"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.
> 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.
> 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.
There are dozens of local auto mechanics within a few miles of me, and most of them seem to be doing steady business. So I fail to see how we discarded them?
> "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."
That was a nod to the fact that "Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured
when compared to their male counterparts." [1]
That fact means nothing when there is no control by field or any other correlated factors. That model also disregards every person who goes into industry.
The control by field part is definitely very important — it can easily be a case of Simpson’s Paradox. However, the decision to go into industry is not at all independent from how you perceive your chances of getting tenure.
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.
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.
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.)
While it is common to pay tuition for your undergraduate degree or maybe even your master degree, PhD students are typically paid for their teaching and research work and their tuition is covered (admittedly the salaries are low).
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.
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.
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.
In the department I was in I was the only non-tenure track person with a phd. All the others only had masters degrees. That is, of course, only one department so may not be representative of other departments. And often it would be difficult to find people to teach the courses. Because there was a limit to how many courses a person could be taught and still be "part-time" the full time, non-tenure track, faculty often ended up teaching extra courses.
Regarding tuition costs, there are a lot of reasons why it has grown so quickly. One is the growth in administration. When my old university announced they wouldn't be doing any more one year contracts and would instead be going with exclusively part-time faculty, I suggested they look into part-time administrators but they didn't seem to think that was a good idea...
Another is the escalating "arms race" of campus amenities. Four year universities feel like they need to add more and more and fancier and fancier amenities to attract students because they feel like if they don't have a new multi-million dollar rec center and the nearby college does that students will be more likely to go to the other college.
A third reason is that the funds colleges get from states is a smaller percentage of their budget now than it was in the past. One of my friends is an advisor at a Big Ten college and she recently posted on facebook that she was going through some old paperwork that had been left in her office and found the university's budget for 1997. Comparing it to 2019, the university's budget had doubled but the amount of money that it received from the state had only increased by about 25%. That money has to come from somewhere (which is one reason why that university has made a big push to attract international students in recent years since they pay a lot more in tuition than in-state students)
I recall reading an article several years ago where they pointed out that 50% of PhD candidates in Biology who were surveyed were hoping for tenure track positions in academia. The other 50% expected to go elsewhere. Of the 50% wanting a tenure-track position, the expectation was that there were enough positions available for 1/6th of them.
My daughter has had a strong interest in biological subjects, but when we talked about careers some years back we both agreed that going for a PhD would be a bad move. She was more interested in medicine, and that's turned out to be a much better career path.
Note many/most of these excess PhDs are not “researchers” in the pure sciences.
We’re talking bout PhDs in fields like “environmental psychology” as mentioned in the article.
Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit. It’s unsurprising that society is unwilling to subsidize many tenured positions in the study of bullshit.
> We’re talking bout PhDs in fields like “environmental psychology” as mentioned in the article. Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit.
From the internet: "Environmental psychologists often study how the built or physical environment affects human behavior. They may conduct research on this topic, or apply their knowledge to designing safe and ergonomic spaces that are conducive to emotional well-being, such as colorful, open floor plans."
Building appealing work and home-spaces may not save the world, but why isn't it a worthy area of research?
> Note many/most of these excess PhDs are not “researchers” in the pure sciences.
People studying mediaeval literature can also be researchers.
> Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit.
I'm sure this is true of some fields, but even fields which produce obvious societal benefits, and even fields which actually do produce PhD candidates who go on to have well-paying jobs in industry often have difficulty growing their departments.
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
What do you mean? Someone is designing the subsidies for getting these students' bachelor's degrees in the first place, and for the research grants that later employ some of them as professors.
What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly.
But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum?
Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
> 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.
These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's
to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
> not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's
> to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
Yes and no. The people did decide to pursue a Ph.D, but also they have to get accepted into a program to get one. It's like a job: I can choose to work at Google, but I can't unless they hire me.
When the Ph.D programs themselves are the only groups that consume their graduates with their credential, they can perfectly balance supply and demand (and pretty simple at that).
