generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

too

I wish I had the book in front of me. "Where did you prep?" seemed to be a typical conversation opener between students.

I don't know - I've been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, which covers his undergraduate years at Princeton in the 1910s, and if anything it sounds snobbier then than it is now. The student body was 100% male and almost 100% white and upper class, and the main activity, which took precedence over academics, seemed to be jostling for membership to the elite social clubs.

an accurate portrayal btw. Princeton President Woodrow Wilson's main bragging point was his "breaking" the hold of the clubs.

I don't know - I've been reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, which covers his undergraduate years at Princeton in the 1910s, and if anything it sounds snobbier then than it is now. The student body was 100% male and almost 100% white and upper class, and the main activity, which took precedence over academics, seemed to be jostling for membership to the elite social clubs.

― o. nate, Friday, March 9, 2012 4:15 PM (41 minutes ago) Bookmark

they had maids! also here's a fun fact: the mascot for pierson college, one of yale's residential colleges, was the "slaves"

o wow

http://www.idealist.org/view/job/JC7BTfSh8b3p/

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ WANT plz pray for me yall

good luck a hoos!

lol scandalously overpaid professors: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/do-college-professors-work-hard-enough/2012/02/15/gIQAn058VS_print.html

As far as I can tell most of my professors (the good ones) worked like 60 hours a week. Some of them just managed to arrange things so that they only had to come in three days a week.

I defy you to find a CC instructor who considers their job a "sinecure"

Since most of them are adjuncts with no benefits.

professors at community colleges, u to lazy, no deserve to be considered "upper middle class professionals".

Well comparing office time to teaching time is ridiculous and enough to ignore the rest of that article. Nonetheless, tenured professors have a pretty easy life for the money compared to similarly salaried professionals. But colleges have already been moving away from tenured professors and toward underpaid instructors and adjuncts for a long time.

yeah I'm pretty cynical on the subject of higher ed in general but that analysis misses the bigger trends
a. lol tenure
b. growth in bureaucratic + non-academic spending

some old tenured white dudes do have it easy and get paid 'too much', it's just not as important as other stuff

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/mar/25/slacker-back-female-lena-dunham

I completely don't get this attitude: "oh, somebody's life (potentially) doesn't suck as much as other people's. they can work a reasonable amount of hours and not go deep into debt. well that's the problem! clearly things should be worse for them!"

or rather, i do get the attitude, but it's so transparent.

well it's a bit more complicated than that when you remember that people who 'have it good' are also people w/ vested interests in the status quo and are in positions of relative influence

he's only talking about teaching-oriented institutions so I don't have much personal stake in this but it seems to me with all teaching salary questions the wrong question to ask is "what's the value of this dollar by dollar"; the real question is: "what kind of person am I gonna buy with a salary like this?" because post-secondary teaching is not so great that good people would choose to do it for average salaries, not when there are lots of more lucrative options (yes, even with a Ph.D.).

idk seems to me like the post-secondary teaching market is not exactly straining to get enough applicants

lol maybe in a few disciplines like English & psych, but not in much else

& to the extent that's true it's only b/c people still have aspirations for better jobs; when that hope erodes then the shitty jobs will get fewer apps; i.e. those are only seen as stepping stones, given the shitty salaries & working conditions

waht

I feel like you live in a magical academic universe that is completely removed from the one there is a surplus of labor and a dearth of academic jobs in *almost every single field*

yeah are you kidding, the last faculty search I was privy to any details of (for a philosopher, even, for a 3-year visiting position) got 200+ applications. Pretty par for the course is what it sounded like too.

yeah I know the philo job market & for visiting positions like that, depending on the location, you can be talking about a search pool of 30 or less

how many applicants does a search for a tt chem job get at a not tier 1 institution in say Utah?

iatee maybe we're talking about difft things but I don't really see 2 yr community college profs making less than six figures/yr as having "vested interests in the status quo and... in positions of relative influence"

how many applicants does a search for a tt chem job get at a not tier 1 institution in say Utah?

a good friend in my program who finished in '09 ended up taking a job in industry late last year because he couldnt find a tt position anywhere and he was willing to move p much anywhere, in fact he ended up in st. louis anyway which was hardly his dream location

iatee maybe we're talking about difft things but I don't really see 2 yr community college profs making less than six figures/yr as having "vested interests in the status quo and... in positions of relative influence"

well I think we are talking about different things yeah, I was mostly talking about tenured faculty at 4 year colleges. but even tenured community college profs are gonna have certain vested interests and are gonna fight any change that might affect them. it's just that the community college system isn't as broken / is inherently more flexible.

