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    Sid and FinancyHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:27am

    I’m sure that looking down upon janitors will help their cause, though.

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      Hamilton NolanSid and Financy
      5/09/16 11:28am

      “Adjuncts here are treated like less than janitors in the administration’s eyes (because janitors have a union).”

      Looking up to janitors, you mean.

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      MershHamilton Nolan
      5/09/16 11:29am

      No, looking down. You know exactly what the implication of what you wrote is. At least have the nuts to man up to it.

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    Cleopatra Donovan MillerHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:36am

    I’m a public high school teacher in a suburb of Dallas and make $60K. I teach three 90 minute classes on A days (with one 90 minute conference) and two 90 minute classes on B days (with a 90 minute department meeting and a random free period because of how the schedule came out). Two of the classes I teach are electives in my department. I feel insanely lucky. I have full health care coverage ($35 a month is my out of pocket cost for it, though the deductible is high), life insurance, great disability coverage, and a total of 18 weeks off a year (adding up all the holidays including summer). Yes, I plan over the summer. I’m going to a week long AP institute over the summer. I do have a heavy grading load, but with all the time off I get during the day, I get it done 100% at school.

    I never thought I’d say this, but all these people need to teach high school. No, the grass isn’t 100% greener. There are drawbacks in any profession. But the amount they get paid for how educated they have to be is just ridiculous. (I have an M.Ed. in Curriculum & Instruction.)

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      SamCleopatra Donovan Miller
      5/09/16 11:46am

      I’ll second that. I jumped off the tenure track in a part of the country I hated, into a private school in the city of my choosing. I have fewer students, and they are reading and writing at a higher level than my college freshmen.

      Oh, and I’m getting paid more, too.

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      accesscodeCleopatra Donovan Miller
      5/09/16 11:52am

      I wouldn’t mind that, but I’d have to get certified. That would cost me extra money. Find me a way to get certified for free, and I’ll teach at high school. I don’t mind. I’m a great teacher. I would be fine with it.

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    JustActSurprisedHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 12:43pm

    Administrators who have far less education than faculty, and whose jobs frankly serve very little purpose, make six figures. Meanwhile the faculty—the backbone of higher ed—try to keep from starving.

    I love how a lot of these are dripping with disdain for anyone who doesn’t have a PhD (including the author of this article, who knocks blue collar workers).

    Running a college is not teaching a class. Granted, there are always extraneous things - but the bulk of the cost at most schools goes to healthcare, salaries, and the plant (university building costs/repair/operations).

    At the most basic, you need people to bring in students (admissions), faculty, and operational staff (registrar/bursar/financial aid/maintenance). Then of course someone to run the place (President and/or board). But these folks are surely going to align with you when you talk about how unnecessary their job functions are and their lack of education!

    P.S. Most schools are tuition driven institutions, meaning that they literally survive because of the cost of attendance. It’s your catch-22, where if you lower the cost you kill the schools. For state schools, too it’s a struggle with state legislatures that refuse to give money (or continuously take money) from institutions.

    Is there an easy solution to where they could just hire more full time staff at institutions? Maybe, if tenure was on the cutting room floor. But until there are deep reforms, the band-aids people suggest won’t be enough.

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      mmsfcJustActSurprised
      5/09/16 1:29pm

      No. Tuition barely pays for education. The most prestigious universities and all private schools have huge endowments and billions in investments. Many of these investments work against the stated function of higher education.

      Most money for public education used to come from taxes but now so-called “public/private” contracts that do more to benefit the “private” than the “public.” The higher positions on boards and in upper administration have become political appointments rather than educators, and these appointees always have some other agenda about how to drain money from the public into private coffers.

      University of California is now heavily skewed toward Silicon Valley industry and toward DOD contracts that came with Janet Napoletano’s appointment as president. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education was an investor in and owner of for-profit education schools and systems. We’ve sold our intellect and our best interests to the highest bidder.

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      JustActSurprisedmmsfc
      5/09/16 1:54pm

      The most prestigious universities and all private schools have huge endowments and billions in investments.

      First, in 2014, 47% of revenue at public universities came from tuition - which is direct disagreement to your statement that “most” of the revenue comes from taxes. I’m happy for you to dispute this, but please show your work.

