Why do we need so many provosts, deans, and vice presidents? They don't bring in research money (professors do, writing grant proposals) and they don't bring in alumni donations (nobody knows what does that). In the scheme of things the larger problem is reduced state and federal spending on higher education but in the short term it seems that the logical action is in front of us, but we would instead prefer to milk the little people until they die.

The article stated the problem clearly, there are too many graduating with the proper credentials who want these jobs. Resorting to union representation is the sign of a system where oversupply being met with stubborn resistance to that fact.

This is not to say that schools are not middle or top heavy. Education as a whole has become far to expensive for the value of the education provided. This is because of the simple fact money is loaned nearly without question to what studies the students want or receive.

The real fix is reigning in the loans. Set costs either at the class or degree level and have colleges comply with it to have students eligible to receive the federal loans to attend that school. The government already restricts cost in the payouts for medical treatments and such, there is little reason it cannot do this in the realm of education if its the one providing the funds. Just like how government money brings along rules with how students are treated so can it do with how degrees if not courses are valued.

Surely many colleges will step up to the plate to offer acceptable cost degrees. There is too much money on the table for them to ignore it.

Still as he points out, there is oversupply because colleges are not required to tell students that while there may be jobs they don't pay what students expect nor pay what they once did. Firing others to raise that pay is not the solution, the solution is guiding students into good careers adn reigning in the costs of obtaining the degrees necessary

If you believe that colleges will lower costs to meet the lower supply of tuition money, then we'd be looking at an even larger oversupply - more people would be able to afford college.

Also, let's keep in mind that when you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, engineering and computer science graduates stop being hard to find and become worthless.

And actually, since wealth of parents is already a major factor in whether a person makes irresponsible decisions that end in unemployment, that's kind of OK.

No one has a right to be a professor. That doesn't exist. The market for them has evaporated. But we have enormous institutions concealing how bad the market so they can keep cranking out graduates. They're largely doing that with government funds. US citizens should oppose that. I know I do.

If colleges lowered costs for useless degrees, they would at least be doing graduates the favor of burdening them with less debt.

When you dump every liberal arts major into engineering and computer science, most of them wash out.

Having taught a fair share of liberal arts majors in intro CS courses, I am absolutely certain that there is essentially no difference in skill between people who choose to major in CS and people who choose to major in the liberal arts.

If anything I would assume the opposite of a selection effect.

I don't think these people are more well-represented at the beginning of Liberal Arts programs than at the beginning of CS programs.

This may be less true about some of the less "hot" STEM fields.

I got to thinking about this a while back when learning about Patton. You could say he was born to be a general- a wealthy, military family, extensive military education. Most of the rest of the world, from the moment he was born, never had a chance to be what he was. But you can't give that lifetime of military education and training to everybody, and isn't that OK? You might like to be fair and give everyone the same chance, and maybe there's a guy out there who would have been even better with the same opportunity, but can we afford to do that?

It's a similar story with racing drivers and many athletes.

Edit: It occurs to me one can point to the failure of communism to determine how many potatoes should be grown, as a reason why we should not try to predict the number of professors that will be needed. I'm not sure where to go from here. Perhaps the next question is, have we gotten in the way of the invisible hand, the traditional savior from this kind of problem? If so, what next?

Perhaps a better solution would be merit-based grants. If you graduate in the top 10% of your high school class, Uncle Sam will foot the bill for the equivalent of in-state tuition/room/board. As long as you keep your GPA above some threshold, we keep paying for 4 years.

Why 10% and not, say, 90%? Or 100%? (100% and maintain a GPA seems the most workable.)

What about someone in the 50% range who decides after 10 years in the workforce to go to college? With no second chances, this is the tyranny of the Permanent Record.

What about someone who gets a GED to graduate early, to start college early; or someone who had to drop out to support the family and then get a GED finish high school and go on to college? What of home schoolers?

