Universities are in trouble. I know of three that are unable to hire
for senior and middle positions. They've been advertising for
months. Here (UK), Brexit is partly to blame, along with post Cov19
fatigue, and aging population with many retiring. As I've said in
other comments, the main problem is that academia has become hideously
corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling
as good people leave.
> As I've said in other comments, the main problem is that academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling as good people leave.
As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
I don't know about other parts of the UK, but I interviewed for some (senior) lecturer positions last year and the salary was a joke by London standards. I'm not comparing to lofty SWE salaries here, but just compared to what it takes to make a decent living in London.
What does "senior and middle positions" mean? Are you talking about something that has the potential to be a tenured position, non-tenured academic positions, or non-academic positions?
> the main problem is that academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values leading to de-skilling as good people leave.
This hits the nail on the head. Everyone I know in academia is there despite their management. One had to leave the UK for the US in order to progress her career. The ongoing pensions fiasco has produced some extraordinary responses. Some universities are threatening to withdraw a whole month's pay for any strike action, not just for the period of the strike. Strike action is likely to hit exams: https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1531245496190128131 , with the result that universities are trying to outsource and automate marking (a lower quality product for which students will be charged the same amount).
Inflation over the course of this year is likely to be 10%. Pay offers are in the region of 2%, with pension cuts of up to 40%. Staff are going on strike simply to maintain their pay levels.
Marketisation has ruined the concept of the university. It's now seen as a place for manufacturing Education Units (to be sold to students) and Research Units. The staff on the Unit production line are therefore as metric-driven as Uber drivers. And there are attempts to casualise them similarly. Nobody senior or in government really cares about the content of the Units, only how they're ranked by the Unit Assessment System (RAE).
The culture war is also squarely pointed at universities, which are in and of themselves a threat to the right-wing, apart from the top two or three which are required for elite reproduction.
I'm surprised it took them so long to get fed up, reaching the mid-career level. I realized doing my PhD that all of academia is a toxic house of cards built on cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to students of at least an interesting (if not particularly well-paid) career. If it took you until mid-career to realize this . . . you weren't observant and I don't really feel that sorry that you were asleep for so long.
A bit over-egged, but there is not denying there are a raft of problems in academia.
On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.
Yep! I was warned almost immediately and had good supervisors. It doesn’t change the fact that academia is built on wage theft, precious contracts and volatile sources of income. Don’t even get me started on the middle manager bullshit.
Yeah, I realized before finishing my PhD that academia was a Ponzi scheme and I was one of the bag holders at the end. Tenure track positions haven’t been growing for many years now, yet degrees are being awarded at far higher than replacement rate. TBH, I should have realized it was a list cause when I found out doing 3 postdocs wasn’t an unusual situation.
1. Covid was hard on education from kindergarten through college. Systems and processes that were already stressed to the max became overloaded and everyone was asked to do more and sometimes take a pay cut or have reduced benefits while doing so.
2. Society stopped valuing education as much. While once educators traded lower pay for the prestige of being a professor they can’t really say it is a worthy trade anymore as a vocal minority do not value education at all.
3. Faculty no longer run colleges/ universities. Once faculty ran everything, but as regulations have tightened and colleges started getting sued for any number of things professional administrators started being required because the jobs got bigger. In theory this has created less work for faculty, but they now feel disconnected and impotent.
"2. Society stopped valuing education as much. While once educators traded lower pay for the prestige of being a professor they can’t really say it is a worthy trade anymore as a vocal minority do not value education at all."
I can totally see why that is the case. Raised in a classical worker family and observing how my peers from childhood are doing, I can imagine where this is coming from.
Most of them were also raised as workers kids (i.e. both parents working in mindless jobs in a factory and earning barely enough to raise the kids), but some had the chance to go earn a BS or MS. Yet, they are financially struggling for severals reasons.
Also, they have a hard time explaining to their parents why they can't afford a house, vacation, a new car and all the things their parents never had, but wanted their kids to have. So all the reasons their parents fought to get them a good education are nullified.
I know getting a good education is of value in and of itself, but the reality is, that most parents want a good education for their kids because they want them to be financially successful, not for humanistic reasons (remember who attended universities in their beginning and why, it was aristocrats with a lot of time and money).
