"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded local auto mechanics: by making all of the systems and regulations so sophisticated that they now require an army of technicians and specialized equipment."
This only means that technology changes and many industries are maturing. This is a good thing.
"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well."
I never saw any supporting evidence that we are suddenly paying professors less because we know more women are getting positions.
Once a professor is tenured, they can pretty much do anything they want and have a job for life. I can't really say that about any job I've ever had.
I also don't think being a professor was ever a path to riches and wealth. It was a way to do what you love and still make a living.
> We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded cab drivers: by leveling the profession and allowing anyone to participate, as long as they had a minimum credential and didn’t need much money.
This is hardly an apt comparison. The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background check. The ride sharing companies didn't lower the bar for this job at all. They just rightly opened it up to a lot more people.
> The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background check
In some cities, taxi drivers were expected to know the vast majority of the streets, such that a passenger could get in, say where they wanted to go, and the driver would know where to go and how to to get there. No looking up in maps, or using an A-Z, just go. They would be tested and certified in this too.
Ride sharing companies + navigation/route planning apps have reduced the barrier to entry tremendously, but they have also reduced the quality of the drive, as drivers no longer actually know where they're going. They have also reduced the ability for abuse, thanks to being permanently tracked.
There are dozens of local auto mechanics within a few miles of me, and most of them seem to be doing steady business. So I fail to see how we discarded them?
> "We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well."
That was a nod to the fact that "Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured
when compared to their male counterparts." [1]
That fact means nothing when there is no control by field or any other correlated factors. That model also disregards every person who goes into industry.
It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and there are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly, highly prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to attain that position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to get some of the few spots available.
Also the commoditization of education has made full "professors" less necessary from the perspective of the college/university. For the vast majority of students at the vast majority of colleges who just need to take the required classes to get their chosen major so they can get a certain type of job, they don't need research professors, they need someone who knows the material and can teach a class. I don't think adjunct teaching positions should pay as little as they do but since so many people want to be adjunct professors as opposed to pursuing careers in other fields, it drives down the cost of hiring adjuncts.
What can we do to fix the problem? The federal government can require a certain ratio of PhD student:professor positions to receive federal research funding, so the ratio balances out across all the school. Decouple being a research professor with being a teacher of tertiary education (adjunct professors aren't really professors in the same sense as a full professor anyway). Get rid of tenure so universities don't perceive giving out full professorship positions as risky.
> It seems pretty obvious to me, lots of people want to be professors and there are only a limited amount of spots. Being a full professor is highly, highly prestigious so many people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to attain that position. That drives pay down and makes it very competitive to get some of the few spots available.
The real problem is that the people who should know better, the people who run Ph.D programs for disciplines whose only career prospects are in academia, decided to graduate more Ph.D's that they were willing to hire. Those guys control both supply and demand, and are perfectly capable of balancing them.
I don't really think it's on the onus of the individual lab to ensure there are enough jobs for all their PhD students within the same lab. It's kind of both a tragedy of the commons (individual labs/departments don't want to hire more PhDs and less full time researchers/professors because it reduces output/$) and externality (research groups have no responsibility to ensure it's actually a good career move for their students to get PhDs) issue. That's why I think part of the solution needs to come from the top down to balance things out. Can't happen at the scope of the individual university
When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent.
There are massive subsidies in higher education, especially at the PhD level (many are had for free, plus stipend).
A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.
>The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them.
Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear for anyone who cared to look. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain.
I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia.
If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.
> When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent.
These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's
to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
What do you mean? Someone is designing the subsidies for getting these students' bachelor's degrees in the first place, and for the research grants that later employ some of them as professors.
What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly.
But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum?
Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
University administrators responded to the market glut of PhD's according to the laws of supply and demand, particularly those running huge endowments who in reality only need the university itself as an excuse for the endowment - from this point of view expensive tenured professors should be replaced with the academic equivalent of cheap immigrant labor. This was not a "we decided" as I understand the use of that phrase.
In my experience, it's generally the budget-strapped universities that choose to replace tenure-track professors with adjuncts.
On the other hand, private universities with very large endowments tend to be prestigious and part of maintaining this prestige means hiring tenure-track professors to teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, and to do research.
