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

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.

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

sure, and this would be a better place to be starting out from when the higher ed crisis really starts to unfold

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.

you have the wall st 'in a free market, talent is gonna get paidddd' thing going and that story might make sense for wall st, people whose marginal value is very, very easy to measure* and who produce something w/ a measurable return. philosophy professors *do not do that*. your economic value is due to a. having a (de facto) union card b. the institutional norms of departments that 'compete' but as non-market actors and on their own terms. the only thing that can be easily liberalized and priced is that of teaching - which is already happening - and the market value is 'not very much'.

*I know this is not true, but it's 'the story'

er 'is that of teaching' = 'is teaching'

If you're really really good you'll still get a good job ime. If you're pretty good but not really really good - good enough to teach interesting courses, do some useful research - then you'll have to make a lot of compromises wrt what you want from life if you decide to stay in academia.

or else the grad student life is superficially slack enough that they slack & then are uncompetitive when the hungry ones completely outclass them

This is me, I think :( Still hanging in there, but I haven't really made a big *splash* yet and unless things change soon I can see the day when I leave for easier pastures and wonder whether that really was the best thing to do with 10 years of my life.

dude that's not true & I mean this with love but it just shows that you don't understand how Big Academia works, even in philolsophy: we get grants from industry, from govs, we schmooze with donors, we write shit people pay to read, we help scientists do their shit better. & yes we teach a bunch of credit hours too. but our contracts are for like 50% teaching 40% research 10% service & that's not because of the graciousness of the taxpayer, it's because we help everyone get paid. teaching def ain't the only thing with a "measurable return"

xp to iatee , to seandalai it sounds like it's time to rethink & maybe ask your advisor the hard q's about what she thinks about your prospects

http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/7C3039DD-EF79-4E75-A20D-6F75BA01BE84/0/Trends.pdf

again 'really really good' isn't a concrete thing, it's contextual and the context is gonna continue to shift. these charts reflect *the bubble years*

show the raw numbers though, also # of credit hours per staff member

dude that's not true & I mean this with love but it just shows that you don't understand how Big Academia works, even in philolsophy: we get grants from industry, from govs, we schmooze with donors, we write shit people pay to read, we help scientists do their shit better. & yes we teach a bunch of credit hours too. but our contracts are for like 50% teaching 40% research 10% service & that's not because of the graciousness of the taxpayer, it's because we help everyone get paid. teaching def ain't the only thing with a "measurable return"

― Euler, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 8:39 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean this with love - you don't understand what 'measurable return' means. 'schoozing with donors' and 'help scientists do their shit better' do not fall under 'measurable return'.

it's not just the graciousness of the taxpayer either - it's also the graciousness of 18 year old kids. both of which are prob going to be less gracious in the future.

then "measurable return" is just lame corporate speak for something useless

money?

iatee: in most branches of academia, money is deeply tied to grants + research funding + lab funding etc. as well.

ie this leads to what you corporate types live off of! There's a return! Economists are so lame that they can't measure it; they should try harder, esp given their silly salaries & dumb curricula

& as I've conceded before 18 year olds prob ought to pay less for no name schools but flagship type ed is still great value, even by your sclerotic measures

also, would be interested in those charts both in absolute figures, and scaled by students. also, broken out by 4yr institutions, universities vs. colleges, etc.

yes

ppl in very many fields also can tell what "good work" is or is not by some measure beyond simply relative.

also, would be interested in those charts both in absolute figures, and scaled by students. also, broken out by 4yr institutions, universities vs. colleges, etc.

― s.clover, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 8:57 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

here's 1997-2007
http://www.aftface.org/storage/face/documents/ameracad_report_97-07for_web.pdf

Public research universities actually experienced growth in the proportion of full- time faculty hired into tenured and tenure-track positions. The proportion of full- time faculty members hired into tenured and tenure-track positions grew from 42 percent in 1997 to 46 percent in 2007, while the proportion of nontenured newly hired faculty declined from 58 percent to 54 percent between 1997 and 2007.

that's only looking at the group 'full-time faculty', which is a group of declining importance. they declined by 5.8% at public research universities as a proportion of total instructional staff.

iatee: in most branches of academia, money is deeply tied to grants + research funding + lab funding etc. as well.

― s.clover, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 8:55 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's true and is on the more 'measurable' side of things though not entirely / is also why I picked a branch of academia that the institution doesn't depend on as much for research $ as my example.

we do fine for grants fwiw, maybe try picking on a less sciency humanities field?

also the data would be better if it told us # of credit hours per instructor, since that's a # deans care about