So to play the devil's advocate, what value has this education, if my kids still struggle in life, just they way I am? And why should I have "high esteem" for the people teaching, if what they offer has so little practical value?
Here in the US, I expect a lot of K-12 teachers to be leaving the field. The additional demands created by Covid were the last straw for many. Their employment contracts are such that they have to give months of notice, so I expect all to be quiet until August, then panic everywhere as slots can't be filled.
My sister got a masters in education and taught for 5 years in the NYC school system, hating every moment of it. A big SaaS company took a risk on her and hired her as a salesperson. She is crushing it, working from home, and occasionally reminiscing about the night and day difference in well-being between working at schools vs a real company.
(Public School) Teacher pay is largely structured to encourage retention. The salary is pretty lousy if you only do it for 2 years, but if you stick around for 40 years it is a well paying job in most States. The pay increases for seniority and the compounding interest of pensions add up to a very good salary.
There is also the other problem that a lot of states require an education degree to teach in public schools which is somewhat specialized. A lot of mid-career educators that I have spoken with find that their skills don't really qualify them for a lot of jobs and becoming a private school teacher typically means a pay cut.
Teachers are not waiting. I know of several who retired mid-year. That NEVER used to happen.
Covid didn't break their back--shitty parents did. Covid just ran the parental shittiness meter up to max.
And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now have multiple students who actually had a parent die. In a normal year, that would be rare and that child would get lots of counseling. With Covid--it's too common and the teachers have to deal with it. Just like everything else.
I left academia for a software company, not midway my career but at the early start.
The decision is easy when you have mouths to feed, wages don’t keep up, and I can earn double my salary doing the fun part of my work (ML+optimization+data/energy modelling in civil engineering space) literally the next day. I was working with all kinds of companies to help them get started with this kind of work. Instead of sending my students I just leapt and it’s been a tremendous experience. If I return I will be a better professor, however not publishing for a couple of years may kill that dream. Right now, it’s a great feeling not to have to worry about food and I can actually focus more on doing my job better. I feel bad about leaving my group, but they can find someone more hungry than me that wants it more.
I left academia after 8 years (4 PhD, 4 Postdoc) to go into a startup (non US). For me, I was disillusioned with what being in academia meant: Publish or Perish meant publishing whatever crap mid-work you had for the sake of putting something out. At the time I was also a blind-reviewer in a couple of publications, and the amount of trash papers that arrived due to the same issue was astounding (and no, I didn't get paid to do that).
I would love to do research and science, but I just hate the current status of that "industry".
And this is considering that I traded a "comfortable" life in Germany, with all the great social safeties in there (I didn't have a problem with the language) for a Mexican based startup with very high risk. And the pay was even not that different. After 10 years of my decision, I can say I took the best path, given that it took me to work in other startups that have been doing amazingly well and for which I've got some good amount of stocks.
What you mention as “the fun part” does sound pretty interesting. Sounds like you’re contracting/consulting? Any advice on finding assignments in the field? (For someone with a DS + non-civil engineering background)
In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.
Prof. from Norway here. While it sounds like the situation in the US and UK is worse than our own, I’m seriously considering moving to industry after 20 years in academia. Mainly fed up by ever growing admin, and stupid financial oversight regulations, and the general workload… and many other things that isn’t wise to complain about publicly.
This is actually really scary. As American universities become less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
Isn't this exactly the opposite of the current state? That the overwhelming power of Universities in the US is what spreads cultural and political movements? I think you could argue that the entire Woke enterprise is centered on Universities particularly elite ones.
The number of administrative staff in universities has been increasing faster that that of faculty. I was wondering if this is the culprit of run-away cost of universities and the culprit of general stagnation of faculty salary.
The real reason, if you want to get to the core of it, is two-fold: Regulation and changing consumer expectation driven by cheap loans. Colleges and universities prior to perhaps the 90s weren't all that concerned about the student experience, health resources, quality of the dorms, dining, fitness center, etc, etc, etc.
Regulation and accreditation has become more stringent because some for-profit schools have scammed people out of money. Regulation has caused a bunch of positions to be created to make sure that the University is in compliance at all times. Falling out of compliance can cause the university to be sued or lose accreditation. The risk of either is so massive it could close a small college or university so it makes sense to spend as much money as required to mitigate the risk.
