I've taught a bit at Arizona community colleges, which also rely heavily on part-time faculty. There are many more people with grad degrees than demand for them from universities, resulting in the obvious when supply exceeds demand: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc....
The administrators and Boards who control budgets are also keenly cognizant of the fact that birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 and haven't recovered since. Those of you who can add 18 to 2009 will know what's coming for an industry that depends heavily on 18 year olds for customers. Tenure is, in the absence of mandatory retirement ages, a 40+ year employment promise.
And one dark truth is that academia insiders with tenure accrue far more power over their adjunct colleagues than they do over their tenured colleagues. Academia insiders rarely emphasize this, for obvious reasons.
US births per thousand fell from 13.8 to 13.5 from 2008 to 2009, less than a 2% decrease. There wasn't a sudden cliff; US birth rates have decreased every year but 9 (1979-1988) from 1950 to 2019, going from 24 in 1950 to 12 today. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birt....
Yeah, probably a bigger effect has been reduced foreign enrollment (COVID etc) over the last 3 years, however this will rebound. This is less true of applicants from China.
US federal population projections don't foresee a big change in 18-24 year olds into the future [0]. Though generally there's a trend of a slight increase in foreign born populations over native born.
I would think even more important to universities should be the raw number of high schoolers and high schoolers’ parent that are questioning the ROI of universities, especially private universities.
The ROI of elite private universities like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are still very high. The private universities that should be worried are the ones that don't have an elite reputation but still charge the same tuition (or higher tuition, if you account for financial aid) as the elite universities.
For the field as a whole I guess, the rate must matter, right? Like, if the birth rate increases, then a higher percentage of the population will be employed in teaching related jobs, because there are more kids per adult.
The Adjunct job title makes sense in certain situations, but when a college system is relying on Adjuncts for the majority of credit hours taught, simply to save money, this becomes a problem.
It is not just about money it is about "flexibility" or else said, ability to kick people out to update curriculum and take younger ones more up to date with recent research.
For reference, a typical adjunct (non tenure track instructor) will make $5000 per course per semester with no benefits. Tenured and tenure track faculty in STEM are typically paid around $60-120k per year with benefits and will teach, at most, six courses a year.
The job of a tenured STEM faculty member is not the same as contract lecturer.
Tenured faculty do research and run the university as well as teach. At a major research school a STEM faculty member will often raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in outside research funds, which will pay upwards of ten graduate students and the other running costs of a research lab. They will do and publish new research, usually while training graduate students, review the work of others, run conferences, sit on hiring committees,, take turns being Director of this or that (ie. management positions).
Many STEM professors raise more external money than their salary costs. They are dollar positive to the school before they teach anything. And they teach too.
Yes, it has a salary better than contract teaching.
It's a bit more than six courses a year at community colleges and teaching-oriented 4-year colleges (though you're still right that adjuncts are much cheaper). In California, most full-time faculty at community colleges have a 15 credit per semester teaching obligation, which works out to ten 3-credit courses a year. Some do get credit in lieu of a course for taking on other responsibilities (dept chair, director of a program, etc.), but that's the baseline workload. Even the Cal State system, which is made up of 4-year schools, has a baseline teaching load of eight classes a year ("4/4").
I really wish they’d allocate Covid-like money to R&D or prizes for solving various challenges like curing diseases, which would drive universities. However first remove the bloated administration and DEI/Woke Discrimination Industry.
It's not always people with industry jobs taking these part-time positions; there's a whole subculture of "freeway flyers" who are teaching at multiple community colleges, and sometimes lower-division classes at private universities, while trying to break into a full-time position. A few years after I was in his class, one chemistry professor I really enjoyed burned out from doing this and disappeared from all his classes in the middle of the semester. The replacement professor apparently wasn't at all prepared to step in, and the students had to petition the dean to have their grades thrown out and retake the class.
That's obviously the worst-case scenario I encountered, but I heard other tales of people like a math professor shuttling back and forth between Merced and Contra Costa counties every week. A biology professor I had was making a go of it doing half the week at Contra Costa campuses and half the week at USF, and told me her situation was not at all uncommon, even in the Bay Area. There's definitely a precariat associated with keeping the community college system going, which is a damned shame because it's the most accessible rung on the ladder. Perhaps the state will be able to do something about this, but it's understandably wise to be skeptical of statewide education initiatives in California.
