Those numbers in the story are chilling and it seems higher ed as rigged a strange system for a select few. While I know teaching K-12 doesn't have the prestige of higher ed, there are some benefits. The average salary for a teacher in the Spokane (Wash.) school district is $100,000. At least look they didn't have publish or perish hanging over them either. I find it amusing the Chronicle of Higher Ed often writes stories about a dearth of upcoming professors, not enough to fill the field. Well, maybe change the system, you know, like pay people and give them job security.
Well put, Tim! I'll not repeat my response to Maureen earlier in this thread, but my great-grandfather's story shows that pay and job security were once much more in line with cost of living. I may develop this line of reasoning a little further on Tuesday with an ethical question about externalities for parents of college students. That is, many of us know as consumers that there is a human cost to low prices. Even if we shop at Trader Joe's sometimes, we try to buy a little from a local farmers market or support a CSA. And we try not to buy things that we know were produced in sweatshops.
College is overpriced now -- no doubt. But that makes the externalities even more egregious. If a parent encourages their student to rack up college credits through community colleges, so they can shave a year or two off a degree at a more prestigious school, they are externalizing some of their cost to those poorly paid instructors at community colleges. Similarly, nearly every flagship university relies on exploited labor to meet their first-year graduation requirements. The big lecture courses, the mandatory first-year writing courses -- these are largely handled by teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers. Penn State, to its credit, gives some folks in this category good benefits -- but $35-50K for full-time teaching of first-year students is still incredibly exploitative. And so even as you're paying that steep tuition price, you're complicit as a consumer in the exploitation of people that the system requires. I'm not sure how anyone can avoid that, necessarily. But when I taught Barry Eastabrook's TOMATOLAND, an expose of human trafficking in the tomato industry, I could not forget or minimize his observation that anyone who has eaten fast food with tomatoes has consumed a tomato picked by the hand of a slave, it made me think differently about my choices. I think parents ought to be aware, as they are shopping around for colleges, of how those colleges treat their employees. Some of this is knowable online. But I think it could easily be ascertained by a follow-up email. When I was thinking about the teaching professor track at PSU, wondering if belonging to a department would help ease my transition even if I was accepting more work for a 50% cut in pay, I emailed several people teaching in that role. They were honest with me, as I think they would be with any parent who bothered to ask.
I find it incredibly frustrating to look at what most faculty earn. If we look at salary in terms of $ in exchange for time, most professors are grossly underearning. If we look at salary in terms of $ in exchange for value, then we open the door to the conversation about what students "get" out of an undergraduate degree and we'll find faculty underearning yet again.
If all profs were providing is access to new information and ways of seeing and thinking, I would argue that is invaluable. But profs are providing -- shoulders to cry on, sites of first disclosure, extensive feedback on work, being available in person and online 24/7, etc. So the job of professor keeps changing, both in terms of what profs offer students and what universities offer (or don't offer) professors in terms of supports.
I have zero patience for the argument, waged against teachers and professors, that they are--or should be--in it solely for the impact on young, impressionable minds, rather than for a comfortable lifestyle. As a former Germanist, I feel Brecht is warranted here: "zuerst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." (First food, then morals.)
I keep half an eye on employment and hiring trends and the public discourse around these (vis-a-vis millenials, Gen Z, etc.) and as a result am of two minds about what being "job ready" means for someone who is graduating with a BA (as my eldest will in December of this year. History and Art History, so a nice test case for the pure humanities graduate in the world of work).
Those of us in the profession know that someone who has undertaken any sort of rigorous course of study that demands of young people that they ingest new information, digest it meaningfully, and then produce something with it also prepares those same people to take on all manner of entry-level professional jobs. But whether this is a result of micro-credentialing or some other facet of the growth in educational and para-educational institutions or not, the majority of employers do not hire "raw talent." If you want to work in a business/management capacity, most companies' job ads will suggest that your course of study, work experience, and additional certifications all align with their work.
This is lazy and, ultimately, not very successful for most companies (I think), while at the same time driving enrollments into UG programs in business, commerce, etc.
I think that colleges and universities have pretty much turned over the terms of this discussion (who trains early-career professionals) to employers, without mounting much of a counter-argument that gets any traction.
Great points, Jennifer, and I love the line from Brecht. Spot on. What you say about employers not hiring raw talent is troubling. All I know on that front is anecdotal. Conversations with former students, college trustees, and other people in business. One former student claimed that the bank he went to work for was essentially just looking for "warm bodies." I know of a few humanities alums who have worked in banking or for the behemoth Principal Financial in Des Moines. A couple of IT guys from Principal told me that the people they see rise in the company are those whose degrees aren't skill-specific. Those who were tech specialists coming in tend to stay tech specialists. Those with liberal arts tend to rise. But that's probably not enough evidence to be making those claims, and it's possible that in some of those cases people were telling me what I wanted to hear :)
May 12, 2023·edited May 13, 2023Liked by Joshua Doležal
We're experiencing the K-12-edufication of higher education. Back when I was a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s, K-12 teachers would encourage their own students to become teachers. That completely died no later than the 2010s, and probably closer to 2000. No K-12 teacher I know of (and I served for four years on a local school board, so I know quite a few) encourages top students to follow in their footsteps. Why would you? The pay is lower-middle-class, the workload is 7 days and most nights a week.
Today's university instructors are in the same boat. 75% of them are paid as badly as, or worse than, K-12 teachers, with less job security, after many more years of schooling and more debt. Why would you encourage your best students to follow you into that quagmire? Research university professors, who are a small slice of the overall (10%?) population, maintain a split personality, complaining about their declining situations (it's true; they are just better than others' situations) while also training the next generation of academics who will have even worse prospects. Their grad students, who are sometimes ill-informed about the real odds of success and more often have 'lottery mentality' and think that they'll be among the 20% or fewer who land the R-I job they've spent 5-10+ years training for, are the last dreamers.
But that dream is dissipating fast; market forces, if nothing else, will dispel it. My own son opted for a Master's in statistics instead of a doctorate, and I describe his current situation to friends and relatives as "now he has a job that ends at 5 pm, he doesn't take work home with him at nights and on the weekend, and he's paid twice as much as he was as a grad student." He read the handwriting on the wall about his chances of getting a tenure-track position, and he had me reminding him that the great Great Recession-to-Trump-to-COVID baby bust will lower the age-18 population by about 600,000 from 2025 to 2040.
The open secret about academia (well, I can speak only to the sciences) is that the "best minds" stopped going into it decades ago. The 1970s was the first big crunch in PhDLand. A lot of physicist-types started going into the biosciences in the 1970s and afterward; the big crunch in physics hit hard in the 1990s. But starting in the 1990s, the whipsmart types went into finance, or did a Ph.D. in physics and then became quants. That's never changed; that's still happening in the 2020s. With the decimation of the professoriate and the rise of the precariat, and the frankly fascist anti-academia movements afoot in some states, there's no reason for people with options to go into academia. And so in no more than 20 years there will be national hand-wringing over "why can't we get more/better people to go into college teaching," and the solutions will be as ineffectual as they are for K-12 teaching today.
You kill the ecosystem, and then you complain about species loss. Brilliant.
Lots to unpack here, John. I think your point about K-12 really depends on the state and the county. In many rural areas, those public school teaching jobs are some of the most reliable in the area. And the Education major was one of the largest at my former employer. There are plenty of students who gravitate to Education as a path of less resistance, which is a separate concern. And that is part of your point about academe -- the impoverished ecosystem with less diversity.
I wonder if your point about the "best minds" is widely accepted in the sciences? I guess I don't know how you sift the "whipsmart types" from the other highly intelligent people in STEM. My disciplinary bias makes me skeptical of these categorical claims about intelligence, because there are a lot of high-producing scholars and creative writers who I don't necessarily see as smarter than their peers -- just more savvy about the system. There are a lot of factors involved in people moving into different industry sectors, so how do we know that the main motivation of working in finance in the 1990s was intellectual reward? Maybe some folks always gravitate toward more lucrative markets. I think the main draw in academe for many years was autonomy, the ability to define mastery for oneself (especially in teaching), and the sense of purpose that followed from that. When people were paid enough to take money off the table and given more of that free rein, the value proposition was still persuasive (at least for me). I think that could still be true for some very smart people who don't want to work for a boss, don't want to be entrepreneurs, and really just want to do what they love, share that passion with students, and *not* think about money. I hear that in Amy's comment below. But it's hard to do that if you're constantly being asked by your institution to think about your students' earning potential or job preparedness. And so then you start to wonder, "Why am I making these sacrifices again?."