I can also envision school swapping. If I'm at the border of 10% in a very good school, then in my last semester (after the submissions for college have gone out) of school I could switch schools to an academically poorer high school and have a much better chance of getting the grade. It's worth $40,000 in tuition money, so some people will do it.

Or in my case, I took a lot of classes in high school, including some that were dual-enrolled with the local community college. While AP calculus had an extra boost in the GPA calculation, my differential equations class did not. What luck it would be if by taking more advanced, unweighted classes I happen to be below the 10% mark, filled by those who maximized GPA instead of education.

And then, just for kicks, we could fix our public school system so as to remedy the disgusting inequalities that show up at the college-admissions level before they have a chance to happen.

That's how it works in most of Europe, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with the quality of learning or the facilities.

That's how it used to work in the UK, and the main result was a strong middle class with plenty of disposable income.

But... not everyone likes the idea of a strong middle class with plenty of disposable income. So now we have financial-rape loans and a weakened economy - a combination guaranteed to create huge default/delinquency issues over the next decade or two.

The first graduate with degrees and skills that are useful - or can be made useful - in the professional world and start working immediately.

The second graduate with degrees that are useful for the sole purpose of teaching others those exact same topics and nothing else. They get paid a fraction of what the first group is.

While we need some teachers, professors, etc, the low pay in these roles point at an overabundance. If there were less people seeking those roles, recruiting them would become a priority and pay would rise. As we're seeing in software development every day.

If tuition is funded by the government then this will force those without a university education to subsidise those who do go to university. Also university places would have to be limited to control costs.

https://www.hesa.ac.uk/pis/urg

suggest there was a slight increase in the percentage of lower-middle and working class students in 2012/13, but this was set against a drop in total UK student numbers of around 6%.

Those are the most recent numbers I can find. They don't break out the details.

>If tuition is funded by the government then this will force those without a university education to subsidise those who do go to university.

There's absolutely no reason why this would have to be true. There are plenty of other possible income sources, not least a much less tolerant attitude to off-shore tax avoidance, raised property taxes and the removal of loopholes that support tax-exempt foreign trusts, and taxes on quick-flip investment speculation.

The UK is actually swimming in cash. It's just not very evenly distributed.

organizing to get fair compensation.

"Fair" does not only mean "fair" for one side.

It'll probably be a twenty-year process, but as long as the Universities prefer to withdraw on their several hundred years of respect until that account is absolutely drained rather than become cheaper or better for the masses, no other outcome is possible. And at the moment I see no reason to believe the Universities will budge until they've run those accounts absolutely dry. The administrators will happily ride this ride into the ground... what else is in it for them?

(Look for ever more desperate appeals to the aforementioned multi-century "respect" account as they go down. Personally I'm more interested in the first derivative and it is clearly negative. Spend, spend, spend, it's all they seem to know how to do, for every account they can get their hands on.)

The side-stepping will take place, but in a parallel market.

But the automated system keeps spinning! There is wealth to spread around. There is a make believe economy of paper pushers and loud talkers, who promote each other into cushy positions. Nobody dares to speak out. We're all the emperor, and we're all naked.

Welcome to the brave new world.

I can't see research and teaching become automated.

For one thing, compliance with extensive regulatory & reporting mandates.

Universities aren't really about "education" primarily. They're a bundle of a semi-autonomous community, grant-funded research labs, landlords, police departments, public health services, etc., with "running classes" as a small part of their overall portfolio. It's not surprising that when they try to do so much they need a lot of people to administer the effort.

   For another comparison, the latest total number in this management category 
   (SMG + MSP) is 9,457 FTE (full time equivalent employees) while the number 
   of Regular Teaching Faculty is 8,657 FTE.

I admit that part of me envies him. But I don't think I could do it in a position like that. Not only would I be terribly bored, I would also feel guilty for raking in so much money for so little work.

As a data point, the university I went to grad school at has an administrator:faculty ratio of 1:1. This is not unusual.

Undergrads in call centers

I don't remember the summer program rate, but I recall the school-year rates were around $3,500 per course. That was fine if you had a full-time day job, as I did, and the classes were in the late afternoon or evening and your employer didn't mind your moonlighting.

