elsewhere) to maintain balance.

~~~
mamon
The problem is: new PhDs are made in just few years, but then they need a job
for a lifetime. So, after you've graduated those 5 or so students you're
willing to hire, are you gonna close your PhD program for the next 10 years?
What about people that want to study out of the genuine interest in the field,
but can't, because there are no universities taking students? What if one of
them is a new Einstein, that would revolutionize the whole domain?

------
brianpgordon
When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't
always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these
systems; they're emergent.

~~~
gnicholas
There are massive subsidies in higher education, especially at the PhD level
(many are had for free, plus stipend).

A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many
prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill,
the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and
decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why
so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market
forces.

~~~
BeetleB
>The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them.

Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author
points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a
decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear _for anyone who cared to
look_. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to
obtain.

I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you
have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia.

If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and
has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software
industry.

~~~
gnicholas
> _I know it 's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age,
> you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia._

Totally agree. For some folks, it's just an easy way to defer making other
tough decisions, plus it's prestigious, plus there's optimism bias.

And I think students naively believe that since universities create PhDs and
hire them, they would not purposely create an oversupply of PhD grads. This
feeling that universities are acting responsibly is probably bolstered by the
fact that universities are nonprofits.

------
zunzun
University administrators responded to the market glut of PhD's according to
the laws of supply and demand, particularly those running huge endowments who
in reality only need the university itself as an excuse for the endowment -
from this point of view expensive tenured professors should be replaced with
the academic equivalent of cheap immigrant labor. This was not a "we decided"
as I understand the use of that phrase.

~~~
schuetze
Do you have any evidence for these statements?

In my experience, it's generally the budget-strapped universities that choose
to replace tenure-track professors with adjuncts.

On the other hand, private universities with very large endowments tend to be
prestigious and part of maintaining this prestige means hiring tenure-track
professors to teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, and to do
research.

~~~
zunzun
Do you have any evidence for those statements?

------
barry-cotter
Well, in the case of scientific and engineering disciplines the government
decided that having lots of PhDs and having them be cheap was helpful so they
set up a system to that end.

> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower
> wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic
> study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the
> flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private
> economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and
> demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the
> bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a
> bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the
> literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release
> of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for
> the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of
> documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the
> NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.

> The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical
> Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-
> Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no
> author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National
> Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some
> hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had
> never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that
> it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and
> now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.

[https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-
gove...](https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-government-
universities-industry-create-domestic-labor-shortages-of-scientists-high-tech-
workers)

------
JMTQp8lwXL
The answer to this question is: when the financialization of higher education
began. That's when it was decided.

------
Inception
Isn't it nearly impossible to fire a professor once they earn tenure? Seems
like pretty good job security to me.

~~~
danieltillett
As a former tenured professor (not fired, I resigned to go work on my startup)
this is not true. Yes it is nearly impossible to fire you directly, but what
the universities do is play musical chairs. Every couple of years (sometimes
every year) there is a reorganisation where there are fewer positions than
tenured professors. Guess who gets cut when this happens.

------
eigenman
I frankly blame funding institutions like the NIH and the NSF for this
situation. They readily fund lots of cheap graduate students rather than pay
for experienced techs. This leads to the glut of PhDs even in fields where
there are jobs outside of the academy. Too many of them (myself included)
think we can make it in the system, having been sheltered by our supervisors
and who themselves may have an outdated notion of what it takes to succeed. So
like people who want to be movie stars there are too many for too few jobs.
Although we never had a formal union, when administrative jobs were filled by
late-career academics it sheltered us from market forces. Now with the
corporate-minded boards and professional administrators that shelter has been
removed leading to the “cost saving” adjuncts.

------
hi5eyes
it's pretty hilarious how my uncle, a prof with almost no teaching background,
talks about profs with tenure. "the most spoiled lazy [expletive]" while hes
moved to admin, makes the average "upper middle class" salary (in canada), I
know a phd in accounting that moved to the states and makes more than his
peers (no one wants to do accounting theses)and still trying to maximize
earning esp looking outside of academia and lives pretty frugally

~~~
btmorex
Maybe tenured professors nearing retirement are lazy, but a basic requirement
of getting tenure is working at least as hard and usually harder than all your
peers. At a certain level, everyone's smart and the only differentiator is
hard work and luck.

~~~
hi5eyes
well... yeah duh

------
rayiner
Ever since we created a huge glut of phds by encouraging people to go into
fields that have no market demand. Next question. (Fun fact: those
underemployed professors are just teaching the next generation of
underemployed academics. It’s turtles all the way down.)

