Canadian Report on the Labour Market Transition of PhD Graduates

[Kron3007]

....they get a visa and path to immigrate and the university gets cheap skilled labour, which drives down salaries and contributes to brain drain.

On a positive note, our university now only allows recent graduates to be classified as a postdoc.  If you are too far out of your PhD, you would now need to be hired as a research associate, which are paid better wages and benefits.  This is to prevent postdocs from being used as long term cheap labour, but the whole thing still stinks a bit.

It is good when universities don't stay complicit in this deal that is good for the bottom line but bad for the long term and for the profession. Limiting postdoctoral associateship to three years, or max five years post-PhD (to avoid sequential postdocs) is good. In the US, The National Institute of Health established a minimum salary (currently start at ~$54K for a new PhD), which is helpful for the many NIH postdocs. Universities can choose to set the same minimum as a policy. That's quite a bit better than $2,500 per course as an adjunct instructor.

Forcing a transition to Research Associate is also good. That usually provides more job security (ours are three-year terms), and a little (5-10%) more money. Justifying the position to HR is usually more work than for a single-year grant-funded postdoc. That reduces the temptation for lab heads to use the slot for cheap and disposable labor.

Overall these good moves reduce the number of working PhDs overall, but exploits fewer.

Yeah, I am in Canada and there is no standard for post docs as far as I can tell.  When I was a post doc I was making in the very low 30K rage (CAD). Granted that this was about 10 years ago, but not much has changed and we can still pay in the 30s if we want.  It is up to individual faculty to decide and many will go as low as they can get away with (like my advisor did).  So here the difference between a postdoc where the PI sets the salary and a research associate which is paid on a grid system, tends to be much more than 5-10%.

For this reason, I think it was great that the university put the limits in place around postdocs, but I do fear that many faculty will just cycle through more postdocs this way.  Perhaps this is better than the perpetual postdoc situation, but more universal standards like what you describe makes more sense to me.

   

[Kron3007]

I get frustrated with the way these discussions are so focused on the personal decisions of grad students or adjuncts. Yes, nobody has to work as an adjunct or go to grad school, but that doesn't mean that institutions should just get to save money from the oversupply without any consideration for the impact on students or the profession at large.

This is one of those sources of friction between liberals and conservatives. Liberals emphasize sympathizing with people being exploited, while conservatives emphasize helping people avoid becoming victims in the first place. Both have value, and neither one alone will provide the best solution. There should be regulations about how students, employees, etc. can be treated which are reasonable, and people need to be proactive about avoiding or leaving situations that do not meet their needs.

Many conservatives take a different tone and don't focus on helping people avoid being victims (that actually seems more like a liberal stance, the conservative view is that you should take personal responsibility) and just blame them for being weak.  Just look to Tim Boyd for a good example...

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you shoudl also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride. 

[Caracal]

I get frustrated with the way these discussions are so focused on the personal decisions of grad students or adjuncts. Yes, nobody has to work as an adjunct or go to grad school, but that doesn't mean that institutions should just get to save money from the oversupply without any consideration for the impact on students or the profession at large.

This is one of those sources of friction between liberals and conservatives. Liberals emphasize sympathizing with people being exploited, while conservatives emphasize helping people avoid becoming victims in the first place. Both have value, and neither one alone will provide the best solution. There should be regulations about how students, employees, etc. can be treated which are reasonable, and people need to be proactive about avoiding or leaving situations that do not meet their needs.

Many conservatives take a different tone and don't focus on helping people avoid being victims (that actually seems more like a liberal stance, the conservative view is that you should take personal responsibility) and just blame them for being weak.  Just look to Tim Boyd for a good example...

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you shoudl also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride.

The costs don't all fall on the individual. Sure, I can make my own decisions about whether I want to adjunct or not, and there's no reason for me to feel personally victimized. However, is paying people by the course really a good thing for students? Wouldn't it be better to have a system that tried to actually retain good teachers (and get rid of bad ones) by providing them with a more stable job?

[marshwiggle]

This is one of those sources of friction between liberals and conservatives. Liberals emphasize sympathizing with people being exploited, while conservatives emphasize helping people avoid becoming victims in the first place. Both have value, and neither one alone will provide the best solution. There should be regulations about how students, employees, etc. can be treated which are reasonable, and people need to be proactive about avoiding or leaving situations that do not meet their needs.