I taught the classes because I enjoyed the experience, not for the money. I've met plenty of people in the same position: Peter Thiel presumably did not teach his now-famous Stanford course for the salary. So to that extent, the Trinity administrator quoted in the linked article is correct.

But I suspect most adjuncts do not have non-academic careers. So they're struggling, especially in expensive metro areas (in part because they're competing against people like me that might be convinced to teach a single seminar for virtually nothing if we get to pick the topic). But it's a bigger problem than that: as <bloataway> suggests, it's middle management bloat, coupled with an oversupply of qualified instructors, government-subsidized loans, etc. Not a simple problem.

This point's key. People will do it for "free" out of personal-fulfillment, driving down costs.

Unless something more important steps in. If someone is only being paid $3,500 for 14 weeks of work, if a $10,000 in a week contract pops up, they're going to blow off the class, I assure you.

That's the right range. And it creates a "damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't" situation.

Students deserve to have some industry experienced teachers. Many of my students got a lot more education about the corporate world than they expected.

However, if I take the job teaching for that, I'm contributing to the downward pressure on the salaries. And that makes their academic teachers worse.

That's crazy. I've paid more than that to take a course from an adjunct, and I was one of 20+ students.

That sounds like excessive churn for $27-35K/year.

I'm sympathetic to improving the adjunct eco-system, but how much of the blame should be placed on people taking on debt to finance careers with fading prospects? Maybe the folks who went in right as the system shifted get a pass, but have we passed a point (like with law schools) where you lose the ability to complain and should've known better?

You were planning that as a fallback, right?

This is something you should have figured out before borrowing money for grad school. If there's truly no outlets commensurate with the debt, that's a powerful signal you should pay attention to.

Which brings up rule #2: if you can't convince someone to pay your way through grad school, don't borrow for one.

Did that make economic sense? Homo economicus math said yes. I still say yes. But I sure would like that $1000 a month back.

If you receive low wages in the private sector, it might be an indication that you're not providing much value, and that your time and effort are probably better spent in some other endeavour. It could also be an indication of some artificial or temporary misallocation of resources. The same goes for high wages. You could be providing genuine value, or your profit could be due to some intervention or other.

In the meantime, people who can't make a living doing teaching shouldn't teach. Or they shouldn't do it as their day job. At the very least, they shouldn't demand other people subsidize their choices.

This attitude is common, confusing, and misses the point.

The point is that when universities spend obscene amounts of money on administration and fancy facilities while side-lining actual teaching, we all lose. Students, Ad Junct Faculty, and the taxpayers who place trust in these institutions. The issue isn't that "anybody should be able to teach", but rather than "those who do teach should be compensated well, so that we have good teachers in the universities we subsidize".

If universities were being squeezed and cutting costs aggressively (as opposed to the exactly opposite), your attitude might make more sense.

If you cut half the ad juncts, the school would absolutely be forced to go on a hiring spree for new FTE teaching positions, just to perform its most basic function.

In the status quo if half the ad juncts left the market, the supply wouldn't decrease. Bean counting schools would just lower their edu standards for ad juncts. Not hypothetical -- you can see this effect at schools in small towns.

I know people stuck on the treadmill of adjuncting, and their resistance to the idea of working outside of academia is amazing. They are still holding out for the impossible.

There's no reason anyone should feel they're entitled to a career in academia anymore than we can all make a living as park rangers or porn stars.

Few undergrads really pick up on the internal ranking, and just call their instructors professors. Anyone outside of academia is just going to call somebody who teaches at college professor, even if they're not a Professor. it's kind of like talking to a paleontologist about dinosaurs, or complaining to an astronomer that pluto should be a planet. You know, it's internal technical jargon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_ranks_(United_States)

I was only responding to the question of how someone could be a professor at four universities. The questioner is correct and the title is not accurate.

