- Ironically, the one cohort that utterly failed to benefit from the boom times was the professors, who are really the only people adding value and remain vastly underpaid. When the cuts come, they won’t come for the administration or the diversity staff. Academic programs will be the first to go, which raises some interesting questions about what the purpose of a university is.
This is a big reason I want out of academia. It sucks to really care about something, put a ton of work into it, and get all of jack and squat in return because the higher-ups don't give a fuck and are only interested in making numbers get bigger.
My wife expressed a great deal of displeasure last night about one of her interns who, upon my wife spending a year pouring all her knowledge into, has decided she's gonna push out babies and be a housewife. The student is in a program that recruited my wife heavily as an instructor, only to offer her an equivalent wage of about $16 an hour, and then was upset and offended when my wife turned them down. They came back lamely with "well if you had more experience we'd pay you more!"
Same school has gone from 150 applicants for 18 slots to 14 applicants for 18 slots in 5 years. They've effectively got three instructors; one of them delivers babies for a living, another has never so much as worked outside academia (and is a 2016 graduate) and the third trained as a dorm RA. Of my two professors at two different community colleges, two of them bitched about the fact that they haven't had a cost-of-living increase since 2012 and that the State sets salaries flat such that a professor in Podunk Washington makes the same wage as the professor in the heart of the second or third hottest real estate market in the United States. Both were bitter. Neither were great.
One of those programs, despite having an average starting salary of $70k after two years of instruction, is at 60% of the level it needs to be at for sustainability. While I was there - a year - two other programs were taught out and ended. Meanwhile I have an employee that got a Master's in Public Health pretty much for the prestige. She didn't need it to practice. And when we hired her, she was delivering for Amazon for a living. With a $140k vanity degree.
I ran a "how much money should you save" calculator when my daughter was born. I shot the moon - I figured "okay let's say it takes her an extra quarter or two and she's gonna do a private school outta state. How much should I set aside?" And the calculator, figuring my daughter's age, the rate of inflation in college prices and the current interest rates, suggested I start putting aside $850 a month because by the time my 8-week-old was 18, I should have about $1.4m set aside. Which, i quickly discovered, is three or four Subway franchises. Frankly it's a reasonable downpayment on a 10-unit apartment building and real estate SUCKS right now.
The center cannot hold.
I miss being actively involved in clinical research.
The theory and discussion is some of the most thought provoking and insightful I have ever heard. Passion for human wellbeing and the quest for knowledge abounds in everyone starting their career. Even my phlebotomy technicians were signed onto research studies, doing their own work with other teams on quality of patient care and the development of their craft.
What I don't miss is the bundle of overinflated egos and paychecks that makes up the MD/PHD's who wind up at the heads of departments and subdepartments. I don't miss putting in 60 hour weeks so some rich old dude gets to drive a new Jag every year.
- When the cuts come, they won’t come for the administration or the diversity staff. Academic programs will be the first to go, which raises some interesting questions about what the purpose of a university is.
Interestingly, I work at a University and we have just finished phase 1 of the dreaded "restructure" in our division (Health Sciences). All they've done so far is cull about 180+ administrative/non-academic jobs and reshape those remaining so they get paid less. Hilariously, we're now woefully understaffed, performing poorly and morale is at an all-time low.
Apparently the Academic roles are next in the firing line but they will have so much more negotiating power so I anticipate them being better off than us. Having said that, the division I'm in is the gem of the University and the Arts/Humanities programmes are slowly being destroyed so my experience might be odd the exception to the articles prediction.
Hmm so I guess it depends on what you're studying - when I was at Uni 2008-2011 that cost me about 35k, standard 4 year BA. Definitely less than 10k a year.
However, say you wanted to get your MBChB, a 6 year course in 2020 you'd be set back a little over 90k by the end. Though that's for a domestic student, an international student doing the same course would be paying 70-80k a year for most of the 6 years.
The domestic student prices listed are the subsidized versions of it, but I couldn't tell you what the true number is. I know a majority of the Universities get about 30% of their funding straight from the Government but they will allocate that as they see fit/according to their programmes.
I enroll in "9 credit hours" of graduate-level research every semester in my private school. It's about $25k in "tuition". I have no fucking idea why or how I'm costing a grant $50k+ each year while I live several hours away from the school, I no longer have an office on campus, I require no university services, and my university-sanctioned advisor has farmed me out to our project's principal investigator. The university is earning more than twice what I receive in the form of my research stipend, and it does literally nothing.
Academia deserves to fail.
He's a newsletter writer. You get this if you are interested in what Jared Dillian thinks, but not $1800 a year worth. If you want to see some data on the decline of college, I have a recommendation.
- What is controversial is the idea that it's just signalling like Bryan fucking Caplan thinks.
I would say the fundamental issue is that the value proposition of college has become questionable. It's been a long time coming - College Inc. first aired in 2010 and that book I just recommended was published in 2013. But here - let's follow your logic:
- If enrollment is decreasing, a bunch of small schools that did not provide much value to begin with will close, society will skew, tuition fees will decline or increase but the institutional rite of passage of "college" never will.
If they never provided value in the first place, what changed? If we presume "no value" then the price/value ratio has always been div by zero so why are they closing now? 'cuz they are.
To quote someone whose opinion I respect from that thread, "it was all bullshit to begin with." Yes. Certainly. But it was viable bullshit until recently.
The institutional "rite of passage of 'college'" as we know it owes a lot to the GI bill. Things have changed. The question is what they will change into.
How so?
I'm coming at it from the angle of setting policy that loans money to the student that will, barring some personal catastrophe, will be able to repay the loan. No loaning a kid $120,000 for a 4-year English degree to a backwater liberal arts college after convincing him/her that the degree will pay off, because it almost certainly won't.
If loans were given restrictively, wouldn't it serve to correct some of the prices students pay? The supply of students with loans would drop, resulting in some pressure on tuition pricing.
Just a wondering.
"will be able to repay the loan" is a pretty low bar. You and I are on the same side here - I don't think it should be child's play to get the money and a sisyphean task to discharge the loan. But I also don't think "ability to repay" is the right pinchpoint. I mean, I give you passage to America in exchange for the right to make you do whatever I want for ten years under penalty of throwing your ass in the stocks when you get uppity - you're gonna repay. You are a safe credit risk.
The problem right now is that if I'm a bank and you're a student, I can loan you money regardless of your circumstances and if you don't pay me back? The government does. And then the government sells your loan to someone else who can garnish your wages, your alimony, your child support, your whatever and not even bankruptcy frees you. Compare and contrast: I'm a bank and you want to buy a house. If you can't pay me back, I take your house, I shit all over your credit rating and we all move on.
The issue is collateral: because there's no decent collateral for student loans, the government decided to step in and guarantee the loans. And then because there's no decent humans in congress, the government decided to step in and turn them into indentured servitude.
And here we are.