Splinter article: The Revenge of the Poverty-Stricken College Professors

[marshwiggle]

The problem I see isn't too many people with deep knowledge in given areas.  The problem I see is a logical disconnect between the assertions of what a good liberal arts education is supposed to do for one and the actual results of people who earned a degree in a liberal arts field, took crappy jobs or no job, went to graduate school in that same liberal arts field and then insist that the only job they can get is teaching/research in that liberal arts field.

It occurs to me how ironic it is that the people in fields who most disparage the idea of university education as "job training" are the ones who also most consider any job outside academia as a failure for their advanced degree holders. So I guess being an academic isn't a "job", but rather a "calling". (Insert some uplifting music and deep sighs of contentment here.)

[Conjugate]

The problem I see isn't too many people with deep knowledge in given areas.  The problem I see is a logical disconnect between the assertions of what a good liberal arts education is supposed to do for one and the actual results of people who earned a degree in a liberal arts field, took crappy jobs or no job, went to graduate school in that same liberal arts field and then insist that the only job they can get is teaching/research in that liberal arts field.

It occurs to me how ironic it is that the people in fields who most disparage the idea of university education as "job training" are the ones who also most consider any job outside academia as a failure for their advanced degree holders. So I guess being an academic isn't a "job", but rather a "calling". (Insert some uplifting music and deep sighs of contentment here.)

It occurs to me that lots of people believe that we faculty should be doing what we do for love, rather than money. We complain about the low pay and sub-inflation-rate increases, and we are told, "Yes, but the students make it all worth it, don't they?"

Well, no, not as much as you'd think. Not when the low pay is compounded by an increase in disrespect, a loss of autonomy, and various other indignities that erode academic freedom.

Note: Edited to correct markup.

[marshwiggle]

It occurs to me that lots of people believe that we faculty should be doing what we do for love, rather than money.

This is the professional equivalent of the idea that in a good romantic relationship, "looks don't matter".

To say that a certain factor is not more important than everything else is absolutely true. But that's not at all the same as saying that it is totally irrelevant.

Since living requires having a roof over one's head and food on the table, then unless one has some other source of income, a job must pay enough for that. However, if one is going to continue in this job indefinitely it has to provide sufficient psychological reward, a.k.a. "love", as well.

If jobs within academia don't provide enough money, it's ridiculous to assume that no jobs outside academia can provide sufficient "love".

[polly_mer]

Another problem I see is the very sad situation of people who decide to sell out and then discover that no one wants to pay them big enough money for doing so.  That big mental leap of giving up one's identity as a scholar and an academic often isn't immediately rewarded monetarily. 

13% of the US adult population over age 25 has a graduate degree, which translates to 37% of everyone who has a bachelor's degree (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-people-with-masters-and-phd-degrees-double-since-2000.html).  For those who like to slice their populations various ways for comparison:

• About 13% is the same as the percentage of the US population who is African American (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218)
• About 13% is the same as the percentage of the US population who is foreign born (ibid)
• About 13% is slightly more than persons in poverty in the US (ibid)
• About 13% is slightly more than the percentage of the US population who is at least 80 years old (https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by-sex-and-age/)

• About 40% (rounding the 37% up) is about twice the 19% of people who live in rural areas in the US (https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html)

In other worlds, having a graduate degree is no longer a rare achievement in the US population and certainly not among the college-educated.

[polly_mer]

I'm going to circle back to:

Are any politicians advocating more job-focused training instead of college?

Career and Technical Education (CTE) caucuses exist at the national level in both the House and the Senate (https://www.acteonline.org/caucus/).  This is one of the truly bipartisan efforts:  just check out the list of House members at https://careerandtechnicaleducationcaucus-langevin.house.gov/members .

Just this week, the US Department of Labor started circulating new rules aimed at assuring that apprenticeship programs are high quality learning, paid opportunities, not just cheap labor (https://ctepolicywatch.acteonline.org/2019/07/new-department-of-labor-rule-seeks-to-create-new-apprenticeship-model.html).

In the past quarter, the CTE caucus wrote an open letter and testified for the infrastructure bill laying out the educational needs to have a skilled workforce able to complete the needed infrastructure upgrades (https://careerandtechnicaleducationcaucus-langevin.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/bipartisan-letter-urges-funding-for-workforce-development-in).