Cheap loans have changed consumer behavior in the same way low interest rate loans increase the cost of housing. Consumers are willing to spend more to go to the best. But how is a student to determine which school is best? It is impossible to really compare education beyond the general prestige of the university, so how do schools differentiate themselves among similarly ranked schools? New buildings; more and better services; better dorms; better website / marketing materials; better events and activities for students. A good example of this is the student fitness center. Almost every school now has a massive world-class fitness center, not for student athletes, just for students to workout and play rec sports. These are buildings that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Great, don't build one you say. Pass that savings on to the students. That is fine, but students will, without fail, choose the school with the giant fitness center. And it can't just be a nice fitness center, it has to be on-par or better than what other schools have.
Schools that are closing their doors are the ones that have left themselves open to risk (compliance, cybersecurity, accessibility, etc) or have not kept up with the arms race for amenities.
I’m leaving my academic position for industry this year. (Technically I’m “on leave” for a year but I am not going to come back barring something insane happening.)
For anyone else in my shoes considering the move, I will say that while money isn’t everything I am going to very nearly quadruple my salary by going into industry.
I know I’ll have a boss and more boring meetings than I have now, but I am not convinced that I’m going to work more hours.
It’s difficult for me to feel bad for these institutions. They jacked up tuitions and caused an entire generation of people to carry lifetime of crippling debt.
Not sure I count as mid career yet(graduated 2018, starting PhD 2022) but I can certainly echo the sentiment. I work in life sciences academia and if it were not for me leaving for school I 100% would be swapping to industry. I’m even quitting a bit earlier than anticipated because I’m fed up.
I’ve been getting a lot more recruitment outreach this spring, some good some bad. The biggest thing is that they’re offering sometimes up to 2x my salary. My institution already compensates much higher than most schools (I make 70k, most research techs make like 30k-40k) so this was quite striking. Also hours are better, etc.
A better barometer perhaps would be the postdocs I know, the majority of which are not bothering to pursue academia. Only 2 that I’m aware of landed tenure track faculty jobs. I personally have no plans to stay in academia unless I somehow land a tenure track faculty position at a R1 university which might as well be like winning the lottery. I’ll stick to industry or leverage my training to go into patent law/science policy/biotech investing.
My niece left academia for Draper Labs, where she has had a very productive career. Done far more for society than she would have, at a school. Instead of struggling for grants for her basic and applied research, often finding herself unfunded for a term or year unexpectedly, she's funded liberally and makes quick progress on important issues. Never looked back.
Years ago i had an option to start an academic carreer (after finishing my studies), and the basic situation back then was publish-or-parish for titles and etting your own EU/locally funded projects/grants and doing most of the stuff yourself, while being limited a lot by paycheck (you're still a public employee) and promotions to tenured positions, because basically, the person there had to die, since it was impossible to remove them, and almost none of them retired voulontarily...
I'm surprised how very few departments within most universities actually make money. If you had a company where most products lost money you would stop producing them. Universities have a lot of departments and degrees that bleed money. I don't understand how anybody thinks that you can have good wages like this.
I worked as an Econ professor and visiting academic in top Business Schools in Latin America and the East Coast (USA), and I can tell you that Business Schools make A LOT of money. They charge whatever they want and people (in most cases, their employers) pay them. In many cases Business Schools can amount up to 40/50% of the universities' revenue. That is also why business professors are paid a lot more. I personally know people at London Business School making more than £ 200,000 a year. Salaries at INSEAD are very similar as well. Of course, salaries at top US Business Schools are even higher.
My point is that you cannot run a business where one or two products make money and the remaining 90% bleed it. That is, if you want to run it as a business and attract talent and pay nice wages. If you want to run universities as some type of public good, then good luck. Pay everybody the same and offer as many degrees as you'd like. Good luck hiring competent people...
Workers in universities are broadly divided into two categories. Academics, which are usually under the direction of the Provost, and Administration, which is just a bucket for everyone else. From my experience people in the academics side are treated in a completely different manner than administration. If the great resignation were to hit academia it would probably happen on the administration side as those personnel of treated like garbage, underpaid and understaffed, and shit on by every person with a Dr. in front of their name. When I was working at Regis as a software developer they wouldn't pay me more than $65k/year when the going rate was $85k for a Jr. After 5 years as a software dev there I jumped ship and got a dev job with a Sr. title for $120k. They've never been able to replace me with a better dev because no one will work for those kind of poverty wages in Denver.