      I also hate to be the one to break this to you, but most private universities and colleges do not have “huge endowments.” Here’s some more facts and figures for you:

      “As of fiscal year 2012, 53 percent of four- and two-year private nonprofit colleges and universities had endowments of less than $10 million. The median endowment at private colleges and universities is roughly $7.9 million, which at a typical spending rate of about 4 percent to 5 percent would support an annual expenditure of between $316,000 and $340,000.”

      I’m not really sure what you were initially arguing about but, tuition is a huge factor in the majority of public and private institutions. The whole problem we have nowadays is everyone rushes to talk about the Ivys or the Elite Private institutions, without realizing that the majority of students are not privileged enough to attend these. A typical mistake, considering most students don’t even attend residential institutions.

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    HASHTAGImWithGoldmanSachsHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:28am

    Look, like Jonathan Chait, I believe these people shouldn’t be complaining, they should go back to school, take on more student debt and get other jobs that will pay them enough to pay off multiple loans and all living expenses. Or they shouldn’t have become teachers in the first place - it’s their own fault, personal responsibility, bootstraps, globalism, liberalism works, everything is fine. #ImWithHer

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      Chicago48HASHTAGImWithGoldmanSachs
      5/09/16 11:31am

      They’re probably paying a mountain of debt already. They don’t need to go back to college and get more debt.

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      HASHTAGImWithGoldmanSachsChicago48
      5/09/16 11:39am

      Wrong. It’s only about education, we need equal opportunity and that’s it. Stop looking at equality of outcome, you Bernie Bro. There is no real equality, well never have it, and taking money from banks doesn’t mean that they will ever influence you.

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    baddoggyHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:37am

    You know, I REALLY hate reading stories about people who work low wage jobs (Walmart, Target, etc) and some self righteous asshole in the comment section say “well you should have had gotten a better education” or “work harder” or “find a better job” because in most cases those people are in dire situations with little options and do what they have to do to survive. But people who are adjunct professors are educated, have choices, and knew EXACTLY what they were getting into for the most part. This is fucking dumb. It just seems stupid to me that someone would get all of that education to work for fucking beans. Ok I get it - they want to be professors or really want to teach and help kids, etc, etc. But the career path is clearly rigged to fuck people over and it’s not even debatable.

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      Cleopatra Donovan Millerbaddoggy
      5/09/16 11:40am

      Yes to all of this. I agree with whoever said all adjunct professors should leave the profession. Do something else, anything else. Create a huge scarcity. WHO IS MAKING ALL THE MONEY OFF TUITION AT THESE SCHOOLS??? Where does it all go to? Not the professors, it seems.

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      IkerCatsillasbaddoggy
      5/09/16 11:48am

      Well, you’re right that the career path of academia is fucked up, and has been for a while now. But in fields with especially long completion times, there are lots of people just finishing up their doctorates who enrolled during the worst of the recession, when job prospects were absolutely terrible for recent college grads. In many cases, grad school seemed like a safer option at the time.

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    ARGHTHEHUMANITYHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:29am

    The only ways I can see adjuncts getting a fair deal is if all of them unionized and struck or people simply stopped taking the positions, forcing scarcity. How to make this happen in the real world is a whole different matter.

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      dontcallmemimiARGHTHEHUMANITY
      5/09/16 11:48am

      Thing is, there are way too many PhDs and nearly-PhDs that are unemployable anywhere outside of academia that will gladly take that work because it’s work. It’s like telling all fast-food workers to unionize or strike for higher wages. People in dire straits don’t even have the luxury to fight for better terms. Tenured positions are increasingly rare, and are becoming a Gladiator-style arena of “justify your existence via research grants or GTFO.”

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      ARGHTHEHUMANITYdontcallmemimi
      5/09/16 11:59am

      I think part of the problem is that so many think as you do, “I’m not qualified for anything else”. Maybe not something in academia, sure, but having a solid college education qualifies one for a load of positions, just probably not the ones that they want. Which leads into the “not taking the positions and forcing scarcity”, get out there, get a job doing something else.

      Yes I know that’s not what people in this position want to hear, but what we want and what we need are often really far apart from one another.