right Lamp but I wonder how many apps we're talking

the article in question was just about teaching positions, e.g. CC jobs, or regional state unis where tenure reqs don't require pubs / international rep like they do at research unis. I don't know what their salaries "should" be but I know that adding up hours in the classroom is silly b/c what you're determining is what kind of people are gonna be interested in those jobs. If you want people who are among the best of the best (& maybe you don't! we need investment bankers pretty badly!) then you're gonna have to make the lifestyle you can buy with those jobs nice enough, particularly if you're living way off the coasts.

you are taking wall street's 'we need to pay the talent/ceos otherwise they'll flee!' argument to describe a group of people who are apparently going to all flee to that surely-to-grow-forever financial labor market. you know, the industry that shed 200,000 jobs in 2011.

anyone who is going into academia today w/ the goal of becoming a highly paid tenured professor is someone who is *not paying very much attention* and thus probably not part of the smartest, most elite americans

or I mean it's a fine goal, but so is being an astronaut

right Lamp but I wonder how many apps we're talking

yeah, i mean its less than 300 for sure but in some cases i think 2 is enough. this is really a side issue but the real problem is that tt positions are getting eliminated not that the poll of applicants to fill them is all that large isnt it?

and i mean the thing is that both my friend and myself are going to end up taking jobs working in the research depts. of large multinationals instead of accepting non-tt positions because the hours and the workload and the pay are better, so i dont think your making a bad argument really

Well comparing office time to teaching time is ridiculous and enough to ignore the rest of that article. Nonetheless, tenured professors have a pretty easy life for the money compared to similarly salaried professionals. But colleges have already been moving away from tenured professors and toward underpaid instructors and adjuncts for a long time.

HI DERE

yeah the # of apps per job only matters if you're interested in the "raw" odds of getting a position; but most candidates ime don't have a real shot at a given job b/c they're just not super well trained. I've been on three tt search committees so far, lots of apps, & it's generally pretty easy to cut down to about a quarter of the candidates right away just based on what they're done (i.e. not done). most people aren't real contenders. this business is rough.

candidates 'don't have a shot at a given job' due to the market, not due to the fact that they couldn't do the job

eh that's one way to look at it, but another way is that evidently this work is desirable enough that people who really don't have what it takes to do it, want to try to do it anyway; or else the grad student life is superficially slack enough that they slack & then are uncompetitive when the hungry ones completely outclass them. I dunno, gonna matter to me more soon when I start having doctoral students of my own.

eh that's one way to look at it, but another way is that evidently this work is desirable enough that people who really don't have what it takes to do it

no, again, you are missing the fact that 'what it takes to do it' is an arbitrary measure that's defined by a (perpetually declining) # of positions. it doesn't matter how hungry and competitive 100 candidates are, some of them are going to have to be 'the worst 25%'.

On a note related to the hiring of adjunct instructors rather than professors, my friends who live in a large college town have noticed that while it's harder to sell a home, renting a multi-occupant dwelling that is a ways away from campus is easier now than it was. No tenure track or professor position is making a lot of people remain renters.

I mean they fact that you think that 25% of applicants could be tossed immediately is a tell but not in the way you think it is - how do you think that compares to normal labor markets?

iatee what i think yr kind of missing is that the exact argument the article makes is sort of the mentality behind why there are so many adjuncts instead of tt jobs.

I'm just missing it, I'm just more concerned about the people in those adjunct positions than the people in tt jobs

esp since they're pretty much the future of academia

what's a "normal labor market"? one where everyone wants to be qualified, is qualified?

this is in line with your usual "we all deserve secure, stable employment"---sure, if we're going socialist, sign me up! but we're not! & just because you can't tell whether one candidate is qualified & another isn't, doesn't mean it's just arbitrary. It just means you can't tell.

Fewer tenure track professors and more adjuncts means a reduction in cost, increased ability to drop course programs that prove unpopular, and a diminished interest in academic work/publishing as schools concentrate more on being vendors of degrees rather than places of study, imo.

I think these people aren't the future of "academia" per se, but they're definitely indicative of the direction of mass-educating college students.

again, after a point - and if you can only rule out 25% in yr sample, then at least 75% of people have hit that point - 'qualified' is *dependent* on the market. many tt profs today could not get a tt-pos if they were on the market today. does that make them 'not qualified'? no. it means they were in a different market.

if enough ppl were concerned with tt jobs howevz many years ago, maybe now we wouldn't be concerned with adjuncts instead. i mean...

agree that many tenured profs today wouldn't get jobs today, & yes, they're not qualified anymore!

fwiw, I am a tenured faculty member with ambiguous feelings about tenure; I think it suppresses wages at the top, actually. but I am getting kinda snobby here so I should back off.

many tt profs today could not get a tt-pos if they were on the market today

Do you mean if they had the level experience they had just starting out? If they went on the market now, they'd have "been in a tenure track" on their resumes and would have an in. The problem isn't that the track has narrowed, it's that it's closed.

tt hasn't closed by any means fwiw, it's just hard to get

Well, the few times it's open, it's also narrowed, too.