Many conservatives take a different tone and don't focus on helping people avoid being victims (that actually seems more like a liberal stance, the conservative view is that you should take personal responsibility) and just blame them for being weak.

In the situation of adjuncts, postdocs, etc. where educated people are complaining about not being to make ends meet, etc. conservatives would be likely to say "Quit and find something else to do." (That's the personal responsibility part.) When those same people claim that they don't have a lot of career options despite their high level of education, that leads conservatives to encourage people to not take those educational paths, (earlier personal respobsibility)  , and if that doesn't seem to make people take responsibility for their employment options, then it leads conservatives to suggest reducing funding for those programs that leave people highly educated but unprepared for gainful employment outside a very narrow and already oversupplied career niche. (If people refuse to take personal responsibility, then remove the choice in the first place.)

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you should also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride.

The challenge for society is developing consensus about how early in the decision-making process people should take responsibility. Liberals tend to place it much later than conservatives.

[marshwiggle]

Many conservatives take a different tone and don't focus on helping people avoid being victims (that actually seems more like a liberal stance, the conservative view is that you should take personal responsibility) and just blame them for being weak.  Just look to Tim Boyd for a good example...

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you shoudl also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride.

The costs don't all fall on the individual. Sure, I can make my own decisions about whether I want to adjunct or not, and there's no reason for me to feel personally victimized. However, is paying people by the course really a good thing for students? Wouldn't it be better to have a system that tried to actually retain good teachers (and get rid of bad ones) by providing them with a more stable job?

If you want to collect data to show how bad the education is that is provided by adjuncts, go ahead, but I don't think many adjunct unions or advocates will help you with that.  That would actually be a much better argument than adjunct porn, but it would no doubt get labelled "victim blaming".

And if there is no significant deficit in teaching quality by adjuncts, then your argument falls apart.

[dismalist]

The challenge for society is developing consensus about how early in the decision-making process people should take responsibility. Liberals tend to place it much later than conservatives.

That is true, but describes only part of the situation. The contemporary left tends to turn personal problems into collective problems, hence political problems. Labor markets provide numerous examples.

It is correct to believe that restriction of supply, politically imposed, will raise wages of adjuncts, post-docs, you name it. But if everybody achieved this, society would look a lot different and eventually we would all be a lot poorer.

[Kron3007]

This is one of those sources of friction between liberals and conservatives. Liberals emphasize sympathizing with people being exploited, while conservatives emphasize helping people avoid becoming victims in the first place. Both have value, and neither one alone will provide the best solution. There should be regulations about how students, employees, etc. can be treated which are reasonable, and people need to be proactive about avoiding or leaving situations that do not meet their needs.

Many conservatives take a different tone and don't focus on helping people avoid being victims (that actually seems more like a liberal stance, the conservative view is that you should take personal responsibility) and just blame them for being weak.

In the situation of adjuncts, postdocs, etc. where educated people are complaining about not being to make ends meet, etc. conservatives would be likely to say "Quit and find something else to do." (That's the personal responsibility part.) When those same people claim that they don't have a lot of career options despite their high level of education, that leads conservatives to encourage people to not take those educational paths, (earlier personal respobsibility)  , and if that doesn't seem to make people take responsibility for their employment options, then it leads conservatives to suggest reducing funding for those programs that leave people highly educated but unprepared for gainful employment outside a very narrow and already oversupplied career niche. (If people refuse to take personal responsibility, then remove the choice in the first place.)

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you should also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride.

The challenge for society is developing consensus about how early in the decision-making process people should take responsibility. Liberals tend to place it much later than conservatives.

Actually, I think the better contrast is that conservatives would say cut the funding, while liberals would be more inclined to agree with my stance that we should increase their salary.  Both approaches reduce the number of people that would be trained using the same principles, but they are quite different.

[Ruralguy]

Or take arguments appealing to intrinsic value or lack thereof off the table and just attribute everything to "market forces." Schools that feel they must treat adjuncts better in order to keep them (because its a rural location, or because they are spouses of other faculty and staff, etc.) will probably pay better, if not super great. Schools that feel that everybody is an interchangeable cog will probably just pay with dirt wages until people just won't take the dirt wages, which is likely never.