I care about this most as a parent now. I feel protective of my children and also concerned about how to vet the institutions that they will be choosing from as college students. Because even if they don't become academics, their experience will be impacted by the well-being of their professors. One easy mark of a healthy institutional culture, to me, is a high rate of tenure-track faculty compared to contingent faculty. Simple to ascertain by browsing faculty profiles and looking at job titles. If you see a lot of titles like "teaching professor" or "lecturer" or "instructor," it ought to be a warning sign. Faculty workload and faculty autonomy would be two others. But I don't really know how I, as a parent, would be able to judge that as an outsider to an institution. I could ask about teaching load, of course, but even faculty at institutions with 3/3, 3/2, or 2/2 feel beset by service demands. And I'm not sure how forthcoming I could expect a faculty member to be about how much autonomy they felt they had in their position, especially if they feel that they live or die based on student recruitment. My former employer has been masterful at suppressing bad PR, and even when I felt desperately miserable, I did my best to put a good face on things while speaking with prospective students. It's a tricky calculus.
All good comments, Josh. A few responses and some advice to a parent from my perspective as a faculty member:
1. The stories I hear about the crashing and burning of K-12 ed are nationwide, but probably weighted more toward urban districts, yes. I was at a public elementary school yesterday morning doing a STEM Day presentation to five different classes of K-5 students, which is in a far-far suburb of Athens, GA. But those teachers and esp. parapros are so tired, and so underpaid, and they are upfront about it.
2. I put "best minds" in quotes, being intentionally ironic. That's the verbiage of generations of scientist-pricks at the top of the science pyramid who thought they knew all about intelligence. My interpretation is much more nuanced. Like you, I agree that many of the most successful academics are just good at game-playing, esp. in what is still called without hint of offense to women "grantsmanship"; they are not actually that interesting as people, or well-read, or any of what you or I might think of as indicative of an intelligent or thoughtful or wise person.
3. The flow of physicists into Wall Street is pretty well documented, and it was a combination of zero jobs in academia, the challenge of the puzzle of reinventing Wall Street as a complex physical system, and big financial rewards. Our society has paid a price for that, in my opinion, because the gamification of Wall Street has not been a good development for its stability or for the vast number of ordinary citizens who don't benefit from Wall Street money games. I have read speculation along the lines of, "What would our society be like if we'd provided incentives for these clever people to fix our nation's problems instead of turning Wall Street into an unfathomably complex game?" But we didn't, and one of the legitimately smartest people I've ever met (national fellowship winner, physicist par excellence, memorized Keats on the side for fun) finally gave up trying to get an academic job after three post-docs and became a quant a few years ago. Rather apologetically, I might add.
4. Here's a 2023 story or two about incentives and careers. For the first time in the 22-year history of our atmospheric sciences program at UGA, we have two students graduating with a perfect 4.00 GPA. I'm not a big fan of perfect GPAs because they often mean you didn't take enough risks, but UGA makes a huge deal out of it, so, well, whatever. Anyway, one of our students did this in 3 years, boom. He's at another, higher level compared to, I think, any of the other 200 atmospheric sciences majors and the 7,000+ students total that I've taught in my career. I didn't even come close to finding his ceiling. He interned for a major airline as a 2nd-year student, and they were so impressed that the airline sent people down to UGA to check us out. So, while measuring intelligence is fraught with problems and biases, I claim that this guy might just be the real McCoy, when major corporations take notice and then hire him right out of college in three years.
The other student is a BIPOC woman, also with no interest in academia. She wants to make a difference in the world and help people, and an academic career seems like the antithesis of that. She's doing a terminal master's to assist in the job market, but that's it.
The other guy, he has 0.00% in further degrees in academia. He doesn't need us, and he has mostly contempt for academia. The slow pace of change, and the large amounts of bullshit in academia are not for him. Would it have been different in the 1960s? I think so; back then, so much money was flowing into academia that new departments were literally created with a phone call, and faculty positions were offered without interviews. That could have appealed to him. But those days are gone for good, in the words of Stuart Rojstaczer, who wrote a good book on the decline of academia in the 1990s. (He's also the #1 statistical documenter of grade inflation.)
So when I say "the best minds" aren't going into academia, I mean that ironically (because "the best minds" were always WASP guys back then) but also in terms of the reality I see. When I teach intro classes, the number of very-high-achieving kids who are in business or management information sciences and are bored in college is high. They know that the monetary reward on the other end is worth the boredom, and doing something else that might involve a career in academia is not worth it. Even subtracting out all the biases, there's definitely been a brain drain away from academia since the 1960s. My own mentor in college has remarked on this noticeable brain drain during her own career, and she got her Ph.D. in 1976, so I claim this has been a thing for a long time. And I'm seeing it in 2023.
5. How to vet an institution. First of all, with regard to teaching loads, most professors I know are oblivious to the fact that teaching loads can vary widely across even one college campus. Chairs, deans, and provosts keep this stuff very, very quiet, just like how they hide salary information. For example, at middle-range research universities like mine, the official teaching load may be 2/2. But, guess what? Over in physics, it could be 1/2. Or even 1/1! And this is without course buyouts using grant monies. This may sound crazy, but I know from multiple sources of evidence at multiple universities that physicists get lighter teaching loads than other faculty at the same institution, I think because Physics Is God. And then there are individual faculty who will quietly go to their chair and complain and beg and complain and beg and get their teaching load negotiated downward, without anyone else knowing. So, asking about teaching load isn't going to get the information you're seeking, and the institution and the professors will often be hesitant to admit the deals they've made and are getting. (On the other extreme of teaching loads, I was told by a faculty member at a Midwestern university recently that their computer science faculty--those who are left--are teaching 7 or 8 courses PER SEMESTER, because of mass attrition. At a public institution. I didn't fathom that that could even happen, but welcome to 2023.)
Public university faculty will be more forthcoming, because it's less the case that their jobs and their college's existence pivots on recruitment of individual students. Tuition may be 20% of their school's budget. Private colleges will be more like 80% dependent on tuition, as you know, so that's where it gets difficult, especially as we experience a decline in college-age freshmen.
I think your best suggestion is going online and looking at the number and ratio of contingent faculty vs. professors. I do that, too, and I agree with you that it's a good yardstick of how underfunded and overworked everyone is.
Finally, a data-driven way for comparing institutions for your children's college choices: Professors nationwide will hate me for saying this, but I recommend using the wisdom of crowds and going on ratemyprofessors dot com and spending some time reading the students' anonymous ratings of teaching at universities your children are interested in. I've read probably tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of instructors at hundreds of universities at that site since it became a thing in the early-to-mid 2000s. What stands out to me is how accurate those ratings are for older white guys (who, after all, are still the bulk of the professoriate). It's been established that there's bias in these ratings against women instructors, BIPOC instructors, and/or those instructors with accents, but the narratives that accompany the ratings can help you navigate past the bias. And, in fact, the narratives that go along with the ratings tell you something about the student bodies of institutions, as well. Lots of whining ratings? Whiny campus. Nuanced ratings interspersed with some clearly biased individuals? That's closer to what you'd want. Or, for the tl;dr version: you'd do this if you were looking on Amazon to buy a product, or imdb.com to rent a movie, so why not try it for your kids' education too? The accuracy of those ratings, including my own ratings (I agree with pretty much all of the negative comments), will surprise those whose knee-jerk reaction is that the students are all haters and have nothing useful to say about their experiences in the classroom.
4. Here's a 2023 story or two about incentives and careers. For the first time in the 22-year history of our atmospheric sciences program at UGA, we have two students graduating with a perfect 4.00 GPA. I'm not a big fan of perfect GPAs because they often mean you didn't take enough risks, but UGA makes a huge deal out of it, so, well, whatever. Anyway, one of our students did this in 3 years, boom. He's at another, higher level compared to, I think, any of the other 200 atmospheric sciences majors and the 7,000+ students total that I've taught in my career. I didn't even come close to finding his ceiling. He interned for a major airline as a 2nd-year student, and they were so impressed that the airline sent people down to UGA to check us out. So, while measuring intelligence is fraught with problems and biases, I claim that this guy might just be the real McCoy, when major corporations take notice and then hire him right out of college in three years.
The other student is a BIPOC woman, also with no interest in academia. She wants to make a difference in the world and help people, and an academic career seems like the antithesis of that. She's doing a terminal master's to assist in the job market, but that's it.
