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

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

I'm not picking on anyone, I'm just reminding you that you get paid to do something that doesn't have a completely measurable economic value, so maybe don't worry about being underpaid cause of the tenure system

let's talk about your mom's measurable economic value, then

her economic value is infinite she produced the smartest human being in history via 'labor'

http://www.esquire.com/features/young-people-in-the-recession-0412#ixzz1qWgDYvmb

i think thats a really good article

he really economizes those 3 pages! these things are usually filled w/ anecdotal examples but he just plows through 20 subjects

haha totally! its obv not super nuanced but it hits really hard, its unrelenting and i think the tone is really right

Critics may argue that teaching faculty members require long hours for preparation, grading and advising. Therefore they would have us believe that despite teaching only 12 to 15 hours a week, their workloads do approximate those of other upper-middle-class professionals. While time outside of class can vary substantially by discipline and by the academic cycle (for instance, more papers and tests to grade at the end of a semester), the notion that faculty in teaching institutions work a 40-hour week is a myth.

Citation?

Teaching three courses last semester probably amounted to a 60-h week.

Teaching one course this semester, on the other hand, leads me to a second occupation posting to message boards.

The esquire article is ok but I'm very politically suspicious of the anti-boomer narrative circulating right now (even though that article at least hedges on whether it's actually their fault).

why are you suspicious?

it all interlocks a little too conveniently with the conservative agenda (the 60s represent moral bankruptcy, too much freedom is bad, "entitlement spending" is the cause of all our problems, etc.)

huh?

it also conveniently absolves things like trade policy and financial deregulation of any contribution they've made to our economic decline

"boomer" is practically code for "big government liberal"

waht

Democrats may not be actively hostile to the interests of young voters, but they are too scared and weak to speak up for them. So when the Boomers and swing voters scream for fiscal discipline and the hard decisions have to be made, youth is collateral damage. Medicare and Social Security were mostly untouched in Obama's 2012 budget. But to show he was really serious about belt tightening, relatively cheap programs that help young people like the Adolescent Family Life Program and the Career Pathways Innovation Fund were killed.