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    FelixElixHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:43am

    Most adjuncts are very bright people who are way overqualified for their work. That’s why they need to walk away. Earning a PhD itself is a demonstrated job skill that is translatable to other areas, and many candidates need to realize that the entire PhD process was a lie to provide cheap labor for their department/advisor. If the only reason to get a PhD is to demonstrate that you’re qualified for a endangered or extinct tenure track job or adjunct purgatory, basically 2 distinctly different versions of the same job, then the PhD process is a complete sham. Take that work ethic and intellect elsewhere.

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      IkerCatsillasFelixElix
      5/09/16 11:56am

      Part of the problem is, there’s very little guidance out there for grad students to think ahead about alternative career paths. Certainly faculty isn’t providing it. They can’t, since their success is predicated on the system that grad students are looking to move beyond — and I think many of them won’t even countenance it, as they’re afraid students who leave the academy make them look bad. Often times, the advice that they give for success in academia (don’t spend so much time developing your teaching; don’t bother doing more than the bare minimum for language competency) is actually the opposite of what people looking to branch out should be doing.

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      Sluicer's ghostFelixElix
      5/09/16 12:15pm

      Union is the answer. They will just get screwed in some other field.

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    IkerCatsillasHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 11:40am

    Yup. Hence my pending decision to tame my humanities PhD, along with my professional fluency in four languages (developed over the course of the program) and EU passport (which I went to the trouble of applying for as a dual citizen just to do dissertation research here) and try my hand at the private market. I’m a fucking good teacher. But I respect myself way too much for this shit.

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      Doofenschmirtz, Inc.IkerCatsillas
      5/09/16 11:51am

      You think that private schools in Dubai or China are going to pay you more for your language skills? That’s adorable.

      Translators and teachers who work for governments get paid decent wages. The rest do not.

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      IkerCatsillasDoofenschmirtz, Inc.
      5/09/16 11:59am

      I meant “private market” more broadly — basically, moving beyond academia/public education. Poorly phrased on my part.

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    ReburnsABurningReturnsHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 12:01pm

    Here’s the deal: administrative positions (Assistant to the Assistant Assistant) have exploded (something like 250% in the past couple decades)

    Which really tells us pretty much ... nothing about anything. There is, relative to a few decades ago, a much larger number of students. The idea of administrative bloat being the major culprit for the financial problems public universities face, which give rise to them attempting to press costs down is pure mythmaking.

    The handy thing about this particular problem is that the growth in tuition costs has made it an avenue people have taken the time to study. What they have found is that, as it relates to tuition costs, by far and away the biggest problem is absolute and/or relative shrinking taxpayer support for public universities.

    http://www.demos.org/publication/pu…

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      bhsmReburnsABurningReturns
      5/09/16 12:42pm

      Okay, how about the growth in tuition costs at private universities?

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      ReburnsABurningReturnsbhsm
      5/09/16 12:58pm

      Who cares?

      ~16% of students attend non-profit private universities that are free to organize themselves as they see fit. If you go to an uber expensive college and go on to become an adjunct faculty member at that college who isn’t having their graduate studies funded by the university or a fund of some sort, you need to leave.

      ~13% of students attend for profit private universities. If you go on to be adjunct faculty at a for profit university then you know exactly what sort of money grubbing operation you are participating in, and you deserve every bit of misery that is heaped upon you for participating in it.

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    det-devil-ailsHamilton Nolan
    5/09/16 3:20pm

    ‘I teach two classes with are each 3.5 hours. For 16 weeks, I make under $6,000. Each month, I make about $1,150 and spend approximately 40 hours a month working sometimes more. The only reason I only work that much is because I put a boundary around how much time I spend and use lesson plans from previous semesters.’

    You work a part time job that doesn’t involve the hot sun, heavy lifting or plunging toilets and it pays $28.75 an hour?

    You poor dear, it must be like a gulag.

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      TheDogIsStillBarkingdet-devil-ails
      5/09/16 6:58pm

      I’m guessing there’s a typo in here somewhere. $6000 (for the entire semester) for two classes isn’t that bad for an adjunct, sadly. But this is saying they spend 7 hours per week in the classroom, leaving only about 3 hours per week on grading, class preparation, office hours, etc... I don’t see how that’s possible. I wish I could teach my classes that efficiently. If these numbers are correct, the pay is nothing to complain about.

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      warriorgrrrlTheDogIsStillBarking
      5/09/16 9:28pm

      Hope that person isn’t a math teacher.

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