The other guy, he has 0.00% in further degrees in academia. He doesn't need us, and he has mostly contempt for academia. The slow pace of change, and the large amounts of bullshit in academia are not for him. Would it have been different in the 1960s? I think so; back then, so much money was flowing into academia that new departments were literally created with a phone call, and faculty positions were offered without interviews. That could have appealed to him. But those days are gone for good, in the words of Stuart Rojstaczer, who wrote a good book on the decline of academia in the 1990s. (He's also the #1 statistical documenter of grade inflation.)
So when I say "the best minds" aren't going into academia, I mean that ironically (because "the best minds" were always WASP guys back then) but also in terms of the reality I see. When I teach intro classes, the number of very-high-achieving kids who are in business or management information sciences and are bored in college is high. They know that the monetary reward on the other end is worth the boredom, and doing something else that might involve a career in academia is not worth it. Even subtracting out all the biases, there's definitely been a brain drain away from academia since the 1960s. My own mentor in college has remarked on this noticeable brain drain during her own career, and she got her Ph.D. in 1976, so I claim this has been a thing for a long time. And I'm seeing it in 2023.
5. How to vet an institution. First of all, with regard to teaching loads, most professors I know are oblivious to the fact that teaching loads can vary widely across even one college campus. Chairs, deans, and provosts keep this stuff very, very quiet, just like how they hide salary information. For example, at middle-range research universities like mine, the official teaching load may be 2/2. But, guess what? Over in physics, it could be 1/2. Or even 1/1! And this is without course buyouts using grant monies. This may sound crazy, but I know from multiple sources of evidence at multiple universities that physicists get lighter teaching loads than other faculty at the same institution, I think because Physics Is God. And then there are individual faculty who will quietly go to their chair and complain and beg and complain and beg and get their teaching load negotiated downward, without anyone else knowing. So, asking about teaching load isn't going to get the information you're seeking, and the institution and the professors will often be hesitant to admit the deals they've made and are getting. (On the other extreme of teaching loads, I was told by a faculty member at a Midwestern university recently that their computer science faculty--those who are left--are teaching 7 or 8 courses PER SEMESTER, because of mass attrition. At a public institution. I didn't fathom that that could even happen, but welcome to 2023.)
Public university faculty will be more forthcoming, because it's less the case that their jobs and their college's existence pivots on recruitment of individual students. Tuition may be 20% of their school's budget. Private colleges will be more like 80% dependent on tuition, as you know, so that's where it gets difficult, especially as we experience a decline in college-age freshmen.
I think your best suggestion is going online and looking at the number and ratio of contingent faculty vs. professors. I do that, too, and I agree with you that it's a good yardstick of how underfunded and overworked everyone is.
Finally, a data-driven way for comparing institutions for your children's college choices: Professors nationwide will hate me for saying this, but I recommend using the wisdom of crowds and going on ratemyprofessors dot com and spending some time reading the students' anonymous ratings of teaching at universities your children are interested in. I've read probably tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of instructors at hundreds of universities at that site since it became a thing in the early-to-mid 2000s. What stands out to me is how accurate those ratings are for older white guys (who, after all, are still the bulk of the professoriate). It's been established that there's bias in these ratings against women instructors, BIPOC instructors, and/or those instructors with accents, but the narratives that accompany the ratings can help you navigate past the bias. And, in fact, the narratives that go along with the ratings tell you something about the student bodies of institutions, as well. Lots of whining ratings? Whiny campus. Nuanced ratings interspersed with some clearly biased individuals? That's closer to what you'd want. Or, for the tl;dr version: you'd do this if you were looking on Amazon to buy a product, or imdb.com to rent a movie, so why not try it for your kids' education too? The accuracy of those ratings, including my own ratings (I agree with pretty much all of the negative comments), will surprise those whose knee-jerk reaction is that the students are all haters and have nothing useful to say about their experiences in the classroom.
For what it's worth, I recognized your intention the first time. I took you to be repeating the discourse of a certain class of individuals but not being lost in it.
The skills that a degree gives you (especially the "soft skills") are highly sought after in non-academic business. Problem is, being able to express one's abilities there effectively in a non-academic resume, say.
Also: advancement within academia is impossible when you're going for actually academic jobs. The money in higher education is in admin. And when a college degree is morphing into a job application, why not go into trade school instead? I've been saying this for a while now: a college degree shouldn't be just to get a job. But all jobs require one now (even several server and bartender positions in my area). Education is for education, not training. Training is for training.
That's how it should be, is what I mean. Nowadays students are purchasing a degree as a job requirement. Why would they be curious/inspired/want to explore or change their minds when the bottom line is ... well, on the line?
Jenn, I have some upcoming interviews that might address your question about expressing your abilities in a non-academic resume. But the literature on practical strategies for transitioning to industry is still pretty dominated by scientists. I don't know about you, but I think that artists and humanities scholars aren't *just* struggling to translate their abilities into corporate contexts, they are also struggling with the whether they really want to do that. For instance, I had a very kind offer from someone who found me on LinkedIn to join a financial advising firm. At that point I'd not really done much with my profile other than say I was "open to work." But that person saw value in my teaching experience for corporate training. In that case, I didn't even really have to make the case -- the offer was already there. But after thinking about it for a day or two, I realized I didn't really want to be talking with people about their money or training people on my team to do that.
So I think the real thing I keep hearing from career coaches and others is Simon Sinek's idea of starting with "why." When I prepared for this transition, I really saw the most purpose in writing. It was the closest to the sense of calling I felt as a teacher. I'm still thinking through what my actual goals are as a freelancer writer or Substacker. But the "why" is clear: a sense of belonging with readers and a broader writing community, a feeling of serving others, and ultimate autonomy to choose what is worth my time and attention. I've hit some speed bumps as I've learned about the marketplace realities of publishing. And I struggle with the messaging on Substack, which is largely geared toward viewing independent writing as a viable primary income (eventually). So I may yet pivot to a more traditional job search. But at least I know in that case that I ought to start not with translating my skills into industry-speak, but rather with what I'd really find rewarding. I'm hoping to balance some of my thought pieces with some practical strategies, like those Gee offered in her interview this week. Maybe that will be helpful to you and others.
You're right, Josh. The literature is dominated by scientists, and the humanities literature is dominated by either academic-adjacent or academic-like entrepreneurship. I want to do neither, but it's really hard to figure out how to translate my skills into a language non-academics will recognize. That is, we all have loads of highly sought after skills, but coding these in ways that non-academics will understand is challenging, I find. Also, in much of the country, the anti-intellectual and anti-academic bias is strong, so that needs to be dodged as well.
Jason, do you also struggle with identifying roles where you would really thrive? I think that's the main thing I'm struggling with. The formula seems simple: figure out what you're really looking for, read the job ads closely, then write the resume and cover letter that shows how your skills solve the problems the job is designed to fix or the needs it is meant to meet. What if you want to still be an intellectual? Must you hide that or compartmentalize it from jobs?
p.s. Maybe I should just send you more examples of atypical jobs that I think academics could do. Of course ... I'll send the one's I'm not applying for ...
No, I don't struggle with identifying roles at all. It's part of what's frustrating about it. I struggle with getting people to acknowledge my expertise. Especially since people like me, department chairs and faculty presidents, have so much experience that people don't expect, so I end up having to elide terms. I would present myself to non-academics as both an administrator/manager and teacher, even though many academics would cringe and howl at that identification. So, the trick is how to present that in a diction non-academics will accept, and that's what I'm still working on.
I won't dive fully into job searching for a few months, so I'll have more to say when I'm at it in earnest, but past experience and tangential experience now suggests that it's going to be hard.
Part of what's changed since I was last trying this is the rise of LinkedIn and social media. People like us could do A LOT of different roles, but people tend to want someone curated as just perfect for their role. That's the expectation. And they tend to expect LinkedIn profiles that present that. But that's impossible if a person is trying more than one role, so part of the challenge is getting past the corporate robots (referring to people, not automatic screening).
We haven't met in person, Josh, but anyone who's ever spent 5 minutes in my presence knows that I'm an intellectual. I can hide it for brief periods, and I almost always do in interviews, because life has taught me that most find it intimidating. It's not obsession with certain topics, but an intensity, insight, and self-certainty (of one's own knowledge and ignorance) that often comes off as arrogance. So, I have a whole teaching persona that I've adopted for years. I'm going to try it at interviews; I'll let you know how it goes.
I didn't mean struggling to identify possible roles so much as roles that would answer enough of your "why" to feel viable. I'll certainly be curious about your journey!