For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities? Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and come up with course materials.
Definitely consider it! Financially, you'll barely break even in the beginning after accounting for commuting and how much work it is to set up a course initially, but emotionally it's very rewarding. As a nice perk, sometimes students (usually the smartest ones) will ask you if you have projects for them to dig deeper, so you've got a great talent pool at your hand.
In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested. Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find people who have a software engineering background and are looking to teach.
Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
I am going the other way, humorously enough. I know a few people who are, too - people who made their mark in the "private" sector, made enough money via their own small business / startup / MANGA job, and are pursuing a graduate-level degree lazily over a half-decade with ideas of teaching part-time for fun.
Surely doesn't help people who want to make actual money doing the job, but it doesn't seem like that's realistic for 90% of people anyway.
At some point, this nonsense has to stop. Both in the UK and the US.
1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough to pay them back either.
2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.
3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows post-covid.
4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending Uni.
5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly unsustainable.
6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials/gen-X with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for different purposes.
Don't even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.
7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.
8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears to be rapidly changing.
9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn't worth it, especially with rapid CoL rises.
I'll leave for sure, but for other reasons than in CS. In CS people leave because they get better salaries and have better job prospects outside academia. In my area, people leave because of lack of career prospects, almost no tenure-track positions, favoritism and corruption. But the decisive reason for me is that our small & poor European country has switched to the new "Pan S" for open science publications. This may seem like a good idea at first, isn't it great that every publication for a funding authority needs to be open access? Well, the problem is that in my area there are at most two good and free open access journals. At most. Every top journal is run by traditional publishers, and funding authorities have explicitly stated they will discourage and limit payment of open access fees. Ironically, the better the journal, the higher the open access fees, and the less it is possible to get funding for them.
As nice as open access sounds in theory, in practice this new "Plan S" policy will mean that bullshitters who game the system and shouldn't even be in academia will win big time and can spit out one crappy publication after another. I've met people in my profession who literally said "Who cares if its false? It's another publication in your CV!" The difference between fringe journals and the top journals is unbelievably high in my discipline, people used to even count bad publications negatively, and a few publications in top journals used to give you a tenure-track position. To give you an idea of the difference, the former have acceptance rates of about 100%, the latter have acceptance rates of less than 5%. Now the top journals won't even count any longer at all in evaluations by our funding authority. There is so much crap published nowadays, they should limit the allowed number of publications/year; instead they are going for the opposite, a large number of publications in fringe and even self-published open access journals. Some of my colleagues are already literally starting their own journals.
I admit that there are many disciplines where open access works better, but not in mine. Maybe "Plan S" will have great and noble effects in 20-30 years from now, but for the generation in-between it's a complete disaster for anyone interested in quality. For me that's the decisive reason to leave.
[+] [-] nonrandomstring|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomsearch|3 years ago|reply
As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
[+] [-] cehrlich|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobThreeThree|3 years ago|reply
As usual with these claims, chances are it's due to the fact that these positions don't pay enough to be competitive.
[+] [-] krastanov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|3 years ago|reply
This hits the nail on the head. Everyone I know in academia is there despite their management. One had to leave the UK for the US in order to progress her career. The ongoing pensions fiasco has produced some extraordinary responses. Some universities are threatening to withdraw a whole month's pay for any strike action, not just for the period of the strike. Strike action is likely to hit exams: https://twitter.com/ucu/status/1531245496190128131 , with the result that universities are trying to outsource and automate marking (a lower quality product for which students will be charged the same amount).
Inflation over the course of this year is likely to be 10%. Pay offers are in the region of 2%, with pension cuts of up to 40%. Staff are going on strike simply to maintain their pay levels.
Marketisation has ruined the concept of the university. It's now seen as a place for manufacturing Education Units (to be sold to students) and Research Units. The staff on the Unit production line are therefore as metric-driven as Uber drivers. And there are attempts to casualise them similarly. Nobody senior or in government really cares about the content of the Units, only how they're ranked by the Unit Assessment System (RAE).
