| Is teaching now a profession only for the wealthy? Sep 11th 2012, 00:21 Professors Making $10,000 a Year? Academia Becoming a Profession Only the Elite Can Afford; One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter. Found this article on LinkedIn; it describes the current situation for those going into teaching, and proposes that with things the way they are, the only way many people could possibly support a career in teaching is by having a pre-existing source of income or working another job, because compensation for an adjunct professor is less than minimum wage. It links to the Adjunct Project which backs the thesis up with data. Many schools are reporting salaries in the range of ~$1000 per course. Since many adjuncts only get one or two courses per quarter/semester, the article's description of professors living below the poverty line is not hyperbole. From the article: Quote:
In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.
In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers , who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.
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Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.
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In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.
My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"
And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.
| What bothers me personally is not so much the money- though, earning less at my job than I pay in student loans it is certainly a concern- as what the money says about how much my work is valued. I worked hard and spent a lot of money myself to become a teacher, and it bothers me to think that society values the work of the barista who serves their coffee more than the work I'm doing in the classroom. If I tried to earn my PhD at this point, I would likely price myself out of my own career. And with so many students in so much debt, it makes me wonder where all that money is going. Students themselves clearly value their education, and even their instructors; are they okay with the fact that the money they are borrowing is going to line someone's pockets instead of providing a quality education for them? I can't offer office hours this semester, for instance. I've tried to make myself available if they need me, but without an office or pay, making a regular thing of it is a practical impossibility. Even though enrollment is actually slightly down this year, because full time professors have been retiring but not being replaced there are even fewer classes, and most of my students have an incredibly difficult time filling a class schedule and take classes irrelevant to their goals simply because there is a spot open. How is that a good use of funds? | |
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