Universities are businesses. They sell qualifications. Their customers are students. If there's demand from their customers for the thing they're selling, then they sell it... they have no idea if the demand for PhDs in that discipline is suddenly going to boom.
The example of Data Science is telling: from too many to not nearly enough graduates within a few years. In Australia we had the opposite with geoscience graduates. The mining industry was starved of them, they were earning a fortune the minute they graduated, then suddenly the exploration boom stopped and the place is full of unemployed geologists. How is a university supposed to predict this?
And I don't get what the alternative is...?
Only having the same number of PhD students as there are tenure places?
Refusing to let people start a PhD unless they can prove they have a viable career plan that uses it?
> Universities are businesses. They sell qualifications. Their customers are students.
No, sorry. That's wrong, and quite an impoverished way to look at institutions of learning (and many other institutions besides).
The "universities" that think as you describe, the for profit colleges, are an unmitigated shit show. Almost all American universities that are worth the name are either explicitly non-profit or literally part of the government. They're not businesses, and for them to act like businesses is a mistake on many different levels.
> The example of Data Science is telling
Data science is not a purely academic discipline, which was such an important qualifier in my original comment that I italicized it. There's plenty of industry jobs for those skills, so those programs can follow a different path.
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.
> but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well.
The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).
Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way.
So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?
If you do not know that your chances of getting a tenure track job in your field are very, very low before you are finished your first semester you are deluding yourself. Even more so for marginal graduate programmes with negligible placements.
Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy?
Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too.
Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.
Being an academic has a certain amount in common with founding a startup. Everyone knows it's hard to get tenure but everyone thinks they're special and their hard work and talent will let them succeed when most people fail.
But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.
This is like saying that skydiving has something in common with Russian Roulette. It's true, both are dangerous, but one is clearly a much better choice for exactly the difference you articulate.
> The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).
IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
> IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.
People encourage this stuff. I don't know how many times I've been told to get my masters in history so I can "teach credit classes". No. I made a mistake with my undergrad. I'm not doubling down on it.
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.
I like to tell myself that having a humanities or social science background will give me some kind of different insight into AI/ML, but other than knowing what a gerund is without having to look it up, or nodding knowingly when someone drops a Wittgenstein quote, it's really not helping. Then again, I can't be sure that I'm not stupid.
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.
From a capitalist standpoint your comment makes sense but from a larger picture perspective negating knowledge and the spreading of said knowledge for monetary pursuits is an overall net negative for our species. I don’t have an answer on how to solve apart from coming up with a better alternative to capitalism
> 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.
I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3].
There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.
> You chose to study medieval [sic] literature.
That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering.
> Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities.
This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.
> I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.
Wasteful sure. But immoral to hire an administrator over a tenured professor?
>That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days.
I don't have a hostile disposition towards the humanities. I just don't have a special reverence for it either. I don't see the point of hand wringing regarding intelligent well educated people choosing to go into poorly compensated careers. I'm not saying that the humanities are without merit, just that there is a low expected value for pursuing some degrees and we can reasonably expect that the individuals pursuing those degrees know or should know that. We don't have to act like it's a huge problem when the people pursuing financially non-rewarding careers wind up not making a lot of money.
As a final point regarding your highlighting of my spelling mistake, the term "[sic]" is a Latin phrase meaning that the thing you're quoting is exactly as you've written it. It helps the reader understand that you're reproducing an error rather than making one yourself. You seem to have used this incorrectly as you both corrected my spelling mistake and still marked it so.
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.
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")
The point of the article, as I read it, is that 50 years ago there basically weren't instructors: very few college/university classes were taught by anyone other than (tenured or tenure-track) professors. That model has been increasingly abandoned in recent years: "we discard[ed] the idea of college faculty". If there ever was a reason that university teachers deserved tenure, that reason has eroded or been outright cast aside over the past few decades. The author of the article thinks that's a bad thing, and I tend to agree.