The culture war is also squarely pointed at universities, which are in and of themselves a threat to the right-wing, apart from the top two or three which are required for elite reproduction.
[+] [-] robwwilliams|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muaytimbo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ska|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.
[+] [-] qmmmur|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobThreeThree|3 years ago|reply
Don't forget about those sweet, sweet tax-free endowment investment gains.
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blahblarblar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
1. Covid was hard on education from kindergarten through college. Systems and processes that were already stressed to the max became overloaded and everyone was asked to do more and sometimes take a pay cut or have reduced benefits while doing so.
2. Society stopped valuing education as much. While once educators traded lower pay for the prestige of being a professor they can’t really say it is a worthy trade anymore as a vocal minority do not value education at all.
3. Faculty no longer run colleges/ universities. Once faculty ran everything, but as regulations have tightened and colleges started getting sued for any number of things professional administrators started being required because the jobs got bigger. In theory this has created less work for faculty, but they now feel disconnected and impotent.
[+] [-] sai_c|3 years ago|reply
I can totally see why that is the case. Raised in a classical worker family and observing how my peers from childhood are doing, I can imagine where this is coming from.
Most of them were also raised as workers kids (i.e. both parents working in mindless jobs in a factory and earning barely enough to raise the kids), but some had the chance to go earn a BS or MS. Yet, they are financially struggling for severals reasons. Also, they have a hard time explaining to their parents why they can't afford a house, vacation, a new car and all the things their parents never had, but wanted their kids to have. So all the reasons their parents fought to get them a good education are nullified.
I know getting a good education is of value in and of itself, but the reality is, that most parents want a good education for their kids because they want them to be financially successful, not for humanistic reasons (remember who attended universities in their beginning and why, it was aristocrats with a lot of time and money).
So to play the devil's advocate, what value has this education, if my kids still struggle in life, just they way I am? And why should I have "high esteem" for the people teaching, if what they offer has so little practical value?
[+] [-] robwwilliams|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crmd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blululu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|3 years ago|reply
Covid didn't break their back--shitty parents did. Covid just ran the parental shittiness meter up to max.
And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now have multiple students who actually had a parent die. In a normal year, that would be rare and that child would get lots of counseling. With Covid--it's too common and the teachers have to deal with it. Just like everything else.
And people wonder why teachers are quitting ...
[+] [-] gnicholas|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RandomWorker|3 years ago|reply
The decision is easy when you have mouths to feed, wages don’t keep up, and I can earn double my salary doing the fun part of my work (ML+optimization+data/energy modelling in civil engineering space) literally the next day. I was working with all kinds of companies to help them get started with this kind of work. Instead of sending my students I just leapt and it’s been a tremendous experience. If I return I will be a better professor, however not publishing for a couple of years may kill that dream. Right now, it’s a great feeling not to have to worry about food and I can actually focus more on doing my job better. I feel bad about leaving my group, but they can find someone more hungry than me that wants it more.
[+] [-] xtracto|3 years ago|reply
I would love to do research and science, but I just hate the current status of that "industry".
And this is considering that I traded a "comfortable" life in Germany, with all the great social safeties in there (I didn't have a problem with the language) for a Mexican based startup with very high risk. And the pay was even not that different. After 10 years of my decision, I can say I took the best path, given that it took me to work in other startups that have been doing amazingly well and for which I've got some good amount of stocks.
[+] [-] samvher|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hintymad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|3 years ago|reply
Regulation and accreditation has become more stringent because some for-profit schools have scammed people out of money. Regulation has caused a bunch of positions to be created to make sure that the University is in compliance at all times. Falling out of compliance can cause the university to be sued or lose accreditation. The risk of either is so massive it could close a small college or university so it makes sense to spend as much money as required to mitigate the risk.
Cheap loans have changed consumer behavior in the same way low interest rate loans increase the cost of housing. Consumers are willing to spend more to go to the best. But how is a student to determine which school is best? It is impossible to really compare education beyond the general prestige of the university, so how do schools differentiate themselves among similarly ranked schools? New buildings; more and better services; better dorms; better website / marketing materials; better events and activities for students. A good example of this is the student fitness center. Almost every school now has a massive world-class fitness center, not for student athletes, just for students to workout and play rec sports. These are buildings that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Great, don't build one you say. Pass that savings on to the students. That is fine, but students will, without fail, choose the school with the giant fitness center. And it can't just be a nice fitness center, it has to be on-par or better than what other schools have.