[marshwiggle]

The challenge for society is developing consensus about how early in the decision-making process people should take responsibility. Liberals tend to place it much later than conservatives.

That is true, but describes only part of the situation. The contemporary left tends to turn personal problems into collective problems, hence political problems. Labor markets provide numerous examples.

It is correct to believe that restriction of supply, politically imposed, will raise wages of adjuncts, post-docs, you name it. But if everybody achieved this, society would look a lot different and eventually we would all be a lot poorer.

If the restrictions were based on performance, then it wouldn't distort the market unduly. For instance, if departments were only allowed to have PhD programs as long as 80% of their own teaching was done by full-time faculty, it would avoid the hypocritical situation of a place that heavily uses adjuncts still contributing to the oversupply.

[dismalist]

Why? The graduate students -- the customers -- know what's going on. In particular, they know about quality and career chances.

Every supplier thinks there is oversupply. Customers don't.

[Stockmann]

Why? The graduate students .....

Do they really know? The information that would really matter for individual prospective students isn't always readily available. Info like "x% of humanities PhDs do Y" isn't terribly useful for a prospective student because it's too broad, given that career prospects can vary widely between different PhD programs in the same field, between different subfields even if housed in the same departments, or even between different advisors in the same subfield. Worse, given the typical duration of a PhD, what should really interest students is what prospects will be like in a few tears, not what they were like in the recent past. This is where the problem of Bowen reports and Professor Sparkle Ponys and universities claiming shortages comes in. You can't preach "personal responsibility" when "customers " are treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed sh*t) and when it's a taxpayer-subsidized system.

[marshwiggle]

Why? The graduate students .....

Do they really know? The information that would really matter for individual prospective students isn't always readily available. Info like "x% of humanities PhDs do Y" isn't terribly useful for a prospective student because it's too broad, given that career prospects can vary widely between different PhD programs in the same field, between different subfields even if housed in the same departments, or even between different advisors in the same subfield. Worse, given the typical duration of a PhD, what should really interest students is what prospects will be like in a few years, not what they were like in the recent past. This is where the problem of Bowen reports and Professor Sparkle Ponys and universities claiming shortages comes in. You can't preach "personal responsibility" when "customers " are treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed sh*t) and when it's a taxpayer-subsidized system.

Indeed. It probably makes sense to think of PhDs like distribution rights to a product. In order for people to make an informed purchase of distribution rights for a product, they have to have an accurate picture of potential sales for the product. Signing up more and more distributors when the market for the product is saturated will only make each distributor poorer. If they have actually been "sold" on misleading information, then the manufacturer selling the rights is guilty of fraud.

[mleok]

I think most reasonable people would support both.  Society should be structured to prevent people from being exploited, but you shoudl also take some responsibility to avoid being taken for a ride.

Yes, I think people should take some measure of personal responsibility, but I don't believe in an entirely laissez faire approach to capitalism, and that there should be some regulations in place.

[mleok]

If you want to collect data to show how bad the education is that is provided by adjuncts, go ahead, but I don't think many adjunct unions or advocates will help you with that.  That would actually be a much better argument than adjunct porn, but it would no doubt get labelled "victim blaming".

And if there is no significant deficit in teaching quality by adjuncts, then your argument falls apart.

There's also the question of how to reliably measure instructional quality, the easy methods based on student evaluations are highly correlated with expected grades, which creates a huge incentive to inflate grades. In any case, I doubt the quality of instruction offered in lower division classes by adjuncts is dramatically worse than that by senior tenured faculty.

The valued added that research active permanent faculty might offer, like connections with research, access to internships and research opportunities, and letters of recommendation are more of an issue when a student is taking upper division classes.

In any case, the adjunct pool seems to be concentrated in lower division general education classes, so it might well be concentrated in courses that nobody, be it the students, faculty, or administration, really cares about.

[dismalist]

If they have actually been "sold" on misleading information, then the manufacturer selling the rights is guilty of fraud.

Are graduate students are being mislead about the costs and benefits of their education choices? If so, by whom?

And if true, do potential graduate students not know this?