Of course not. But the reason that tenure ostensibly exists is to allow people who are considered in the top of their field academically to say and do things that might be unpopular (with administrators, politicians or the public at large) in the form of teaching their classes, research and publication.[1] The idea is that society wants them to push the envelope without fear of repercussions. Take away the protection that tenure provides, and more often than not (even more) professors will take the path of least resistance and become politicians and bureaucrats rather than educators and researchers.
[1] Yes, tenure has been horribly abused by some professors over the years that had nothing to do with this. There are also those who, while not blatantly abusing it in ways that made headlines, never contributed much back to society in return for the privilege. All systems can be gamed.
That's the point: the majority of college classes in the US today are not taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, but rather by adjunct faculty who are paid by the course rather than an annual salary. My wife used to teach five classes per year as an adjunct and made under $20,000 for it, and she had zero job security from one semester to the next. (Sometimes her contract for a class wouldn't show up until a week before it was due to start.) Tenured professors at the same college teach six classes per year, and make... rather a lot more. (We've got expectations for scholarship and service, too, so some additional pay is reasonable, but that would have to be more than half the job to make that ratio reasonable, and it's definitely not.)
Universities rarely grant tenure today, compared to decades past. It is security-- if you can get it, and very few do anymore. Adjuncts have very little, if any, security in their role.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadThis 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.
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.
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.
That was a nod to the fact that "Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured when compared to their male counterparts." [1]
1 - https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ913032.pdf
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.
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.
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.
Regarding tuition costs, there are a lot of reasons why it has grown so quickly. One is the growth in administration. When my old university announced they wouldn't be doing any more one year contracts and would instead be going with exclusively part-time faculty, I suggested they look into part-time administrators but they didn't seem to think that was a good idea...
Another is the escalating "arms race" of campus amenities. Four year universities feel like they need to add more and more and fancier and fancier amenities to attract students because they feel like if they don't have a new multi-million dollar rec center and the nearby college does that students will be more likely to go to the other college.
A third reason is that the funds colleges get from states is a smaller percentage of their budget now than it was in the past. One of my friends is an advisor at a Big Ten college and she recently posted on facebook that she was going through some old paperwork that had been left in her office and found the university's budget for 1997. Comparing it to 2019, the university's budget had doubled but the amount of money that it received from the state had only increased by about 25%. That money has to come from somewhere (which is one reason why that university has made a big push to attract international students in recent years since they pay a lot more in tuition than in-state students)
You'd think we'd want more and more researchers in general, even if their research doesn't immediately turn into a marketable product.
We’re talking bout PhDs in fields like “environmental psychology” as mentioned in the article.
Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit. It’s unsurprising that society is unwilling to subsidize many tenured positions in the study of bullshit.
From the internet: "Environmental psychologists often study how the built or physical environment affects human behavior. They may conduct research on this topic, or apply their knowledge to designing safe and ergonomic spaces that are conducive to emotional well-being, such as colorful, open floor plans."
Building appealing work and home-spaces may not save the world, but why isn't it a worthy area of research?
People studying mediaeval literature can also be researchers.
> Such invented pursuits have minimal societal benefit.
I'm sure this is true of some fields, but even fields which produce obvious societal benefits, and even fields which actually do produce PhD candidates who go on to have well-paying jobs in industry often have difficulty growing their departments.
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.
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.
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.
What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly.
But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum?
Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
> to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
Yes and no. The people did decide to pursue a Ph.D, but also they have to get accepted into a program to get one. It's like a job: I can choose to work at Google, but I can't unless they hire me.
When the Ph.D programs themselves are the only groups that consume their graduates with their credential, they can perfectly balance supply and demand (and pretty simple at that).
The example of Data Science is telling: from too many to not nearly enough graduates within a few years. In Australia we had the opposite with geoscience graduates. The mining industry was starved of them, they were earning a fortune the minute they graduated, then suddenly the exploration boom stopped and the place is full of unemployed geologists. How is a university supposed to predict this?