Schools that are closing their doors are the ones that have left themselves open to risk (compliance, cybersecurity, accessibility, etc) or have not kept up with the arms race for amenities.
[+] [-] robwwilliams|3 years ago|reply
1. Benjamin Ginsberg: The Fall of the Faculty. The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.
2. Harry R. Lewis: Excellence without Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.
[+] [-] huitzitziltzin|3 years ago|reply
I’m leaving my academic position for industry this year. (Technically I’m “on leave” for a year but I am not going to come back barring something insane happening.)
For anyone else in my shoes considering the move, I will say that while money isn’t everything I am going to very nearly quadruple my salary by going into industry.
I know I’ll have a boss and more boring meetings than I have now, but I am not convinced that I’m going to work more hours.
[+] [-] lvl102|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stanford_labrat|3 years ago|reply
I’ve been getting a lot more recruitment outreach this spring, some good some bad. The biggest thing is that they’re offering sometimes up to 2x my salary. My institution already compensates much higher than most schools (I make 70k, most research techs make like 30k-40k) so this was quite striking. Also hours are better, etc.
A better barometer perhaps would be the postdocs I know, the majority of which are not bothering to pursue academia. Only 2 that I’m aware of landed tenure track faculty jobs. I personally have no plans to stay in academia unless I somehow land a tenure track faculty position at a R1 university which might as well be like winning the lottery. I’ll stick to industry or leverage my training to go into patent law/science policy/biotech investing.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
Something is broken in Academia.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
So I said "nope".
[+] [-] cyrksoft|3 years ago|reply
I worked as an Econ professor and visiting academic in top Business Schools in Latin America and the East Coast (USA), and I can tell you that Business Schools make A LOT of money. They charge whatever they want and people (in most cases, their employers) pay them. In many cases Business Schools can amount up to 40/50% of the universities' revenue. That is also why business professors are paid a lot more. I personally know people at London Business School making more than £ 200,000 a year. Salaries at INSEAD are very similar as well. Of course, salaries at top US Business Schools are even higher.
My point is that you cannot run a business where one or two products make money and the remaining 90% bleed it. That is, if you want to run it as a business and attract talent and pay nice wages. If you want to run universities as some type of public good, then good luck. Pay everybody the same and offer as many degrees as you'd like. Good luck hiring competent people...
[+] [-] stillbourne|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] upupandup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t_mann|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikeTheGreat|3 years ago|reply
In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested. Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find people who have a software engineering background and are looking to teach.
Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
[+] [-] culopatin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icelancer|3 years ago|reply
Surely doesn't help people who want to make actual money doing the job, but it doesn't seem like that's realistic for 90% of people anyway.
[+] [-] kd913|3 years ago|reply
1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough to pay them back either.
2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.
3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows post-covid.
4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending Uni.
5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly unsustainable.
6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials/gen-X with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for different purposes.
Don't even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.
7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point does the value of this come into question? Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university degree.
8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears to be rapidly changing.
9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn't worth it, especially with rapid CoL rises.
[+] [-] 13415|3 years ago|reply
As nice as open access sounds in theory, in practice this new "Plan S" policy will mean that bullshitters who game the system and shouldn't even be in academia will win big time and can spit out one crappy publication after another. I've met people in my profession who literally said "Who cares if its false? It's another publication in your CV!" The difference between fringe journals and the top journals is unbelievably high in my discipline, people used to even count bad publications negatively, and a few publications in top journals used to give you a tenure-track position. To give you an idea of the difference, the former have acceptance rates of about 100%, the latter have acceptance rates of less than 5%. Now the top journals won't even count any longer at all in evaluations by our funding authority. There is so much crap published nowadays, they should limit the allowed number of publications/year; instead they are going for the opposite, a large number of publications in fringe and even self-published open access journals. Some of my colleagues are already literally starting their own journals.
I admit that there are many disciplines where open access works better, but not in mine. Maybe "Plan S" will have great and noble effects in 20-30 years from now, but for the generation in-between it's a complete disaster for anyone interested in quality. For me that's the decisive reason to leave.