Good questions that I think the system tries to silence through shame, as you pointed out. I'd also had two other consequences. One, children of professors who are underpaid are forced to take on student debt, while their parents still pay student debt, so this becomes intergenerational debt (although of course this isn't limited to professors). Two, I know professors stuck in toxic universities who stay for the discount tuition offered their kids, because they can't afford to send them elsewhere. My former chair tried to tell people I left a toxic situation because I didn't care about the students and I was only interested in making money in the private sector. Ironically, we've hired my former students and I spent the first year writing lots of letters of recommendation for a whole host of students, because my former colleagues would not.
Excellent point about intergenerational debt. I've written about this elsewhere, but a university education truly was a path to mobility for my great-grandfather, who did not begin his Ph.D. work until he was forty years old -- already with four children. He was a lecturer for most of his career, only at the very end graduating to the rank of Assistant Professor (and retiring as an emeritus assistant professor, which now seems like an oxymoron). Yet he was somehow able to buy a home in Richmond Beach, Virginia, quite near the shoreline, be the sole provider for a family of six, and live quite comfortably. This might seem unseemly to say, but I think it's germane -- at the time of my resignation, I made roughly $68K as a full professor. Very difficult to raise a family of six on that income alone, much less purchase a house. So my education gave me much less mobility than it did my great-grandfather, even though I accomplished more. Ironically, my salary and benefits in 2021, when I resigned, would have been less than many contracted and independent loggers were making in Montana during my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. So one could argue that higher education actually diminished my economic mobility -- at least so long as I stayed in academe. I'm mindful of the alt-academic path, and how higher education can yield more privilege in industry. But the core irony I'm focusing on is how false the story of opportunity is as long as one stays within academe -- except for the very fortunate few.
And your point about entrapment because of tuition benefits -- especially in a time of soaring costs -- is so true. This also limits mobility because it restricts the range of choices a professor's child might have. I think it is still possible to leverage an average undergraduate degree for a more elite advanced degree, but it's by no means assured. The path to privilege for many low-income students begins in that undergraduate admissions process.
Since we're talking salaries. My current pay is also $68K/yr as a CC professor. According to the crooked HR accounting, that's 10 years experience and a Ph.D. teaching a 5/5 load and I've never worked less than a 50-hour week. (I write "crooked" because they don't count part-time or full time without the "right" job title.) In contrast, I was offered $80k/yr back in 2002 (now about $100k) to work as a software engineer fresh out of school. So ... despite multiple degrees and much success, I'll never make my starting salary from decades before...
So, as Maureen mentioned, I was trapped. Almost no jobs in academia, so I was trapped at an outrageously toxic environment. And, I needed to stay long enough for PSLF to finish. My post-academic story, unlike some here, is all about exploitation and entrapment, as opposed to the disillusionment story of others.
Being an ethicist, I'm not surprised at the rapaciously exploitative nature of academia. That is, our entire economy and culture is rife with it. Immigrant labor. Minimum wage jobs. Whole classifications of jobs--notably educator--getting paid much less than either market or fair rates. Part of the problem is that people group-think that market rates just are fair rates, while ignoring that market rate usually means "whatever exploitation we can get away with." So, I'm telling fellow academics--who in my prior experience generally miss this--that they need to stop seeing academia as special and more as of a piece with a larger pattern. The difference here is that society is convinced that we make a lot of money and barely work, whereas the other disadvantaged groups are largely invisible.
I fault my colleagues for your other point, that progress in fair compensation for some usually comes at the cost of others. There's an utterly unwillingness to do more than virtue signal on this issue, just like many others, such as DEI.
This is hard to write, but I'm going to try to be brave. I earn 10% less than you did when you left the university, and I do not feel poor. When I started at this job a decade ago, my starting salary was just over 50k. When I told my dad the starting pay of my new job, his reaction was so odd I had to ask my mom what was up with that -- and she told me that he'd only just achieved earning slightly *less* that my starting salary after 40 years at his job. When I got this job, I was teaching full time non-tenure track ("instructor") at a Florida State-system university, and my salary was 30k, and had been for 5 years (no pay raises, and in fact they'd increased our class sizes, so that's a pay cut, really, and if I'd stayed there I was going to take a 3% loss in benefits contributions, which is also a pay cut). South Florida was then and is now very expensive, so that 30k didn't go far. I do not have a PhD. I have a 60-hour MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. I have a sibling who didn't graduate high school but who cares about money who has gracefully slid up a major corporate ladder despite not having a degree because culturally they "fit" in that space. I'd be a DISASTER in my sibling's job, I'd be fired, I'm not money-focused enough, and I can't do those kinds of hours. My sib makes what I make in a year in about two months. My sibling's spouse owns their own business they started in high school and stuck with -- decades of waking up at 2 or 3 am most mornings to get the shop started and ready before their handful of employees came in -- after all these years, the business is locally established, and they have a very high income too. They live in a really nice neighborhood. But you know what? Their next-door neighbor earns over a million a year on OnlyFans. It's a crazy world. Money is one thing, what you do with your life is another.
So my take on this is a little different: I get one life. And what I do with it matters. If I love what I do, that matters. I got an MFA because I loved doing it. I taught under arguably really sub-par working conditions in Florida for five years because I could squeak by and I liked it -- when I was given the opportunity to make 60% more for teaching half as many students but far from home, I took the offer, and the biggest "cost" has been one of distance: being far from the people I love and places I call home.
I have heard people say they were offered false promises of life as a professor, but that isn't my story. I've just taken some risks and they've worked out well enough for me. 60k in Iowa is like 100k in Florida, and in Florida I was making 30k. I guess it has to do with expectations and lifestyle to a certain extent. If you grow up poor, maybe your idea of what your food and clothes "should" look like are different? But in the end you just have to pursue the things that make you happy. You know, if I had my sibling's money, I'd use it to travel around the world: Italy, Japan! But they couldn't care less about seeing the world; if they want a vacation they go to Orlando, over and over, every time. You know what they spend it on? Clothes. Shoes like you wouldn't believe. I couldn't care less about clothes. Or shoes. You see what I mean?
Amy, you've captured my feelings exactly when I began as an assistant professor in 2005. I couldn't believe I got to read books for a living and talk about them with young people. I was glad I wasn't working at a sawmill like my grandfather (though he loved it) or cutting timber like my uncles (who also loved that work). After living ascetically for nearly ten years, I could save. And I had the freedom to travel in the summer.
But that was when I felt I had the autonomy to do what I loved and that I was valued for that by my institution and my students. What you're not addressing -- and the core of the ethical contradiction I'm posing here -- is the emphasis on employability in undergraduate curriculum. This was not what I loved. Yet increasingly I was asked to care about it -- and to demonstrate that I was doing it for my students. That made me think a lot more about my salary. If you have the freedom to truly do what you love without the pressure to show evidence that your students are more employable as a result, then the value proposition still holds true for you.
But aren't there are also a lot of adjuncts and lecturers at your school who subsidize your position, to some extent, by absorbing the externalities that I describe? This was not the case when I first took my position, but it is becoming the model at my former employer. I think it's a difficult reality to ignore.
Thanks for sharing your view -- for being brave. I guess I'm trying to do the same :). I really do value your voice in these conversations.
Boy, do you hit the nail on the head with this post. On science Twitter there is a periodic symbolic debate about whether "passion" is needed to succeed in science. This can be a way to shame people into staying and working without fair compensation.
In my experience, those who project the passion narrative onto others are compensating for their own hurt or insecurity. It is not dissimilar to the ways that many fathers subject their sons to bizarre tests of manhood because they, themselves, suffered that kind of ritualized humiliation. One of my senior colleagues collared a friend in the grocery store and gave him an earful about how younger faculty were demanding too much. But that kind of "back in my day" rationale doesn't work when cost of living outpaces salary increases and abstract forms of compensation like status or cultural respect erode. Also -- ironically -- the passion narrative has its roots in the aristocratic origins of universities, which were (until the nineteenth century, possibly not until the mid-twentieth) largely finishing schools for the wealthy. One became a professor because one could afford to focus on passion and rise above crass industrialists. Even as a first-generation student, I bought into that tweedy Oxford storyline, forsaking earning potential for meaning and purpose. But it really is a cruel myth -- and a persistent one.
Those numbers in the story are chilling and it seems higher ed as rigged a strange system for a select few. While I know teaching K-12 doesn't have the prestige of higher ed, there are some benefits. The average salary for a teacher in the Spokane (Wash.) school district is $100,000. At least look they didn't have publish or perish hanging over them either. I find it amusing the Chronicle of Higher Ed often writes stories about a dearth of upcoming professors, not enough to fill the field. Well, maybe change the system, you know, like pay people and give them job security.