I frankly blame funding institutions like the NIH and the NSF for this situation. They readily fund lots of cheap graduate students rather than pay for experienced techs. This leads to the glut of PhDs even in fields where there are jobs outside of the academy. Too many of them (myself included) think we can make it in the system, having been sheltered by our supervisors and who themselves may have an outdated notion of what it takes to succeed. So like people who want to be movie stars there are too many for too few jobs. Although we never had a formal union, when administrative jobs were filled by late-career academics it sheltered us from market forces. Now with the corporate-minded boards and professional administrators that shelter has been removed leading to the “cost saving” adjuncts.
Well, in the case of scientific and engineering disciplines the government decided that having lots of PhDs and having them be cheap was helpful so they set up a system to that end.
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
> The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.
As a former tenured professor (not fired, I resigned to go work on my startup) this is not true. Yes it is nearly impossible to fire you directly, but what the universities do is play musical chairs. Every couple of years (sometimes every year) there is a reorganisation where there are fewer positions than tenured professors. Guess who gets cut when this happens.
That's the point: the majority of college classes in the US today are not taught by tenured or tenure track faculty, but rather by adjunct faculty who are paid by the course rather than an annual salary. My wife used to teach five classes per year as an adjunct and made under $20,000 for it, and she had zero job security from one semester to the next. (Sometimes her contract for a class wouldn't show up until a week before it was due to start.) Tenured professors at the same college teach six classes per year, and make... rather a lot more. (We've got expectations for scholarship and service, too, so some additional pay is reasonable, but that would have to be more than half the job to make that ratio reasonable, and it's definitely not.)
Universities rarely grant tenure today, compared to decades past. It is security-- if you can get it, and very few do anymore. Adjuncts have very little, if any, security in their role.
Readit News
This only means that technology changes and many industries are maturing. This is a good thing.
"We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well."
I never saw any supporting evidence that we are suddenly paying professors less because we know more women are getting positions.
Once a professor is tenured, they can pretty much do anything they want and have a job for life. I can't really say that about any job I've ever had.
I also don't think being a professor was ever a path to riches and wealth. It was a way to do what you love and still make a living.
This is hardly an apt comparison. The skills required to drive a cab were never worthy of credentials beyond a driver's license and and a background check. The ride sharing companies didn't lower the bar for this job at all. They just rightly opened it up to a lot more people.
In some cities, taxi drivers were expected to know the vast majority of the streets, such that a passenger could get in, say where they wanted to go, and the driver would know where to go and how to to get there. No looking up in maps, or using an A-Z, just go. They would be tested and certified in this too.
Ride sharing companies + navigation/route planning apps have reduced the barrier to entry tremendously, but they have also reduced the quality of the drive, as drivers no longer actually know where they're going. They have also reduced the ability for abuse, thanks to being permanently tracked.
That was a nod to the fact that "Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured when compared to their male counterparts." [1]
1 - https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ913032.pdf
Also the commoditization of education has made full "professors" less necessary from the perspective of the college/university. For the vast majority of students at the vast majority of colleges who just need to take the required classes to get their chosen major so they can get a certain type of job, they don't need research professors, they need someone who knows the material and can teach a class. I don't think adjunct teaching positions should pay as little as they do but since so many people want to be adjunct professors as opposed to pursuing careers in other fields, it drives down the cost of hiring adjuncts.
What can we do to fix the problem? The federal government can require a certain ratio of PhD student:professor positions to receive federal research funding, so the ratio balances out across all the school. Decouple being a research professor with being a teacher of tertiary education (adjunct professors aren't really professors in the same sense as a full professor anyway). Get rid of tenure so universities don't perceive giving out full professorship positions as risky.
The real problem is that the people who should know better, the people who run Ph.D programs for disciplines whose only career prospects are in academia, decided to graduate more Ph.D's that they were willing to hire. Those guys control both supply and demand, and are perfectly capable of balancing them.
A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.
Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear for anyone who cared to look. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain.
I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia.
If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.
These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly.
But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum?
Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
In my experience, it's generally the budget-strapped universities that choose to replace tenure-track professors with adjuncts.
On the other hand, private universities with very large endowments tend to be prestigious and part of maintaining this prestige means hiring tenure-track professors to teach undergraduates, mentor graduate students, and to do research.
> During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall.
> The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...