As an example at the state level, Tennessee's governor's first initiative is GIVE: Governor's Investment in Vocational Education to expand vocational education in the high schools and support technical training, which was a campaign promise (https://chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2019/02/05/after-campaigning-for-more-vocational-education-lee-unveils-his-proposal-for-tennessee/).  The funding comes from the same lottery pool that includes the HOPE program.

Another example at the state level, Future Ready Oregon (https://www.oregon.gov/gov/policy/pages/future-ready-oregon.aspx) expands CTE courses and apprenticeships.

About 2 years ago, California spent millions of dollars to ensure prospective students knew what they could do in the CTE programs. 

Part of the problem, [the California Community College system's vice chancellor for work force and economic development], and other experts say, is outdated notions about the jobs being dirty and low paying.

In reality, many CTE professions pay well and are highly technical. Labor market data from the system show, for example, that radiologic technologists in the Sacramento area have a median annual wage of $90,000. Telecommunications equipment installers in Sacramento earn a median of $62,000, while web developers make $75,000.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/05/california-community-colleges-seek-rebrand-cte-state-kicks-new-money

As a note indicating that the shift is from college to CTE, Inside Higher Ed reported that many of the positive recent outcomes of CTE are likely a result of people enrolling in CTE who could have gone to college, but opted for CTE itself while warning about overstating what CTE can do for those who wouldn't be successful at college (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/01/emerging-career-education-tracks-may-mask-struggles-students-traditional-programs).

So, are there politicians advocating more job-focused training instead of college?  Yes, there are people being elected while specifically advocating that policy.  That tends to play very well in places where the majority of people don't have college degrees and prioritize family/community over a specific career, although people do need jobs.  In a Pew survey, family won as being most meaningful, well above career, especially when folks were restricted to only one choice (https://www.pewforum.org/2018/11/20/where-americans-find-meaning-in-life/).

[downer]

Thanks Polly. That is interesting info. I hope that my state is doing this kind of thing so I don't have so many students in my classes who would be better off somewhere else. I guess that might mean that I don't have a class to teach, but I'm OK with that.

[spork]

Thanks Polly. That is interesting info. I hope that my state is doing this kind of thing so I don't have so many students in my classes who would be better off somewhere else. I guess that might mean that I don't have a class to teach, but I'm OK with that.

There is still the problem of the "everyone must go to college and get a bachelor's degree to have a chance at a middle class existence" hype.

I remember (as a child) state-run vocational-technical schools that were a significant pipeline for high school grads who lacked the ability or will to attend a four-year university. I don't have data, but it seemed that they were ignored/dismantled beginning in the 1980s as part of a shift toward generic two-year associate degree programs in topics like "human resources" and "business."

[mahagonny]

So, adjuncts are blamed for taking jobs that aren't meant to be for people who actually need them to, you know, pay the bills.

Not exactly. It's uglier than that. Employment is understood to be taken for the purpose of sustenance. Therefore, you're being blamed for having needs.

5) Enforce budget decisions at the state level for the public institutions that explicitly make the trade-offs in how many students can be served by paying real wages to hard-working folks.  Make explicit that the community college can only serve N students with the resources available and refuse to admit more than N students without a plus-up in resources to address larger enrollment.

Newsflash... plenty of bureaucrats out there who don't care if they turn students away. Not their problem. Those is the rules.

You've missed my point: we probably should be turning away students so that the ones who are enrolled are actually getting an education.  As Hibush points out, the system can support good education, broad education, or low cost education with at most two of those three at any one time.

Personally, I'd rather we opt for good education that is free to the small number of people who can benefit instead of pretending that a degree is the same as an education and that either degree or education is really going to help the rapidly approaching future where we don't need all the people we have.

So, higher education and the resulting access to economic and social power should only be for those whose family income was high enough to afford high quality schools in the first place?

Or those whose family income can pay for both education and union busting attorney fees.

Actually it's the preservation and power of tenure that keeps the desire to admit students who won't perform really well. Their tuition  and fees float the better students who can be used to show off the vitality of tenure.

[mahagonny]

What that really means, i.e. 'these jobs were never intended for making a living' is the part time job population was expected to remain small and disparate and not able to achieve any solidarity or advocacy. thus they would never have unions or anyone saying 'hey, what is it that these people actually 'deserve.' So it's extremely important for administrators to make the claim that unions can't bring any improvement to the job. They'll spend ridiculous amounts of money and time to maintain that impression.