Well put, Tim! I'll not repeat my response to Maureen earlier in this thread, but my great-grandfather's story shows that pay and job security were once much more in line with cost of living. I may develop this line of reasoning a little further on Tuesday with an ethical question about externalities for parents of college students. That is, many of us know as consumers that there is a human cost to low prices. Even if we shop at Trader Joe's sometimes, we try to buy a little from a local farmers market or support a CSA. And we try not to buy things that we know were produced in sweatshops.
College is overpriced now -- no doubt. But that makes the externalities even more egregious. If a parent encourages their student to rack up college credits through community colleges, so they can shave a year or two off a degree at a more prestigious school, they are externalizing some of their cost to those poorly paid instructors at community colleges. Similarly, nearly every flagship university relies on exploited labor to meet their first-year graduation requirements. The big lecture courses, the mandatory first-year writing courses -- these are largely handled by teaching assistants, adjuncts, and lecturers. Penn State, to its credit, gives some folks in this category good benefits -- but $35-50K for full-time teaching of first-year students is still incredibly exploitative. And so even as you're paying that steep tuition price, you're complicit as a consumer in the exploitation of people that the system requires. I'm not sure how anyone can avoid that, necessarily. But when I taught Barry Eastabrook's TOMATOLAND, an expose of human trafficking in the tomato industry, I could not forget or minimize his observation that anyone who has eaten fast food with tomatoes has consumed a tomato picked by the hand of a slave, it made me think differently about my choices. I think parents ought to be aware, as they are shopping around for colleges, of how those colleges treat their employees. Some of this is knowable online. But I think it could easily be ascertained by a follow-up email. When I was thinking about the teaching professor track at PSU, wondering if belonging to a department would help ease my transition even if I was accepting more work for a 50% cut in pay, I emailed several people teaching in that role. They were honest with me, as I think they would be with any parent who bothered to ask.
I find it incredibly frustrating to look at what most faculty earn. If we look at salary in terms of $ in exchange for time, most professors are grossly underearning. If we look at salary in terms of $ in exchange for value, then we open the door to the conversation about what students "get" out of an undergraduate degree and we'll find faculty underearning yet again.
If all profs were providing is access to new information and ways of seeing and thinking, I would argue that is invaluable. But profs are providing -- shoulders to cry on, sites of first disclosure, extensive feedback on work, being available in person and online 24/7, etc. So the job of professor keeps changing, both in terms of what profs offer students and what universities offer (or don't offer) professors in terms of supports.
I have zero patience for the argument, waged against teachers and professors, that they are--or should be--in it solely for the impact on young, impressionable minds, rather than for a comfortable lifestyle. As a former Germanist, I feel Brecht is warranted here: "zuerst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral." (First food, then morals.)
I keep half an eye on employment and hiring trends and the public discourse around these (vis-a-vis millenials, Gen Z, etc.) and as a result am of two minds about what being "job ready" means for someone who is graduating with a BA (as my eldest will in December of this year. History and Art History, so a nice test case for the pure humanities graduate in the world of work).
Those of us in the profession know that someone who has undertaken any sort of rigorous course of study that demands of young people that they ingest new information, digest it meaningfully, and then produce something with it also prepares those same people to take on all manner of entry-level professional jobs. But whether this is a result of micro-credentialing or some other facet of the growth in educational and para-educational institutions or not, the majority of employers do not hire "raw talent." If you want to work in a business/management capacity, most companies' job ads will suggest that your course of study, work experience, and additional certifications all align with their work.
This is lazy and, ultimately, not very successful for most companies (I think), while at the same time driving enrollments into UG programs in business, commerce, etc.
I think that colleges and universities have pretty much turned over the terms of this discussion (who trains early-career professionals) to employers, without mounting much of a counter-argument that gets any traction.
Great points, Jennifer, and I love the line from Brecht. Spot on. What you say about employers not hiring raw talent is troubling. All I know on that front is anecdotal. Conversations with former students, college trustees, and other people in business. One former student claimed that the bank he went to work for was essentially just looking for "warm bodies." I know of a few humanities alums who have worked in banking or for the behemoth Principal Financial in Des Moines. A couple of IT guys from Principal told me that the people they see rise in the company are those whose degrees aren't skill-specific. Those who were tech specialists coming in tend to stay tech specialists. Those with liberal arts tend to rise. But that's probably not enough evidence to be making those claims, and it's possible that in some of those cases people were telling me what I wanted to hear :)
We're experiencing the K-12-edufication of higher education. Back when I was a kid in the 1970s and early 1980s, K-12 teachers would encourage their own students to become teachers. That completely died no later than the 2010s, and probably closer to 2000. No K-12 teacher I know of (and I served for four years on a local school board, so I know quite a few) encourages top students to follow in their footsteps. Why would you? The pay is lower-middle-class, the workload is 7 days and most nights a week.
Today's university instructors are in the same boat. 75% of them are paid as badly as, or worse than, K-12 teachers, with less job security, after many more years of schooling and more debt. Why would you encourage your best students to follow you into that quagmire? Research university professors, who are a small slice of the overall (10%?) population, maintain a split personality, complaining about their declining situations (it's true; they are just better than others' situations) while also training the next generation of academics who will have even worse prospects. Their grad students, who are sometimes ill-informed about the real odds of success and more often have 'lottery mentality' and think that they'll be among the 20% or fewer who land the R-I job they've spent 5-10+ years training for, are the last dreamers.
But that dream is dissipating fast; market forces, if nothing else, will dispel it. My own son opted for a Master's in statistics instead of a doctorate, and I describe his current situation to friends and relatives as "now he has a job that ends at 5 pm, he doesn't take work home with him at nights and on the weekend, and he's paid twice as much as he was as a grad student." He read the handwriting on the wall about his chances of getting a tenure-track position, and he had me reminding him that the great Great Recession-to-Trump-to-COVID baby bust will lower the age-18 population by about 600,000 from 2025 to 2040.
The open secret about academia (well, I can speak only to the sciences) is that the "best minds" stopped going into it decades ago. The 1970s was the first big crunch in PhDLand. A lot of physicist-types started going into the biosciences in the 1970s and afterward; the big crunch in physics hit hard in the 1990s. But starting in the 1990s, the whipsmart types went into finance, or did a Ph.D. in physics and then became quants. That's never changed; that's still happening in the 2020s. With the decimation of the professoriate and the rise of the precariat, and the frankly fascist anti-academia movements afoot in some states, there's no reason for people with options to go into academia. And so in no more than 20 years there will be national hand-wringing over "why can't we get more/better people to go into college teaching," and the solutions will be as ineffectual as they are for K-12 teaching today.
You kill the ecosystem, and then you complain about species loss. Brilliant.
Lots to unpack here, John. I think your point about K-12 really depends on the state and the county. In many rural areas, those public school teaching jobs are some of the most reliable in the area. And the Education major was one of the largest at my former employer. There are plenty of students who gravitate to Education as a path of less resistance, which is a separate concern. And that is part of your point about academe -- the impoverished ecosystem with less diversity.
I wonder if your point about the "best minds" is widely accepted in the sciences? I guess I don't know how you sift the "whipsmart types" from the other highly intelligent people in STEM. My disciplinary bias makes me skeptical of these categorical claims about intelligence, because there are a lot of high-producing scholars and creative writers who I don't necessarily see as smarter than their peers -- just more savvy about the system. There are a lot of factors involved in people moving into different industry sectors, so how do we know that the main motivation of working in finance in the 1990s was intellectual reward? Maybe some folks always gravitate toward more lucrative markets. I think the main draw in academe for many years was autonomy, the ability to define mastery for oneself (especially in teaching), and the sense of purpose that followed from that. When people were paid enough to take money off the table and given more of that free rein, the value proposition was still persuasive (at least for me). I think that could still be true for some very smart people who don't want to work for a boss, don't want to be entrepreneurs, and really just want to do what they love, share that passion with students, and *not* think about money. I hear that in Amy's comment below. But it's hard to do that if you're constantly being asked by your institution to think about your students' earning potential or job preparedness. And so then you start to wonder, "Why am I making these sacrifices again?."
