[mazelife]

> I hate to sound mean spirited, but I have a hard time being sympathetic to intelligent well educated people who chose to pursue careers that obviously don't pay well.

I think the issue that the author is raising is that in the not-so-distant past, these jobs did pay well. They weren't wildly lucrative, but one could live comfortably as an academic. At some point though things started to change. College costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last two decades [0] and yet with all this extra money sloshing around in the system, salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that kind of growth in the same time period [1]. In fact most institutions actually employ fewer full-time faculty than they did 20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts [3].

There are a lot of people in this thread saying "it's just supply and demand!" and that's part of the story, but it's not the whole story. Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities. I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.

> You chose to study medieval [sic] literature.

That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days. I think it's also a bit shortsighted as what's happening to academics is part of a larger hollowing-out of the middle class in this country; hardly something to be celebrated. Today it's college professors, but it's not at all unlikely that in a decade or two people will be saying similar things about people who "chose" to study software engineering.

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tu...

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...

[max76]

> Conscious choices were made by university administrators, trustees, and boards to hollow-out and undercut the professorial class, even as they have massively expanded their own bureaucratic and administrative class, gone on building sprees, and spent lavishly on student amenities.

This was the worst part about paying for college. So much of what I was buying had little direct impact on my education.

[ALittleLight]

>> You chose to study medieval [sic] literature.

>That kind of attitude towards the humanities and academia in general is distressing to me, but all too common these days.

I don't have a hostile disposition towards the humanities. I just don't have a special reverence for it either. I don't see the point of hand wringing regarding intelligent well educated people choosing to go into poorly compensated careers. I'm not saying that the humanities are without merit, just that there is a low expected value for pursuing some degrees and we can reasonably expect that the individuals pursuing those degrees know or should know that. We don't have to act like it's a huge problem when the people pursuing financially non-rewarding careers wind up not making a lot of money.

As a final point regarding your highlighting of my spelling mistake, the term "[sic]" is a Latin phrase meaning that the thing you're quoting is exactly as you've written it. It helps the reader understand that you're reproducing an error rather than making one yourself. You seem to have used this incorrectly as you both corrected my spelling mistake and still marked it so.

[JamesBarney]

> I think it's fair for us to question the morality of this and to question whether the result of all this has been a net gain or loss for the cause of higher education.

Wasteful sure. But immoral to hire an administrator over a tenured professor?