~~~
jccalhoun
That is certainly part of it. As someone with a phd in a field with no market
demand I tell anyone with doubts about whether they want to go to grad school
not to. However, there is also the immense growth in adjuncts and non-tenure
positions. In the last department I was in there were 5 tenure track
positions, 4-5 people on three year contracts (which they have since cut back
on) and like 10 of us that were either on one year contracts (which the school
eliminated which led to me getting my current job) or "part time" faculty that
they didn't have to pay benefits.

~~~
shhehebehdh
You say “however”, but doesn’t this just reflect the same problem? There are a
lot of people with phds who want these jobs, so they are willing to accept
these adjunct positions. In the past, when there were fewer excess phds,
nobody would have accepted a position under these terms.

Personally, I have no problem with professors getting paid less. My only
objection is that these savings don’t appear to be passed on to students. When
we get much more efficient at manufacturing computer hardware, one of the
benefits is that anyone can buy a capable device for $300 or less. But when we
get more efficient at generating phds, and therefore have a much greater
supply of teachers, the savings are not apparent in tuition prices.

~~~
veryworried
Tuition will not drop until we see a tightening on student loans. As long as
lenders are giving out vast sums of money to kids with no job and no credit,
there is no reason to drop tuition prices.

Higher tuition wouldn’t really be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that
many people who take on these massive debts are later unable to secure high
paying jobs that let them pay it off in a timely fashion, turning them into
debt slaves for the better part of their life (or maybe all of it). That’s the
risk you take though.

~~~
cmurf
Or if student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy.

~~~
veryworried
Too late for that now. These debts can never be discharged without grave
consequences for the economy.

------
azhenley
CS, engineering, and business professors make good salaries and have good job
security.

I'm a CS professor.

------
Hnrobert42
Most jobs don’t have tenure.

~~~
Steuard
Most college instructors in the US today don't, either, and aren't in
positions that will ever be eligible for it. That's the point.

~~~
opportune
Why do instructors deserve tenure?

~~~
rosser
The theory, as I understand it, is that without tenure or a mechanism like it
people might not feel empowered to research controversial subjects, or draw
conclusions which challenge conventions, for example.

~~~
opportune
What I was implying was that instructors =/= professor. Don't really think
adjuncts need tenure any more than public school teachers (though I know some
public school teachers in certain districts can get "tenure")

------
contact_fusion
It's already been said that, essentially, most PhD graduates are in a state of
delusion - the truth is that nobody would make a rational decision to become
an adjunct. This is very true. What I think still needs to be said that most
PhD graduating institutions actively perpetuate these delusions. (In
disclosure, I am associated with an academic institution doing academic
research, but I am not an adjunct. Thankfully.)

There is really next to no value in taking on PhD work at an institution below
a certain threshold. Nearly all tenure-track positions go to candidates with a
very select background. They must have graduated from the top 30 (or so)
institutions in their field. They usually have done a postdoc at another peer
institution in that class. They need to have produced a large number of
publications, which usually means having well connected collaborators,
especially your PI/advisor. If you do not have this background, you stand
little chance of even being considered for the tenure track.

That being said, the lower tier institutions are less capable of supporting
their faculty, so they pad this with cheap labor in the form of PhD students.
The selection hierarchy begins even before graduate school - whether you
attend an elite institution in your field is a major academic accomplishment
in itself. Many are tempted to take the consolation prize when they don't make
it, and the faculty at the lower tier schools are all too happy to accommodate
them.

The tenured faculty will never change this on their own. They are the winners,
whose continuing success depends on a ready supply of people who are deceived
into thinking that they actually have a shot. For some, this deceit is only a
moderate one - if you are at an elite school you have maybe a 1 in 10 chance.
For most, the rate is approximately zero. Very few people are willing to
really give their students a realistic assessment, but in the end it doesn't
matter whether they do anyway. Graduate school is like trying to get published
as a novelist, or becoming a professional athlete. Everyone wants that kind of
status. Heck, you can definitely support yourself, depending on what level of
asceticism you can tolerate and how lucky, well connected, or (rarely)
brilliant you are. It is just that the vast majority makes very little
money/status, and a privileged few make a large amount. There will never be a
shortage of people who try to make it anyway. Some would say the entire
enterprise depends on it.