I care about this most as a parent now. I feel protective of my children and also concerned about how to vet the institutions that they will be choosing from as college students. Because even if they don't become academics, their experience will be impacted by the well-being of their professors. One easy mark of a healthy institutional culture, to me, is a high rate of tenure-track faculty compared to contingent faculty. Simple to ascertain by browsing faculty profiles and looking at job titles. If you see a lot of titles like "teaching professor" or "lecturer" or "instructor," it ought to be a warning sign. Faculty workload and faculty autonomy would be two others. But I don't really know how I, as a parent, would be able to judge that as an outsider to an institution. I could ask about teaching load, of course, but even faculty at institutions with 3/3, 3/2, or 2/2 feel beset by service demands. And I'm not sure how forthcoming I could expect a faculty member to be about how much autonomy they felt they had in their position, especially if they feel that they live or die based on student recruitment. My former employer has been masterful at suppressing bad PR, and even when I felt desperately miserable, I did my best to put a good face on things while speaking with prospective students. It's a tricky calculus.
All good comments, Josh. A few responses and some advice to a parent from my perspective as a faculty member:
1. The stories I hear about the crashing and burning of K-12 ed are nationwide, but probably weighted more toward urban districts, yes. I was at a public elementary school yesterday morning doing a STEM Day presentation to five different classes of K-5 students, which is in a far-far suburb of Athens, GA. But those teachers and esp. parapros are so tired, and so underpaid, and they are upfront about it.
2. I put "best minds" in quotes, being intentionally ironic. That's the verbiage of generations of scientist-pricks at the top of the science pyramid who thought they knew all about intelligence. My interpretation is much more nuanced. Like you, I agree that many of the most successful academics are just good at game-playing, esp. in what is still called without hint of offense to women "grantsmanship"; they are not actually that interesting as people, or well-read, or any of what you or I might think of as indicative of an intelligent or thoughtful or wise person.
3. The flow of physicists into Wall Street is pretty well documented, and it was a combination of zero jobs in academia, the challenge of the puzzle of reinventing Wall Street as a complex physical system, and big financial rewards. Our society has paid a price for that, in my opinion, because the gamification of Wall Street has not been a good development for its stability or for the vast number of ordinary citizens who don't benefit from Wall Street money games. I have read speculation along the lines of, "What would our society be like if we'd provided incentives for these clever people to fix our nation's problems instead of turning Wall Street into an unfathomably complex game?" But we didn't, and one of the legitimately smartest people I've ever met (national fellowship winner, physicist par excellence, memorized Keats on the side for fun) finally gave up trying to get an academic job after three post-docs and became a quant a few years ago. Rather apologetically, I might add.
4. Here's a 2023 story or two about incentives and careers. For the first time in the 22-year history of our atmospheric sciences program at UGA, we have two students graduating with a perfect 4.00 GPA. I'm not a big fan of perfect GPAs because they often mean you didn't take enough risks, but UGA makes a huge deal out of it, so, well, whatever. Anyway, one of our students did this in 3 years, boom. He's at another, higher level compared to, I think, any of the other 200 atmospheric sciences majors and the 7,000+ students total that I've taught in my career. I didn't even come close to finding his ceiling. He interned for a major airline as a 2nd-year student, and they were so impressed that the airline sent people down to UGA to check us out. So, while measuring intelligence is fraught with problems and biases, I claim that this guy might just be the real McCoy, when major corporations take notice and then hire him right out of college in three years.
The other student is a BIPOC woman, also with no interest in academia. She wants to make a difference in the world and help people, and an academic career seems like the antithesis of that. She's doing a terminal master's to assist in the job market, but that's it.
The other guy, he has 0.00% in further degrees in academia. He doesn't need us, and he has mostly contempt for academia. The slow pace of change, and the large amounts of bullshit in academia are not for him. Would it have been different in the 1960s? I think so; back then, so much money was flowing into academia that new departments were literally created with a phone call, and faculty positions were offered without interviews. That could have appealed to him. But those days are gone for good, in the words of Stuart Rojstaczer, who wrote a good book on the decline of academia in the 1990s. (He's also the #1 statistical documenter of grade inflation.)
So when I say "the best minds" aren't going into academia, I mean that ironically (because "the best minds" were always WASP guys back then) but also in terms of the reality I see. When I teach intro classes, the number of very-high-achieving kids who are in business or management information sciences and are bored in college is high. They know that the monetary reward on the other end is worth the boredom, and doing something else that might involve a career in academia is not worth it. Even subtracting out all the biases, there's definitely been a brain drain away from academia since the 1960s. My own mentor in college has remarked on this noticeable brain drain during her own career, and she got her Ph.D. in 1976, so I claim this has been a thing for a long time. And I'm seeing it in 2023.
5. How to vet an institution. First of all, with regard to teaching loads, most professors I know are oblivious to the fact that teaching loads can vary widely across even one college campus. Chairs, deans, and provosts keep this stuff very, very quiet, just like how they hide salary information. For example, at middle-range research universities like mine, the official teaching load may be 2/2. But, guess what? Over in physics, it could be 1/2. Or even 1/1! And this is without course buyouts using grant monies. This may sound crazy, but I know from multiple sources of evidence at multiple universities that physicists get lighter teaching loads than other faculty at the same institution, I think because Physics Is God. And then there are individual faculty who will quietly go to their chair and complain and beg and complain and beg and get their teaching load negotiated downward, without anyone else knowing. So, asking about teaching load isn't going to get the information you're seeking, and the institution and the professors will often be hesitant to admit the deals they've made and are getting. (On the other extreme of teaching loads, I was told by a faculty member at a Midwestern university recently that their computer science faculty--those who are left--are teaching 7 or 8 courses PER SEMESTER, because of mass attrition. At a public institution. I didn't fathom that that could even happen, but welcome to 2023.)
Public university faculty will be more forthcoming, because it's less the case that their jobs and their college's existence pivots on recruitment of individual students. Tuition may be 20% of their school's budget. Private colleges will be more like 80% dependent on tuition, as you know, so that's where it gets difficult, especially as we experience a decline in college-age freshmen.
I think your best suggestion is going online and looking at the number and ratio of contingent faculty vs. professors. I do that, too, and I agree with you that it's a good yardstick of how underfunded and overworked everyone is.
Finally, a data-driven way for comparing institutions for your children's college choices: Professors nationwide will hate me for saying this, but I recommend using the wisdom of crowds and going on ratemyprofessors dot com and spending some time reading the students' anonymous ratings of teaching at universities your children are interested in. I've read probably tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of instructors at hundreds of universities at that site since it became a thing in the early-to-mid 2000s. What stands out to me is how accurate those ratings are for older white guys (who, after all, are still the bulk of the professoriate). It's been established that there's bias in these ratings against women instructors, BIPOC instructors, and/or those instructors with accents, but the narratives that accompany the ratings can help you navigate past the bias. And, in fact, the narratives that go along with the ratings tell you something about the student bodies of institutions, as well. Lots of whining ratings? Whiny campus. Nuanced ratings interspersed with some clearly biased individuals? That's closer to what you'd want. Or, for the tl;dr version: you'd do this if you were looking on Amazon to buy a product, or imdb.com to rent a movie, so why not try it for your kids' education too? The accuracy of those ratings, including my own ratings (I agree with pretty much all of the negative comments), will surprise those whose knee-jerk reaction is that the students are all haters and have nothing useful to say about their experiences in the classroom.
Thanks again for your stimulating essays.
4. Here's a 2023 story or two about incentives and careers. For the first time in the 22-year history of our atmospheric sciences program at UGA, we have two students graduating with a perfect 4.00 GPA. I'm not a big fan of perfect GPAs because they often mean you didn't take enough risks, but UGA makes a huge deal out of it, so, well, whatever. Anyway, one of our students did this in 3 years, boom. He's at another, higher level compared to, I think, any of the other 200 atmospheric sciences majors and the 7,000+ students total that I've taught in my career. I didn't even come close to finding his ceiling. He interned for a major airline as a 2nd-year student, and they were so impressed that the airline sent people down to UGA to check us out. So, while measuring intelligence is fraught with problems and biases, I claim that this guy might just be the real McCoy, when major corporations take notice and then hire him right out of college in three years.
The other student is a BIPOC woman, also with no interest in academia. She wants to make a difference in the world and help people, and an academic career seems like the antithesis of that. She's doing a terminal master's to assist in the job market, but that's it.
