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

Well, I'm happily tenured at a research university, so I'm a freak. It's just worth being clear on what you want.

With a schedule like that, I imagine it's basically necessary to have a very accommodating spouse/partner, especially if you have kids.

My wife is incredible, but we both have Ph.Ds & in fact my wife will have an academic position of her own starting in the fall. I'm around the house a lot too, as I work mostly from home; I teach & hold office hours on campus but I write at home. & so I'm super flexible about being to get the kids from school (also a short walk). Location is key to pull this off.

I guess what I was saying is that she "gets" the insanity.

That makes way more sense, because I was pretty sure your wife was also an academic iirc and the whole only being w family for 3 hrs a day was...that's like stockbroker/Goldman-Sachs wealth manager levels of uninvolvement. And they pay people to do everything else for them, or so the movies tell me.

So when she starts her job will she continue to do everything except get the kids from school? I wish her luck.

But it's why I tell potential graduate students that you'd be better be sure you love what you work on more than you love anything else

haha

i am just making a face and thinking about my life

Well, our salaries are going, er, up, so we'll be hiring help. We'll still be in the Midwest so housing & labor is inexpensive, except for Big Ten faculty evidently (re labor, no housing discounts unlike U of California faculty)

Euler when did you start and finish your PhD? How many years were you in non-TT positions before your current job?

finished in the mid 2000s, had one non-TT for 2 years, but at a sexxxy place with as much grad teaching as undergrad teaching

It feels like for professors, work is this much more fluid thing than for most of us. I lived with/was in a relationship with a professor, and she would say (not inaccurately) that she worked 12 hours a day, but at the same time that 12 hours included taking the dog out for a walk, watching tv while answering emails, etc. It is most certainly an incredibly demanding job, but 12 hours a day researching/professoring does not equal 12 hours a day on a factory floor or even in a stereotypical office environment.

Also 4 months a year of total geographic freedom, so boo-hoo you ivory tower elitists; get a real job digging ditches.

eh, not really. every professor I've ever known uses summer and school breaks to write and conduct research, which necessarily takes the back burner during the school year. It's not exactly the same as backpacking across Asia for four months.

(I was joking)

nah, that's otm, the working conditions are incredible. Though I know PhDs who've quit the profession bc it demands too much self-directed ness & they couldn't do it & preferred a steady office job with a boss telling thm what to o ech day. My life's ...not like that.

that 12 hours included taking the dog out for a walk, watching tv while answering emails, etc

OK, I don't count these as work hours. Yeah, work is fluid but I only count the actual hours I spend focused on work as my work hours. If a 13h workday includes like thinking about articles while getting groceries or doing laundry or doing dishes, then that schedule suddenly sounds much more reasonable.

(I was seriously wondering how you ever got to post on ILx!)

I don't follow things here closely, just a flutter now & then. But yeah, work time is fluid.

http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-barely-budge-2012/131432

But yeah, work time is fluid.

haha ive been thinking about yr 90 hour work week since you posted it...

That makes way more sense, because I was pretty sure your wife was also an academic iirc and the whole only being w family for 3 hrs a day was...that's like stockbroker/Goldman-Sachs wealth manager levels of uninvolvement. And they pay people to do everything else for them, or so the movies tell me.

― how did I get here? why am I in the whiskey aisle? this is all so (Laurel), Thursday, 19 April 2012 01:14 (4 days ago) Permalink

I'm not sure how two people with even normal jobs would manage much more than this if you consider that a normal bedtime for kids is like 8:30 pm.

the faculty pay table is interesting but also sometimes seems to have some absurd numbers - I am willing to guess that instructors at ohio state don't actually average 98k. and in a lot of ways the part-time faculty and non-tt numbers are the more important ones.

yeah, in the mornings we have I dunno 15 minutes together, aside from rushing around getting showered & dressed & getting lunches made. if you include those then I guess 30 minutes? then they get home from school at 4pm but I'm not ready to be with the fam until 6pm (though I'm generally around the house working so they can come get hugs & briefly relate the travails of the day). then yeah, bed between 8 & 8:30pm. & that seems pretty generous to me!

where we suffer is during what normal people call "le weekend".

at my present (doctoral research) university we haven't gotten raises, except for mandated raises for promotion (e.g. from assistant to associate or from associate to full) since 2006.

at my new (doctoral research) university they haven't gotten raises (except blah) since 2003.

my kids qualified for reduced price lunches here, btw; yeah, we're overpaid.

