At the companion site, Michael Mohr grapples with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Gertrude Nonterah sometimes gets blowback on LinkedIn when she admits that she left higher ed because she was tired of being poor. She told me, “There's this flawed thinking within academia that when you leave…it's because somehow you are a capitalistic opportunist. Or you don't want to serve people.”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.