The other guy, he has 0.00% in further degrees in academia. He doesn't need us, and he has mostly contempt for academia. The slow pace of change, and the large amounts of bullshit in academia are not for him. Would it have been different in the 1960s? I think so; back then, so much money was flowing into academia that new departments were literally created with a phone call, and faculty positions were offered without interviews. That could have appealed to him. But those days are gone for good, in the words of Stuart Rojstaczer, who wrote a good book on the decline of academia in the 1990s. (He's also the #1 statistical documenter of grade inflation.)
So when I say "the best minds" aren't going into academia, I mean that ironically (because "the best minds" were always WASP guys back then) but also in terms of the reality I see. When I teach intro classes, the number of very-high-achieving kids who are in business or management information sciences and are bored in college is high. They know that the monetary reward on the other end is worth the boredom, and doing something else that might involve a career in academia is not worth it. Even subtracting out all the biases, there's definitely been a brain drain away from academia since the 1960s. My own mentor in college has remarked on this noticeable brain drain during her own career, and she got her Ph.D. in 1976, so I claim this has been a thing for a long time. And I'm seeing it in 2023.
5. How to vet an institution. First of all, with regard to teaching loads, most professors I know are oblivious to the fact that teaching loads can vary widely across even one college campus. Chairs, deans, and provosts keep this stuff very, very quiet, just like how they hide salary information. For example, at middle-range research universities like mine, the official teaching load may be 2/2. But, guess what? Over in physics, it could be 1/2. Or even 1/1! And this is without course buyouts using grant monies. This may sound crazy, but I know from multiple sources of evidence at multiple universities that physicists get lighter teaching loads than other faculty at the same institution, I think because Physics Is God. And then there are individual faculty who will quietly go to their chair and complain and beg and complain and beg and get their teaching load negotiated downward, without anyone else knowing. So, asking about teaching load isn't going to get the information you're seeking, and the institution and the professors will often be hesitant to admit the deals they've made and are getting. (On the other extreme of teaching loads, I was told by a faculty member at a Midwestern university recently that their computer science faculty--those who are left--are teaching 7 or 8 courses PER SEMESTER, because of mass attrition. At a public institution. I didn't fathom that that could even happen, but welcome to 2023.)
Public university faculty will be more forthcoming, because it's less the case that their jobs and their college's existence pivots on recruitment of individual students. Tuition may be 20% of their school's budget. Private colleges will be more like 80% dependent on tuition, as you know, so that's where it gets difficult, especially as we experience a decline in college-age freshmen.
I think your best suggestion is going online and looking at the number and ratio of contingent faculty vs. professors. I do that, too, and I agree with you that it's a good yardstick of how underfunded and overworked everyone is.
Finally, a data-driven way for comparing institutions for your children's college choices: Professors nationwide will hate me for saying this, but I recommend using the wisdom of crowds and going on ratemyprofessors dot com and spending some time reading the students' anonymous ratings of teaching at universities your children are interested in. I've read probably tens of thousands of reviews of thousands of instructors at hundreds of universities at that site since it became a thing in the early-to-mid 2000s. What stands out to me is how accurate those ratings are for older white guys (who, after all, are still the bulk of the professoriate). It's been established that there's bias in these ratings against women instructors, BIPOC instructors, and/or those instructors with accents, but the narratives that accompany the ratings can help you navigate past the bias. And, in fact, the narratives that go along with the ratings tell you something about the student bodies of institutions, as well. Lots of whining ratings? Whiny campus. Nuanced ratings interspersed with some clearly biased individuals? That's closer to what you'd want. Or, for the tl;dr version: you'd do this if you were looking on Amazon to buy a product, or imdb.com to rent a movie, so why not try it for your kids' education too? The accuracy of those ratings, including my own ratings (I agree with pretty much all of the negative comments), will surprise those whose knee-jerk reaction is that the students are all haters and have nothing useful to say about their experiences in the classroom.
Thanks again for your stimulating essays.
For what it's worth, I recognized your intention the first time. I took you to be repeating the discourse of a certain class of individuals but not being lost in it.
The skills that a degree gives you (especially the "soft skills") are highly sought after in non-academic business. Problem is, being able to express one's abilities there effectively in a non-academic resume, say.
Also: advancement within academia is impossible when you're going for actually academic jobs. The money in higher education is in admin. And when a college degree is morphing into a job application, why not go into trade school instead? I've been saying this for a while now: a college degree shouldn't be just to get a job. But all jobs require one now (even several server and bartender positions in my area). Education is for education, not training. Training is for training.
That's how it should be, is what I mean. Nowadays students are purchasing a degree as a job requirement. Why would they be curious/inspired/want to explore or change their minds when the bottom line is ... well, on the line?
Jenn, I have some upcoming interviews that might address your question about expressing your abilities in a non-academic resume. But the literature on practical strategies for transitioning to industry is still pretty dominated by scientists. I don't know about you, but I think that artists and humanities scholars aren't *just* struggling to translate their abilities into corporate contexts, they are also struggling with the whether they really want to do that. For instance, I had a very kind offer from someone who found me on LinkedIn to join a financial advising firm. At that point I'd not really done much with my profile other than say I was "open to work." But that person saw value in my teaching experience for corporate training. In that case, I didn't even really have to make the case -- the offer was already there. But after thinking about it for a day or two, I realized I didn't really want to be talking with people about their money or training people on my team to do that.
So I think the real thing I keep hearing from career coaches and others is Simon Sinek's idea of starting with "why." When I prepared for this transition, I really saw the most purpose in writing. It was the closest to the sense of calling I felt as a teacher. I'm still thinking through what my actual goals are as a freelancer writer or Substacker. But the "why" is clear: a sense of belonging with readers and a broader writing community, a feeling of serving others, and ultimate autonomy to choose what is worth my time and attention. I've hit some speed bumps as I've learned about the marketplace realities of publishing. And I struggle with the messaging on Substack, which is largely geared toward viewing independent writing as a viable primary income (eventually). So I may yet pivot to a more traditional job search. But at least I know in that case that I ought to start not with translating my skills into industry-speak, but rather with what I'd really find rewarding. I'm hoping to balance some of my thought pieces with some practical strategies, like those Gee offered in her interview this week. Maybe that will be helpful to you and others.
I'd like to hear more about this.
You're right, Josh. The literature is dominated by scientists, and the humanities literature is dominated by either academic-adjacent or academic-like entrepreneurship. I want to do neither, but it's really hard to figure out how to translate my skills into a language non-academics will recognize. That is, we all have loads of highly sought after skills, but coding these in ways that non-academics will understand is challenging, I find. Also, in much of the country, the anti-intellectual and anti-academic bias is strong, so that needs to be dodged as well.
Jason, do you also struggle with identifying roles where you would really thrive? I think that's the main thing I'm struggling with. The formula seems simple: figure out what you're really looking for, read the job ads closely, then write the resume and cover letter that shows how your skills solve the problems the job is designed to fix or the needs it is meant to meet. What if you want to still be an intellectual? Must you hide that or compartmentalize it from jobs?
p.s. Maybe I should just send you more examples of atypical jobs that I think academics could do. Of course ... I'll send the one's I'm not applying for ...
Josh,
No, I don't struggle with identifying roles at all. It's part of what's frustrating about it. I struggle with getting people to acknowledge my expertise. Especially since people like me, department chairs and faculty presidents, have so much experience that people don't expect, so I end up having to elide terms. I would present myself to non-academics as both an administrator/manager and teacher, even though many academics would cringe and howl at that identification. So, the trick is how to present that in a diction non-academics will accept, and that's what I'm still working on.
I won't dive fully into job searching for a few months, so I'll have more to say when I'm at it in earnest, but past experience and tangential experience now suggests that it's going to be hard.
Part of what's changed since I was last trying this is the rise of LinkedIn and social media. People like us could do A LOT of different roles, but people tend to want someone curated as just perfect for their role. That's the expectation. And they tend to expect LinkedIn profiles that present that. But that's impossible if a person is trying more than one role, so part of the challenge is getting past the corporate robots (referring to people, not automatic screening).
We haven't met in person, Josh, but anyone who's ever spent 5 minutes in my presence knows that I'm an intellectual. I can hide it for brief periods, and I almost always do in interviews, because life has taught me that most find it intimidating. It's not obsession with certain topics, but an intensity, insight, and self-certainty (of one's own knowledge and ignorance) that often comes off as arrogance. So, I have a whole teaching persona that I've adopted for years. I'm going to try it at interviews; I'll let you know how it goes.
I didn't mean struggling to identify possible roles so much as roles that would answer enough of your "why" to feel viable. I'll certainly be curious about your journey!
Oh. Anything intellectually challenging in a supportive environment in which I can grow.