it's not really a question of underpaid or overpaid, there are questions about the sustainability of various aspects of higher ed

you have questions, at least

yup, just me

come on, Euler

yeah I was feeling passive aggressive to the passive aggressive "there are questions about the sustainability" & I've been grading essays this weekend so my eye is keen for that kind of soft prose right now

plus those "questions" are part of a right-wing narrative taking form right now & you can bet that their "answers" to those "questions" will make America a more unequal & dumber place, & so I'd rather see creative answers than concern trolling or "we just can't afford good things anymore" right-wing bullshit.

part of a right-wing narrative taking form right now

The right wing approach to social programs reminds me of a parent going through the house breaking all his kid's toys, then showing them to the kid and saying gravely, "You see? This is why you can't have nice things. They always getting broken."

there's nothing 'right-wing' about this, but a right-wing that actually does want to dismantle higher ed benefits from people pretending like nothing's wrong

yes, & before iatee goes on again about Baumol's cost disease notice that the big problem in university funding is pensions & health care, same as everywhere else in the USA

I can't understand the xp fwiw, using my red pen on you

there is not one big problem there are about 13 medium-sized problem.

I don't think there's any question that higher ed is, almost by nature, an inefficient industry. there is nothing particularly wrong w/ that in itself - it worked for a long time even. but more and more of that inefficiency fell on consumers over the last two decades - whatever the reasons, most of them ~not being prof salaries~ - and because of that there has been more and more room for it to be an industry that gets pretty violently shaken up. you can pretend that 18 y/os paying 50k a year aren't 'consumers' and are really just there out of their love of learning but I don't think there's any real benefit to doing that.

I don't really care how much people who work at universities get paid or what people 'deserve', remember that when you aren't busy calling me right-wing you are getting angry cause I think the gov't should prob start paying people not to work.

I think the gov't should prob start paying people not to work.

B..but this means more professors with fewer classes!?

also insofar as I do care about how much people at universities make, it's in the disparity between the the tenure caste and the non-tt caste

people who pay 50k a year for Ivies+ are getting their money's worth; people paying that for NYU are morons. most good students should just attend their in-state flagship, at which tuition/fees are gonna be less than 20k a year, even at the ridic UC system.

dude I don't get angry about anything on ILX! if we were talking about journal fees then maybe I'd get lit up though (cf. the big Harvard story today though)

better to focus on the lack of benefits for the non-tt caste, but that's a general problem with this silly country, not just a problem with us big bad elitist professors

yeah it's crazy what's happening/potentially going to happen w/ the journals...but it's also sorta symbolic of the slack that isn't gonna be there anymore

nah, it's not symbolic of anything except the lag that prestigious institutional faculty / libraries have had in supporting online publication. It was mainly the big pub houses that gained from the status quo; we write for free, referee for free, sub edit for free; & then we pay them to access our work & even to buy our copywrites back for republishing our work in collections! That's all silly in 2012: it didn't provide any scientific or educational value to do things this way.

well the point is that there are plenty of other things that are 'silly in 2012' in higher ed, the question is how long they can stay silly

what exactly do you have in mind as being silly?

xp. that's not the point.

an 18 y/o paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn calculus or german from a grad student

so your problem is just with big sections of various intros taught by non-tt faculty? that doesn't account for a big % of an individual student's credit hours in any case.

& yeah, iatee, the repartee here is fun enough but on higher ed you seem simply to have an axe (go Cardinal) to grind, without a whole lot of understanding of the specifics, or even wanting to engage the specifics. like big debt is a big problem! but you move from this to "it's all a shell game" so quickly that you clearly have other agendas that obscure my understanding of where you're coming from.

it's like "dead people vote in Chicago!" -> "but that's a tiny percentage of voting, yeah it sucks, but really" -> "no, it shows that we should disenfranchise young people systematically"

you know I recently found a krugman article from 1996 where he's doing his best to predict the big picture structural changes in the american economy this century. the whole thing is freakishly otm:

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/magazine/white-collars-turn-blue.html

did princeton prof paul krugman have personal beef w/ the higher ed system, when, almost 20 years ago he predicted a massive downsizing this century? or is it just kinda possible that the 2030 job market won't need *the exact same feeder system* as the 1970 job market?

the worst thing about the tenure system is that it allows people like you to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory, grad students who don't get jobs 'just didn't try hard enough', 18 y/os who are loaded w/ debt 'should have just gone to a public school' etc. etc.

"The worst thing about some people having decent jobs is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

"The worst thing about some people having healthcare is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

"The worst thing about some people eating three meals a day is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

"The worst thing about some people owning multiple pairs of pants is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

do you have a point