And I don't get what the alternative is...?
Only having the same number of PhD students as there are tenure places?
Refusing to let people start a PhD unless they can prove they have a viable career plan that uses it?
No, sorry. That's wrong, and quite an impoverished way to look at institutions of learning (and many other institutions besides).
The "universities" that think as you describe, the for profit colleges, are an unmitigated shit show. Almost all American universities that are worth the name are either explicitly non-profit or literally part of the government. They're not businesses, and for them to act like businesses is a mistake on many different levels.
> The example of Data Science is telling
Data science is not a purely academic discipline, which was such an important qualifier in my original comment that I italicized it. There's plenty of industry jobs for those skills, so those programs can follow a different path.
I'll admit that, say, theology or philosophy are probably only ever going to provide a career path in academia. But even then, you never know.
And are you really going to say to someone who has a burning ambition to study philosophy "no sorry, we're full, go study something else"?
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.
The problem is that those people went through their schooling being told that they were awesome and should be a professor (by people who successfully became tenured professors, and who didn't experience failure).
Then they finished school, tried to actually become a tenured professor, and found out being awesome isn't good enough. You actually have to be spectacular. So they failed, unlike their old professors who encouraged them the whole way.
So there they are. Ph.D in hand after a decade of hard work, but no tenure in sight. What would you do in their position? Find and adjunct job that's at least someone related to what you've spent your life doing? Or roll the dice again and spend thousands of dollars you don't have to go to some javascript bootcamp or something (that you'll probably fail, since you're no technical whiz kid, because you spent the last decade focusing on medieval literature)?
Adjuncting is not on the academic track. If you are adjuncting you have already lost. If you choose to keep making the same mistake over and over again you don’t generally get much sympathy if it’s gambling or sticking with a partner who beats you. Why does chasing a dream you’ve failed at get so much more sympathy?
Teaching high school is very much not what most people want to do but it’s at least better than adjuncting. Lots of people do things they don’t want do for money, if adjuncts would prefer to do something they want to fit very little money, great. Their choice, the consequences are theirs too.
Lambda School is free until you get paid so if they want to do a boot camp that’s the way to go, not borrowing money.
But while second place for failing to start a startup is you go make high six figures at a FAANG, second place in academia is you're fucked.
IMO it's still on them if they didn't do the research on what their outcome might look like. I absolutely loved physics in high school and chose to study computer science because I knew it would pay my bills. 8 years later I am not regretting my decision at all.
This is that corrosive individualist idea that the community has zero responsibility for its members, so we get to wash our hands of each individual's failure. It's wrong. Often the individual can't "do the research" to accurately estimate their outcome, such as when they're so disadvantaged they don't know where to start, or when they've been lied to.
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.
I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3].
There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.
> You chose to study medieval [sic] literature.
That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering.
[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu...
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...
[2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...
This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.
Wasteful sure. But immoral to hire an administrator over a tenured professor?
>That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days.
I don't have a hostile disposition towards the humanities. I just don't have a special reverence for it either. I don't see the point of hand wringing regarding intelligent well educated people choosing to go into poorly compensated careers. I'm not saying that the humanities are without merit, just that there is a low expected value for pursuing some degrees and we can reasonably expect that the individuals pursuing those degrees know or should know that. We don't have to act like it's a huge problem when the people pursuing financially non-rewarding careers wind up not making a lot of money.
As a final point regarding your highlighting of my spelling mistake, the term "[sic]" is a Latin phrase meaning that the thing you're quoting is exactly as you've written it. It helps the reader understand that you're reproducing an error rather than making one yourself. You seem to have used this incorrectly as you both corrected my spelling mistake and still marked it so.
[1] Yes, tenure has been horribly abused by some professors over the years that had nothing to do with this. There are also those who, while not blatantly abusing it in ways that made headlines, never contributed much back to society in return for the privilege. All systems can be gamed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm a CS professor.
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)
> 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...
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.