[Conjugate]

It's entirely possible that if I had gotten licensed as an electrician, plumber, and/or HVAC tech, I'd be making more money now for fewer hours per week than I am as a professor in a small rural college.  On the other hand, I'd have a lot less control over my life, and I would be missing out on a lot of the wonderful things that I've learned.

Anyway, all this is to say that I don't see that a liberal arts education is essentially undesirable; lots of what I learned in my liberal arts classes are still with me, even though I couldn't tell you that they have earned me a penny in any concrete way.  If a liberal arts degree were not so damned expensive, I think I would encourage any plumber, electrician, drywall installer, or truck driver to get one.

[Trogdor]

It's entirely possible that if I had gotten licensed as an electrician, plumber, and/or HVAC tech, I'd be making more money now for fewer hours per week than I am as a professor in a small rural college.  On the other hand, I'd have a lot less control over my life, and I would be missing out on a lot of the wonderful things that I've learned.

I don''t think of academia as a career in which we have much control over our lives. I can't choose where I live, for example. There is basically no job portability or mobility. We take jobs wherever we can get them.

[mahagonny]

It's entirely possible that if I had gotten licensed as an electrician, plumber, and/or HVAC tech, I'd be making more money now for fewer hours per week than I am as a professor in a small rural college.  On the other hand, I'd have a lot less control over my life, and I would be missing out on a lot of the wonderful things that I've learned.

I don''t think of academia as a career in which we have much control over our lives. I can't choose where I live, for example. There is basically no job portability or mobility. We take jobs wherever we can get them.

That's a tenure track situation.

[paultuttle]

More broadly, artificially low wages are a problem for all who work for a living as opposed to those who invest for a living.

The systematic dismantling of labor-focused strength and the concomitant corporatization of the United States is slowly but surely turning our polity into a very large, once-democratic, banana republic.

Academia is merely one of the canaries in the coal mine, IMHO, in that broader view.

To me, the supreme irony is that self-professed "Christians"--of a "Christianity" that my uber-liberal Protestant upbringing would not have recognized as valid--have not only embraced the corporatization process but have also venerated wealth as a sign of Godly favor, so that--yes, as a previous poster in this thread noted--poverty is therefore unGodly (with or without the capital letter) and therefore should not be ameliorated due to some twisted sense that the poverty-stricken have "brought it upon themselves."

Yeah. Sure. As though institutional structures to keep poor people in their "place" (socioeconomically) don't exist and haven't existed in multiple polities for millennia.

<steps off soapbox and stalks away muttering into my beard>

[marshwiggle]

To me, the supreme irony is that self-professed "Christians"--of a "Christianity" that my uber-liberal Protestant upbringing would not have recognized as valid--have not only embraced the corporatization process but have also venerated wealth as a sign of Godly favor, so that--yes, as a previous poster in this thread noted--poverty is therefore unGodly (with or without the capital letter) and therefore should not be ameliorated due to some twisted sense that the poverty-stricken have "brought it upon themselves."

My fairly-conservative Protestant upbringing didn't make such a direct connection between wealth and God's favour, and neither does my middle-of-the-road current faith perspective. And both of those have made it clear that often peoples' bad circumstances are not of their own making.

Yeah. Sure. As though institutional structures to keep poor people in their "place" (socioeconomically) don't exist and haven't existed in multiple polities for millennia.

But what is the objective process for determining the "appropriate" remuneration for any particular task? And how much agency do people need before they do have to take some responsibility for their own outcomes? In the case of adjuncts, we are literally talking about some of the most educated citizens in a democratic country who are eligible for all kinds of jobs, but choose to only consider ones which require their specific educational background. (This is without considering whether the choices they made in their own education, including in many cases going into great debt for advanced degrees, were reasonable.)

Much as I like working in academia, I have often said that if it didn't pay enough to feed my family, I would walk away in a heartbeat. I truly don't understand individuals who seem incapable of even considering such a move. Similarly, much as I like my work, I look forward to retirement because there are other things in life that are important to me and that I wish to pursue. My employment does not define me as a human being.

[fast_and_bulbous]

My employment does not define me as a human being.

A very healthy attitude, indeed.