I was one of those. California has a law that was intended to protect against exploitation of adjuncts that makes things worth where an adjunct is limited to 10 LHE (lecture hour equivalent) per district. In Orange County, it’s not too bad because there are a lot of districts in a smallish geographic area, but LACCD covers a huge geographic area which makes L.A. County much more challenging. Add in all the competition and the low wages (although, as I recall, the L.A. County districts paid more than the O.C. districts) and life is pretty painful for an adjunct.
I had a chemistry prof with the same story: a PhD who had to work in two different counties to scrape together a living while avoiding limits on hours. And the department chair was younger and only had a master’s degree in education.
The situation with adjuncts is terrible everywhere in the US, though. The situation at Hamline University could only have happened because the professor lacked tenure, otherwise academic freedom protections would have kicked in.
This is true of big name research institutions too. Since 2000, spending on administration in US colleges nationwide has increased faster than the combined increase of scholarships, grants, and professorships. (Source: Graeber, 2018ish).
This requires cost savings, and that comes at the cost of the things a college should be doing: teaching, and educating. After all, the bureaucrats who make the budgets aren't going to reduce their own salaries. Savings must be found, and it can't possibly be found in cutting the fifth community outreach residential assistant wellness officer.
Possibly controversial and happy to be swayed, but to me the fundamental problem at the core of grad student oversupply is a lack of investment training.
Degrees like the sciences and mathematics (and certainly arts too) are appealing to some because they are not tied to capital (or at least, less tied to capital than say business degrees). This means there are less chances to make money, sure, but also less chances for corruption. The problem is, that isn't a complete career plan. There needs to be an "and then" that reflects the current market.
I don't have a lot of hope for universities hiring enough people to satisfy the number of current t grads. But, we definitely need innovation. Universities should be teaching students how to intelligently take risks, while not sticking their neck out too far.
Governments can help here by offering cheaper loans to young investors, or offering partial protection to investors who do. Again, happy to be swayed here.
IMO, one thing that absolutely needs to be retired is the current academic reward pattern of "better = more papers at more high impact journals with more cool positions held". It's too easy to game and too hard to be creative under. Something where the financial risk is not held ENTIRELY by the post doc is a good start.
In this case, I'd say I very much liked that the community colleges I attended in California had part-time faculty that were working in the industry. I feel the quality of education for some classes was better than what I received in university. (Thanks Mrs. Wong (Math) and Mr. Vedrin (EE)!)
I really appreciated by CA community college experience with part-time faculty. My math, physics, and chemistry teachers were literally rocket scientists at their day jobs (military R&D).
The sad thing is that major universities are filled with researchers who are distracted by pushing on the frontiers. They often do a very basic job with teaching.
The sad thing is that the job market favors graduates from major universities. Research universities are doing what they are supposed to do, but their reputation attracts talented and ambitious students in general. When those students end up being successful in their careers, they maintain the reputation.
Some countries have tried establishing two parallel higher education systems. Universities provide research-based education, while the other system focuses more on skills that are relevant in the job market. And the job market still favors academic education over the more practical alternative.
I'm not saying that the research universities aren't performing according to plan. Only that the plan was never focused on helping the undergraduates learn.
I'd say the plan was focused on helping students to learn. It was not focused on teaching students with no intrinsic motivation to learn.
When I was a student in Finland, there were still remnants of the old system left. In that system, it was the student's responsibility to learn. The university provided opportunities and supported the student to the extent its resources allowed. The curriculum was centered around exams, which the student was expected to pass even when the corresponding classes were not offered. There was no expectation that everyone should graduate. It was ok to drop out if you could not find the motivation to study and pass the exams.
That was a good system for some and bad for others. And it was a poor fit to the new era, where the universities were repurposed to teach the masses skills that were supposed to be relevant in the job market.
The best professors I had at CCC's were part time and actually worked outside of the Academia bubble. Gave a lot of very relevant advice and information. Some were full time researchers at UC's or nearby schools on research as well instead of Tenured faculty paid to not care.
In Oregon, already in the 1990s community colleges were replacing retiring full-timers with part-timers as a cost-cutting measure. This is something administration will always do when they can get away with it. We need a formal policy on what ratio of part-timers is allowable.