(edit - clarification)

------
rhacker
Simple answer? They are still teaching with what's been given to them.

------
Simple_Guy
Why does this article pretend that we collectively made a decision to punish
professors and not that the effect of supply and demand in a free market is
the cause?

~~~
GavinMcG
It's absurd how many examples of the collective action problem are treated
this way every day, on HN or in media more broadly.

~~~
marcus_holmes
the article itself does a pretty good job of listing all the other cases where
a previously respected and well paid profession has been affected by market
forces.

Of course, it ascribes malicious intent for all of them, too.

I think the paragraph about journalism was probably the most pertinent. No-one
decided to relabel journalism as "content" to be produced by designated
"content providers". Pre-internet only journalists had a way of publishing
their opinions. Post-internet everyone does. The simple law of supply and
demand means that opinions are less valuable now.

------
mshaler
Wallace Sayre’s Third Law of Politics holds that “academic politics is the
most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”

------
RickJWagner
They forgot buggy-whip makers and telephone operators.

Seriously, good riddance to the ivory towers. College is a racket-- you have
to pay big bucks, tenured profs can behave pretty much as they want to, and
the books game is legalized thievery. As recent news articles have shown, the
rich are shown the short line through.

I can't wait for MOOC 2.0 to bring quality, affordable education to anyone who
wants it.

------
musicale
It's a pyramid scheme and the top of the pyramid (which was always small) is
shrinking.

------
ALittleLight
I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to
intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously
don't pay well. If you like being on college campus, teaching, and don't care
about money - hey, that's fantastic. More power to you. Be an adjunct
professor. If you do care about money - think about a different career.

I just don't get why this is a problem. You chose to study mideval literature.
Chose to get a PhD in it. Chose to be an adjunct professor. Kept choosing to
keep doing it, etc. If it's a bad job, stop doing it.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
We should fund medieval literature well too. Some of the best CTOs are
humanities people for whom engineering just isn't fully satisfying at
intellectual life scale.

Applying symbolic logic, hermeneutics, retroduction, and criticism are higher
abstract levels of creative problem solving, via inference to the likely
explanation with respect to priors, a.k.a. the scientific method. These kinds
of reasoning simply aren't practically doable by math alone yet, not to
mention deep learning tools in the field.

The next wave of AI methods will need to go beyond statistics to come full
circle, because classification is not reasoning. What else is there? All the
GOFAI stuff, prolog, expert systems, knowledge graphs, fuzzy/modal logics.
These things were always great at reasoning but the last winter happened
because they were bad at dealing with uncertainty. Now the stats methods have
solved that problem but they suck at reasoning. It is time for a synthesis.

As a startup I don't want a data science PhD to tinker with an optimal CNN
design for a year to eke out that extra 1 or 2 percent of precision and
recall. I want an ensemble of specialized models, ideally pre-trained, grafted
together in a logically consistent way that is configurable and introspect-
able via text/data at runtime.

The economy is misconfigured! That said, humanities people should probably
learn how to code as a research skill.

~~~
dx87
When I was doing a training exercise in the military, I was talking to an Air
Force General who told us that their best cybersecurity officers had
undergrads in non-tech fields. They said that computer science and software
engineering undergrads weren't good at thinking outside the box because they
were used to questions being provably right or wrong with no middleground.
Their officers with political science, philosophy, or other humanities
undergrads were better at handling big picture problems that needed a "best"
answer, not necessarily a verifiably 100% correct answer. They needed more
technical training after graduation, but usually ended up being superior
cybersecurity officers.

------
lifelongUU
the same way we decided it was ok for all the other teachers.... Koch brothers
said so.

~~~
rayiner
Fun fact: US teachers are paid, adjusted for purchasing power, above the OECD
average: [http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-
school/48631286....](http://www.oecd.org/education/skills-beyond-
school/48631286.pdf). Around the same level as Norway, England, and Finland,
and above France or Sweden.

------
zerr
What about school teachers?

------
wyclif
Since higher education became a commodity, that's how.

------
purplezooey
Let's not leave out decades of state budget cuts. Higher ed took most of the
brunt of it. Baby boomers went to college for free, then as soon as they got
theirs, voted up all the tax cuts and right wing people leaving the next
generation with much less.