This requires letting go of one's identity as an academic. I haven't had that in a decade ... but I think others really struggle with this.
Good questions that I think the system tries to silence through shame, as you pointed out. I'd also had two other consequences. One, children of professors who are underpaid are forced to take on student debt, while their parents still pay student debt, so this becomes intergenerational debt (although of course this isn't limited to professors). Two, I know professors stuck in toxic universities who stay for the discount tuition offered their kids, because they can't afford to send them elsewhere. My former chair tried to tell people I left a toxic situation because I didn't care about the students and I was only interested in making money in the private sector. Ironically, we've hired my former students and I spent the first year writing lots of letters of recommendation for a whole host of students, because my former colleagues would not.
Excellent point about intergenerational debt. I've written about this elsewhere, but a university education truly was a path to mobility for my great-grandfather, who did not begin his Ph.D. work until he was forty years old -- already with four children. He was a lecturer for most of his career, only at the very end graduating to the rank of Assistant Professor (and retiring as an emeritus assistant professor, which now seems like an oxymoron). Yet he was somehow able to buy a home in Richmond Beach, Virginia, quite near the shoreline, be the sole provider for a family of six, and live quite comfortably. This might seem unseemly to say, but I think it's germane -- at the time of my resignation, I made roughly $68K as a full professor. Very difficult to raise a family of six on that income alone, much less purchase a house. So my education gave me much less mobility than it did my great-grandfather, even though I accomplished more. Ironically, my salary and benefits in 2021, when I resigned, would have been less than many contracted and independent loggers were making in Montana during my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s. So one could argue that higher education actually diminished my economic mobility -- at least so long as I stayed in academe. I'm mindful of the alt-academic path, and how higher education can yield more privilege in industry. But the core irony I'm focusing on is how false the story of opportunity is as long as one stays within academe -- except for the very fortunate few.
And your point about entrapment because of tuition benefits -- especially in a time of soaring costs -- is so true. This also limits mobility because it restricts the range of choices a professor's child might have. I think it is still possible to leverage an average undergraduate degree for a more elite advanced degree, but it's by no means assured. The path to privilege for many low-income students begins in that undergraduate admissions process.
Josh,
Since we're talking salaries. My current pay is also $68K/yr as a CC professor. According to the crooked HR accounting, that's 10 years experience and a Ph.D. teaching a 5/5 load and I've never worked less than a 50-hour week. (I write "crooked" because they don't count part-time or full time without the "right" job title.) In contrast, I was offered $80k/yr back in 2002 (now about $100k) to work as a software engineer fresh out of school. So ... despite multiple degrees and much success, I'll never make my starting salary from decades before...
So, as Maureen mentioned, I was trapped. Almost no jobs in academia, so I was trapped at an outrageously toxic environment. And, I needed to stay long enough for PSLF to finish. My post-academic story, unlike some here, is all about exploitation and entrapment, as opposed to the disillusionment story of others.
Josh,
On the diminished earning potentials of Ph.D.s...
Being an ethicist, I'm not surprised at the rapaciously exploitative nature of academia. That is, our entire economy and culture is rife with it. Immigrant labor. Minimum wage jobs. Whole classifications of jobs--notably educator--getting paid much less than either market or fair rates. Part of the problem is that people group-think that market rates just are fair rates, while ignoring that market rate usually means "whatever exploitation we can get away with." So, I'm telling fellow academics--who in my prior experience generally miss this--that they need to stop seeing academia as special and more as of a piece with a larger pattern. The difference here is that society is convinced that we make a lot of money and barely work, whereas the other disadvantaged groups are largely invisible.
I fault my colleagues for your other point, that progress in fair compensation for some usually comes at the cost of others. There's an utterly unwillingness to do more than virtue signal on this issue, just like many others, such as DEI.
This is hard to write, but I'm going to try to be brave. I earn 10% less than you did when you left the university, and I do not feel poor. When I started at this job a decade ago, my starting salary was just over 50k. When I told my dad the starting pay of my new job, his reaction was so odd I had to ask my mom what was up with that -- and she told me that he'd only just achieved earning slightly *less* that my starting salary after 40 years at his job. When I got this job, I was teaching full time non-tenure track ("instructor") at a Florida State-system university, and my salary was 30k, and had been for 5 years (no pay raises, and in fact they'd increased our class sizes, so that's a pay cut, really, and if I'd stayed there I was going to take a 3% loss in benefits contributions, which is also a pay cut). South Florida was then and is now very expensive, so that 30k didn't go far. I do not have a PhD. I have a 60-hour MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. I have a sibling who didn't graduate high school but who cares about money who has gracefully slid up a major corporate ladder despite not having a degree because culturally they "fit" in that space. I'd be a DISASTER in my sibling's job, I'd be fired, I'm not money-focused enough, and I can't do those kinds of hours. My sib makes what I make in a year in about two months. My sibling's spouse owns their own business they started in high school and stuck with -- decades of waking up at 2 or 3 am most mornings to get the shop started and ready before their handful of employees came in -- after all these years, the business is locally established, and they have a very high income too. They live in a really nice neighborhood. But you know what? Their next-door neighbor earns over a million a year on OnlyFans. It's a crazy world. Money is one thing, what you do with your life is another.
So my take on this is a little different: I get one life. And what I do with it matters. If I love what I do, that matters. I got an MFA because I loved doing it. I taught under arguably really sub-par working conditions in Florida for five years because I could squeak by and I liked it -- when I was given the opportunity to make 60% more for teaching half as many students but far from home, I took the offer, and the biggest "cost" has been one of distance: being far from the people I love and places I call home.
I have heard people say they were offered false promises of life as a professor, but that isn't my story. I've just taken some risks and they've worked out well enough for me. 60k in Iowa is like 100k in Florida, and in Florida I was making 30k. I guess it has to do with expectations and lifestyle to a certain extent. If you grow up poor, maybe your idea of what your food and clothes "should" look like are different? But in the end you just have to pursue the things that make you happy. You know, if I had my sibling's money, I'd use it to travel around the world: Italy, Japan! But they couldn't care less about seeing the world; if they want a vacation they go to Orlando, over and over, every time. You know what they spend it on? Clothes. Shoes like you wouldn't believe. I couldn't care less about clothes. Or shoes. You see what I mean?
Amy, you've captured my feelings exactly when I began as an assistant professor in 2005. I couldn't believe I got to read books for a living and talk about them with young people. I was glad I wasn't working at a sawmill like my grandfather (though he loved it) or cutting timber like my uncles (who also loved that work). After living ascetically for nearly ten years, I could save. And I had the freedom to travel in the summer.
But that was when I felt I had the autonomy to do what I loved and that I was valued for that by my institution and my students. What you're not addressing -- and the core of the ethical contradiction I'm posing here -- is the emphasis on employability in undergraduate curriculum. This was not what I loved. Yet increasingly I was asked to care about it -- and to demonstrate that I was doing it for my students. That made me think a lot more about my salary. If you have the freedom to truly do what you love without the pressure to show evidence that your students are more employable as a result, then the value proposition still holds true for you.
But aren't there are also a lot of adjuncts and lecturers at your school who subsidize your position, to some extent, by absorbing the externalities that I describe? This was not the case when I first took my position, but it is becoming the model at my former employer. I think it's a difficult reality to ignore.
Thanks for sharing your view -- for being brave. I guess I'm trying to do the same :). I really do value your voice in these conversations.
Boy, do you hit the nail on the head with this post. On science Twitter there is a periodic symbolic debate about whether "passion" is needed to succeed in science. This can be a way to shame people into staying and working without fair compensation.
In my experience, those who project the passion narrative onto others are compensating for their own hurt or insecurity. It is not dissimilar to the ways that many fathers subject their sons to bizarre tests of manhood because they, themselves, suffered that kind of ritualized humiliation. One of my senior colleagues collared a friend in the grocery store and gave him an earful about how younger faculty were demanding too much. But that kind of "back in my day" rationale doesn't work when cost of living outpaces salary increases and abstract forms of compensation like status or cultural respect erode. Also -- ironically -- the passion narrative has its roots in the aristocratic origins of universities, which were (until the nineteenth century, possibly not until the mid-twentieth) largely finishing schools for the wealthy. One became a professor because one could afford to focus on passion and rise above crass industrialists. Even as a first-generation student, I bought into that tweedy Oxford storyline, forsaking earning potential for meaning and purpose. But it really is a cruel myth -- and a persistent one.
Exactly! Can't we just have a passion for supporting our families and living in a region of our choosing?