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

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

"The worst thing about occasionally hilarious gags in apatow comedies is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

seriously you just weasel your way into these threads, you wanna say something dude

"The worst thing about relatively easy access to adorable animal pictures is it allows people to honestly believe that everything is hunky dory."

so you don't you have a specific point, iatee, besides it's bad for first years to take intro with grad students? or that it's bad that students choose to go to NYU or USC & take out stupid amounts of loans? except maybe you think they should be able to go to NYU without massive debt? I don't get your position.

you want one point which encompasses everything that's wrong with our higher ed system + the likely trajectory? I mean I can give you a sentence w/ 20 semicolons.

if you want the two biggest points, the first is made in the kruman article - the us economy is probably experiencing a long-term shift away from a lot of white collar work and while there are social benefits from having a highly educated populace if there aren't personal benefits to the investment, there is likely to be a massive drop in the demand.

the second is that people w/ degrees from mit and stanford (go cardinal?) are currently v. interested in the fact that one person's intro to calculus lecture can already reach a million people. as soon as a name brand college becomes willing to not only offer entire courses online - which they already do, freely, tons of them - but offer their stamp of approval for completion? there is an inordinate amount of money to be made w/ this, and it's just a question of which brand-name school is gonna take a step in the dark.

the student loan crisis is just the backdrop that makes both of these things easier to sell. I've neve seen any profesors at tuition hike protests. sometimes they'll write an op ed or something.

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.

3h with the kids per weekday doesn't sound bad. 3h/day to do ANYTHING OTHER THAN WORK 7 days a week did before there was clarification.

sometimes they'll write an op ed or something.

Was going to post this to the Canadian Politics thread but seems like it may be relevant here too. (Yeah, it's an op-ed but it's a pretty good one imo + I'm not sure that protests accomplish more than op-eds):

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Tuition+hikes+solve+what+ails+system/6501275/story.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/30/120430fa_fact_auletta?currentPage=all

but iatee, intro is just a small part of what universities provide in their teaching. It's true that the giant McClasses don't well serve students or our essentiality as faculty, but any online model will only be worse at this, since what they will lack is one-on-one attention. Indeed that's their fundamental appeal: take McClasses to another level. You keep saying, "but that's what the economic model dictates", as those we are passive victims of "processes" rather than making explicit choices to McClass-ize those courses. I wish we wouldn't! But I don't have a feeling for how dominant that is as a way of teaching (it's not been the case in any department I've taught in, all big R1s). & we could choose to teach only smaller sections (as we do in my soon-to-be-ex department). But that takes more faculty..."and that's not what the economic model dictates", you'll say again; & I say bullshit, that's a choice you seem to favor, as do other know-nothings; for what reasons I can only speculate.

btw wasn't calling you a know-nothing there, not trying to hardbody in that post; I meant you're allied with the know-nothings in your support for dismantling the present model of American higher ed, the best system of higher education the world's ever known.

I've never suggested an online model will be better at teaching, as a whole I would say it's clearly worse. but that itself doesn't matter.

also I dunno where you see me suggesting we dismantle anything - I just don't think it's that hard to see what's on the horizon at this point.

yeah if you're just prognosticating then I gotta say I don't have a lot of confidence in your predictions

which of these two don't you have confidence in?

if you want the two biggest points, the first is made in the kruman article - the us economy is probably experiencing a long-term shift away from a lot of white collar work and while there are social benefits from having a highly educated populace if there aren't personal benefits to the investment, there is likely to be a massive drop in the demand.

the second is that people w/ degrees from mit and stanford (go cardinal?) are currently v. interested in the fact that one person's intro to calculus lecture can already reach a million people. as soon as a name brand college becomes willing to not only offer entire courses online - which they already do, freely, tons of them - but offer their stamp of approval for completion? there is an inordinate amount of money to be made w/ this, and it's just a question of which brand-name school is gonna take a step in the dark.

did you read the article? I mostly steal my predictions from other people, like the president of stanford xp

or paul krugman

on 1) long-term shift from a lot of white-collar work that *was* done by college grads of the past doesn't mean that *new* white-collar work hasn't emerged that present & future college grads will do.

of course, if I had my fascist ways I'd eliminate all departments except math, philosophy, computer science, cog sci (which would all be just a single department, actually) & I guess maybe econ, bio, maybe physics. those are all going to be part of future white collar work that there aren't presently enough Americans to do; & that work will only continue to grow in importance.

it might be that we won't need as many mediocre universities in the future, but I don't have a huge amount riding on that. I care about my grad students but I'd rather see them think about industry jobs as the primary trajectory than academic work.

on 2), I'm not convinced that outsourcing more intro teaching is going to affect universities all that dramatically. right now we (at R1s) already outsource plenty of it to community colleges. We do majors teaching, though, & afaict that teaching isn't the issue in this thread.

of course, if I had my fascist ways I'd eliminate all departments except...

this would be a good way to respond to the drop in demand iatee is predicting.

iatee you do realize the krugman futurology article predicts a rise in blue-collar manufacturing?

Or consider the panic over ''downsizing'' that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90's was not especially high by historical standards. Downsizing suddenly became news because, for the first time, white-collar, college-educated workers were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled machinists and other blue-collar workers were in demand.

which is exactly what you said wouldn't happen upthread when you were arguing that manufacturing was on the outs and it was service all the way.

and now you're arguing that white-collar is on the outs and...

of course, if I had my fascist ways I'd eliminate all departments except math, philosophy, computer science, cog sci (which would all be just a single department, actually) & I guess maybe econ, bio, maybe physics

You realize that there are many people who basically agree with this except for the philosophy part? (They'd preserve engineering and medicine too.)

yes and they are all completely out of their minds

xp

again, I wasn't arguing that manufacturing being on the outs was *a good thing* - just that it was a thing. it wasn't a good thing, for the most part.

and now you're arguing that white-collar is on the outs and....

tax mark zuckerberg and give money to poor people or mark zuckerberg gets 100000 slaves.