It sounds like they can afford to screw around and hoard the money.
I'm interested in a theoretical optimization problem where education becomes expensive without bound and as it grows over time how that affects both admissions and birth rates, eventually killing itself or reducing its own influence over society.
You know, because modern society has just become a min-max living simulation for people in power and leaders across all industries operate without moral values, substituting them with nietzscheistic organizational values instead.
As someone in the profession for over a decade, what is the best way to offer yourself out as a guest lecturer for community college courses focused on software development?
I'll give you my approach as someone in the profession for over a decade who started teaching part time at a private university last year. I enrolled (as a student) in a couple of classes at a local CC for fields that were just passive interests of mine. One lecturer was great and served as a model for in-class instruction.
After a semester of that I applied to various local community colleges and private universities (one my alma mater). Many of these universities didn't even have an official "adjunct lecturer" position posted, but I selected whatever sounded most appropriate and spent a lot of time on cover letters tailored to each university explaining what I had to offer to them and why I ought to be a good fit for whatever they valued in instructors.
It took over a month to hear back from the first which was pretty disappointing. 3 months later I heard back from the second, and I never heard back from a third private university or either of two local CCs. By the time I heard back from the second I had already been informally offered a position at the first.
* Adjunct lecturer/temporary faculty: These are people hired for just one semester for a specific course, for fairly minimal salary. Ads for these are posted usually 3 to 6 months before the semester starts, and you can just apply to them.
* Visiting faculty: If you are actually really good, sometimes Universities will hire you as a visiting faculty. There is a case-by-case negotiated contract (usually 1 or 2 courses per year, with whatever other constraints you have). The difference from the first choice is that you have some choice in the course you get to teach, and how you teach it.
I would recommend starting from the first choice, and teaching a large standard course where other faculty are around to help you. Teaching well is very difficult (and teaching badly is relatively easy), and people's future is at stake, so its best to start slow and learn the ropes before attempting something difficult.
I used to be a PT teacher at my local California community college, in the art department (graphic design, illustration, Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, etc.). I definitely heard from other teachers that some things were off (that seem like they could be related), but who knows if they were really related to the use of funds described here.
I taught for just a couple of years and I was told that my classes were appreciated to some degree because I was a working professional in my field at the same time.
Still, it was kind of annoying that some students only wanted that. When you have massively-high-achievers and middle-age homeless students with obvious struggles in the same class, the UMC people angling for their particular needs and also trying to min/max every class start to seem kind of off-putting. Not to blame anybody really, but it had a real feeling of inequity-upon-inequity to it.
One couple really grilled me before a digital photography class, asking trivia questions about the topics we'd be covering and _how much I could teach them_, because they were trying to figure out _how much_ of a waste of time it would be. For a simple weekend class! They had nearly five figures worth of gear and a lot of expectations from a community college.
I believe this is about when boot camps started to really pick up speed, and I could feel that tension building around traditional educational institutions.
I do feel like there are pros/cons of "working professional teacher" vs. traditional FT college faculty for sure, which I didn't really understand before working there.
Unfortunately it was also kind of a slow-motion "that's like a dollar an hour" [1] experience, and after reviewing the whole situation, with its variety of little pros and cons, decided to move all my energies back into my normal business.
One thing I really miss though is how much I learned! My students thought _they_ were learning but holy smokes did I learn a lot from creating lessons, lesson plans, and websites for the courses.
BTW tech-wise it was a lot of fun too. I gave extra credit points for trying non-Photoshop software, including some FOSS titles like GIMP, Bluefish, Inkscape, etc.
Some of my students also got a bonus intro to web development with PHP, Python, and one was I believe a Rebol programmer who showed me his homebrew back-door VNC client with a one-click button palette to control any of his IT-company clients' computers.
I also believe I came close to mastering the art of carrying my teacher's life on a USB disk. I had so many Portable-Apps downloads on there, even some servers I believe.
> Still, it was kind of annoying that some students only wanted that. When you have massively-high-achievers and middle-age homeless students with obvious struggles in the same class, the UMC people angling for their particular needs and also trying to min/max every class start to seem kind of off-putting. Not to blame anybody really, but it had a real feeling of inequity-upon-inequity to it.
