Dismantling academia, part II: the parasites

This post is a sequel of my research on how the U.S. academia is being demolished.

As we have already established, according to major school administrators around the country (including the former president of Stanford University), the major reason for the high college tuition is the overblown salaries of the faculty.

The solution? Remove faculty from the equation – or at least keep them at the bare minimum. Instead of full time faculty with benefits, the higher education institutions should employ adjunct faculty and teaching assistants without benefits.

Whereas these declarations have been made public only recently, the process of switching to adjuncts has been undergoing for decades. The adjunct faculty are now the majority of the higher education instructors in the U.S.

More than 50% of all faculty appointments are part-time.  According the Association of American Association of University Professors: 
 
“This includes positions that may be classified by the institution as adjuncts, part-time lecturers, or graduate assistantships.

Many faculty in so-called “part-time” positions actually teach the equivalent of a full-time course load.

Over one-fifth of part-time appointments are held by graduate student employees, whose chances of obtaining tenure-track positions in the future are increasingly uncertain.

To support themselves, part-time faculty often commute between institutions and prepare courses on a grueling timetable, making enormous sacrifices to maintain interaction with their students.
 
Since faculty classified as part-time are typically paid by the course, without benefits, many college teachers lack access to health insurance and retirement plans” 
 
According to online records, an adjunct professor is paid $3,500 for an entire course. So, why would anyone take on this type of work that is so exacting, requires so much effort and investment of time? 

I just watched a documentary about poverty in America, and one of the featured guys was explaining that as a head busboy he was making approximately $11,000-12,000/year. This income probably does not include tips distributed among the service staff. So, instead of teaching four huge courses in nine months, why not work as a busboy or barista in Starbucks?

It might be that in some places around the country, adjuncts are paid a bit higher for a full load of teaching. Thus, according to this website, the median pay for adjunct professors is $30,000/year; whereas the average salary for all secondary / higher education lecturers / associate / assistant professors is $65,140. Obviously, our administration can save good amount of money by switching to adjunct teachers.

Are there any consequences?

According to online research, this trend damages student learning (the adjuncts do not even have offices in the colleges), faculty governance, and academic freedom (the protection of tenure is gone, so if you are not tenured, and even worse - you are an adjunct, watch your mouth and keep your opinions to yourself).

Meanwhile, no one has tried to compare the salaries of the adjunct educators to these of the administrators. But here they are, I could not find one administrator position that is paid less than $45,000. Most salaries are six figures. 

Most of the administrator positions in the past were created to help faculty fulfill their functions as educators. Today, faculty serve the administrators.  And the administrators are self-propagating.  By the way, these are the defining characteristics of any parasite, look it up in a biology textbook:

"an organism that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host's expense"

The follies of our lives - part IV

Folly #4

Overschooling or underschooling 

I definitely erred on the side of overschooling by obtaining the shiny degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Biology. However, the mistake of expanding my study years started earlier: I also went to a “special” high school that added a year to the regular schedule (I immersed myself in a year of foreign language studies prior to resuming the regular high school schedule). 

After high school, I obtained a BS/MS in five years, and for the next two years I went through a fellowship in a now defunct research institute. My mentor “disappeared” at the beginning of my appointment in the Institute, but eventually, I was admitted to a real PhD program in Biology.

The PhD studies in the U.S. take up to six years (unlike many other countries in the world, where a PhD degree takes only three years), and at the ripe age of 32, I was finally a PhD graduate. My first “job” was a post-doctoral fellowship with the accompanying payment of $24,000. In the year of my PhD graduation, 22-year old college graduates with software engineering (BS) degrees were starting jobs with $50,000 in salary.

Currently, I am lucky to have a better paid position. However, if I sum my compensations since I started working as a post-doc and divide the total payment by the number of years I was supposed to work (if I had graduated with a BS degree), my annual earnings come to $35,000/year.  Within the same period of time, the software engineers who started with $50,000 after college continued to increase their compensation and ended up with the minimum earnings of $70,000/year. Clearly, obtaining a PhD was my financial downfall. 

Add to these financial “benefits” the fact that I had to postpone starting a family (read on the dangers of late motherhood), it is quite clear why overschooling was a terrible mistake.

Underschooling could also become an obstacle to one's career; however, there are more success life stories among people who took this path. Think about the young founders of the most successful tech and social media companies - many of them quit college or grad school.

Underschooling can be easily remediated; whereas, overschooling cannot be compensated as the lost years cannot be "recovered". 

Have I learned anything? I did, but my understanding came in retrospect, and I cannot get back the years invested into schooling. Based upon my experience, I could advise my child to skip any graduate school, but the system in this country is such that I cannot encourage my child to skip college. If I were filthy rich and could guarantee the financial independence of my child for life, then I would have given her the opportunity to do anything she likes: homeschooling, un-schooling, no college/grad school or any college/school, etc. Life should be a path of unrestrained exploration of the human intellect and capabilities; however, the more we institutionalize life, the more it feels like a pre-charted prison. 

Part III