What to call a college instructor is a hard problem for the instructors own students! [1] You aren't taking issue with the layperson view of "everyone is a professor", furthermore that's the approach advised in [1]

You're asserting it's a clickbait title. I disagree.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/03/what_sh...

In response to the earlier question which you also answered:

In general, in American Universities it goes Assistant Professor --> Associate Professor --> Professor at ~5-10 years between each step (the exact details vary depending upon discipline and University). In science, these are usually the people who are writing grants and are at the heads of labs. Usually you must be tenure-track to advise graduate students.

Then there may be another class of 'lecturers' who are not-tenure track but are still considered faculty-members. There is not always a distinction here between lecturers and adjunct instructors, however. Lecturers' main role is usually instruction of undergraduate or graduate students.

Finally, there are the adjunct instructors, whose primary role is the education of undergraduates and who are paid much smaller amounts of money for their work relative to tenure-track faculty. This is a relatively newer class of University employee, and it is definitely a very difficult career. I imagine most adjuncts either have other careers or are attempting to break into the tenure-track rank, although I do no know how often this happens.

In addition, in science there might be 'Research Scientists,' 'Research professors," or 'Staff Scientists' who work under a tenure-track faculty member. They are often somewhat equivalent to lecturers, except they do not instruct undergraduates but instead are usually full devoted to research. It's essentially a "Super-Post Doc," but hopefully with a salary one can reasonably live on modestly.

And for completeness: In science, people do Post-Docs following the completion of their PhD. They are non-faculty jobs under a tenure-track professor where one conducts full-time research, usually for 2-3 years, although some people must complete multiple Post-Docs. The usually idea is to find a faculty job after your post-doc, but I think a majority of people end up filling some ancillary position in science or leaving science entirely, because there are unfortunately many more post-docs than there are faculty positions.

It gets even more complicated when you add in MDs and hospitals to this academic situation.

My impression was always that research scientists/professors are paid reasonably well (e.g., what you might get in industry after leaving a phd).

Adjuncts (whose contracts are course-by-course rather than for any fixed length) are commonly given a title like "Instructor" or "Visiting Instructor", though there may be places that would assign a "Visiting Assistant Professor" title to an adjunct with a Ph.D. ("Lecturer" is less common in the US, in my experience, and often implies a longer-term non-tenure-track faculty position.) As often as not, students don't pay that much attention to whether a given instructor is an adjunct, so it's pretty common for them to be called "Professor Smith", too.

So in the broadest usage in the US (which I think is pretty typical among people who don't work in academia), "Professor" winds up meaning "any college/university level instructor", while "Teacher" means "any elementary/middle/high school instructor".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic

Too many professors, not enough classes, and most likely many of the adjuncts do not teach classes that could justify any type of full time position at the institute to begin with.

I would be much more concerned at the fact that many full time K-12 teachers do not make ends meet.

My GF worked as a PE teacher for 2-3 years and was in the same boat, many schools do not hire full time PE teachers, or just hire one and use 2-3 more part time each week. Since you are not full time you get much less benefits (e.g. no summer pay, no additional "non-teaching" work hours etc.) you also tend to be paid at the lowest band of salaries regardless of you experience. But she wasn't complaining that the system was broken, she understood very well how the system works for many subjects. When you only teach 10 or so hours a week it's kinda hard to justify a full time position.

And while the 13 hours work days might seem back breaking (and they are) these are because you work at 3 schools, and have to travel in between, if 5-6 hours of your day is travel it might suck but you can't really claim you are forced to work 13 hours either.

Why is the right answer to invest more money in adjuncts and not to encourage adjuncts to find other jobs? If he loves to teach, why not become a public school teacher? Many districts are experiencing critical shortages.

Nobody is entitled to a job in academia and if you are educated enough to do that, you are almost certainly educated enough to do many other more lucrative things. To the extent that an adjunct is a PhD that did not succeed in the academic job market, the right answer is not to force universities to make room for them anyway.

Universities have a perverse incentive to saturate the market with graduates that they can hire back for little to no money. That needs to change also.