As a former CC instructor and adjunct, I will say that these students have really helped my mindset as I continued through with my PhD. I had former forklift drivers, single mothers, etc. as students and it really made me think about activities like homework - the reality is that they did not have the same amount of time to work on homework like the traditional 18-25 demographic. Rather than shrugging my shoulders and saying "oh well", I would block out time in class so they could work with me available, started my YouTube channel to avoid minor emails, etc.
NC State is more a traditional 18-25 demo, but I've tried to carry on the same mindset. These are people with their own things going on in life. Since I allow attending lectures via the web stream, I've found out that I've had students attending while waiting to pick up their children from school.
> Rather than shrugging my shoulders and saying "oh well", I would block out time in class so they could work with me available, started my YouTube channel to avoid minor emails, etc.
This is great, I only wish I could be more like that,putting more into the world that I know will be useful in the long term.
Without getting into it, I've had a number of "unfortunate events" in my life, many during college. As a result, I sort of recognize that "life happens" and it can suck at times. If its any consolation, the videos have saved me hours of time. They can be annoying to make, but I do always get a kick when I see a "thanks" notification from someone out there just trying to learn Microsoft Access.
As a community college student in California, one of my biggest complaints about the system (which I like overall!) is that some of the professors don't care or are too overworked to help students. Hopefully the results of this audit spur some change.
While it’s easy to say to administration… it’s more complicated than that. Salary for professors didn’t increase much, but benefits increased massively (because of the increased cost of health care and pensions). administrators also get paid more. Higher ed is a labor intensive business, and labor intensive businesses are expensive.
Unfortunately, this article misses the mark and distracts from the overall problem.
If you poll that vast number of college dropouts regarding the issues for why they dropped out, you will find a common picture. Its finances or its unfairly structured or misrepresented classes.
Some professors structure their courses in an optimized to fail way. These are often called Weed-out classes, Engineering has the most, Economics has a decent amount, and the degrees with no real business applications have the least.
Structure aside, students need two things to succeed. The classes must be taught and tested in a determinable way, that means you either teach the methodology or heuristics to come to a single answer for questions involved, or you test the material which has one right answer. You don't have an open-ended question that has 3 correct answers, where you have to guess which one is correct because there's no single unique answer that is correct. Or vocabulary used with multiple meanings depending on how you read it, or lecture material that mismatches what's actually on the exams.
Also, you set expectations of how much time spent per class is needed must be accurate up front. If either of those two core things are not enforced (and I can tell you neither of those are enforced in any legitimate way now or for the past 20 years), then students will consistently fail or withdraw.
The general rule of thumb is a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week. That is not always the case, some classes are structured in a way where no matter how much time you spend, you won't be able to prepare for the material being tested. If you are a full time student with 4 classes and you have one class like this, then its possible the class will cause you to fail the other 3, or you could potential have financial aid clawed back unless you self-fund at which case its a simple loss.
You cannot succeed in school without being able to control basic academic outcomes. Courses structured with 24 mostly equal assignments and a final exam have to get at least a 70% on each assignment on average. The results that fall in that range (above 70%, are 30% with slight deviations depending on weightings of the total points). So you end up with a .3 probability raised to the 24th or 25th power. That's somewhere around ~8.4 * 10^-14. Not taking into account factors like difficulty of the individual questions or other factors.
Most classes that are generally labelled Weed-out courses have such a low probability of success that they should never have been sold to the student, but the student couldn't identify the issues until after its too late. Put another way, this is fraud on the colleges part, and while there are pathways to appeal issues with specific professors; it rarely works out because there is an informal structure that punishes people for going this route, with no real enforcement or accountability. I've gone to a chair person and Dean before and had them say they don't have the seniority to challenge a tenured professor that's been teaching for 25 years (who structured their class so the only way to pass was academic dishonesty, where a blind eye was turned to the passing around of answer keys in class from student's that previously failed)... In other words, you only pass/get a degree if you are on the take. You know what happened with each successive exam after that, they were all fails, and the professor stopped covering the material or providing any help during office hours.
Over the past two decades, I've attempted 53 units where I had to withdraw. Slightly more than half are from courses like what I describe. I started on the engineering route, then failing that business, and now its just any degree to supplement a decade of professional experience. There's no accountability, and the people capable of making changes have no incentive, there's a reason graduation rates hover between 5% and 30% a year. Its optimized to fail people for captive repeat customers.
If as a student, the course is structured so you cannot control basic academic outcomes, you shouldn't have to pay, but that will never happen; and an entire industry of exploitative behavior has adapted to this over the past 20 years. Its sad because its completely unnecessary and serves only one purpose to profit off people in a way that they can't seek bankruptcy protection, which causes debt slavery, where they cannot succeed/have opportunities without a qualifier (such as a degree).
My understanding is that weed-out courses largely only happen in the US, and not in Europe or Asia. In the latter, students are usually admitted into a major, sometimes after passing an entrance exam. In the US, admissions are much more "holistic" and students have much more freedom to choose their major. This inevitably results in some people who have very low aptitude for a major enrolled in it. So Departments have decided that, because they can't change the admission process, the next best thing is to weed out students with a difficult course. This usually results in a large number of qualified students also being forced out, which is very unfortunate.
I don't think there is any solution to this other than fixing the admission process. If you ever become a professor, you will quickly realize, how much even a handful of bad students can bring down the level of a senior elective. The 80:20 rule applies, where 80 percent of your time gets spent on 20 percent of the weakest students. Its a zero-sum game with the profs time. This does not discount the fact that the academy is filled with profs who have no interest in teaching.
> a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week
As a prof, I don't agree. Semester enrolled credits x 3 should be the total time the student has to work per week. Its ridiculous notion to normalize each course to the same amount of time/week - some subjects are simply more difficult. Its up to the department to thoughtfully structure the curriculum so students have a mix of difficult and easy courses in every semester. Even as a student, I was quite glad that I got to spend 20hrs/week on Quantum Mechanics 2, and 5hrs/week on Intro to Journalism in that same semester.
In an ideal world, yes. But, it is all administrative issues. Regulation demand that every undergrad degree be 4 years with something like 130-150 credits. The other constraint is that you have to teach the undergrad enough material. And simply speaking a degree in mechanical engineering requires mastering a lot more material than a degree in journalism. So inevitably, the average mechanical engineering course will require more time and effort than the average journalism course.
Its just all stupid regulations. I don't even understand why all courses have to run 16 weeks, when a lot of them have filler content at the end. Just let the course end early, and gain the benefits of student motivation.
I agree with a lot of what you've said, most of the issues are regulatory, or structural issues. Some teachers also simply don't want to teach, and prefer to be gatekeepers, but not all of them.
I was one of those who had been weeded out of an engineering degree at the Mechanics of Solids level, attempted it something like 9 times before giving up, passed the labs with A's. B average up to the required math for engineering which included Discrete Mathematics, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra (iirc) all those were already completed for most of those attempts.
Tests were 3 questions, 5-10 steps, Answer to the 2nd was dependent on the first correct answer, Third dependent on the second. If you one, you could potentially have failed the class by week 4 which was just outside the withdrawal date for a full refund. Its pretty sad when you have a large number of people pass upper division math, who then in turn can't pass basic physics because of academic structure. I remember getting an award on one of those labs for being the only group to have their egg survive a 3 story drop with just a plastic baggy full of water (at my insistence).
Almost all professors in my local geographic area had decided to push that structure. Economics for Business had issues with deterministic tests. Professionally I deal with a lot of automation so ensuring determinism in systems we use gets back-checked quite often.
Its a sad state of affairs, and most of those issues are solveable with proper incentives and design, but getting to that point would require firing a lot of vested interests. I don't know what it is about a central structure that tends to gravitate towards the lowest common denominator in terms of work.
High performing people often get socially punished for making the people slacking off look bad. Such a backwards system.
In the 1945 - 1975 period, demand for faculty exceeded supply: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l..., and many in or adjacent to academia yearn for a return to those days. But it's probably not happening.
The administrators and Boards who control budgets are also keenly cognizant of the fact that birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 and haven't recovered since. Those of you who can add 18 to 2009 will know what's coming for an industry that depends heavily on 18 year olds for customers. Tenure is, in the absence of mandatory retirement ages, a 40+ year employment promise.
And one dark truth is that academia insiders with tenure accrue far more power over their adjunct colleagues than they do over their tenured colleagues. Academia insiders rarely emphasize this, for obvious reasons.