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Prices are information

It’s no secret. In recent years, there has been a growing concern over colleges and universities increasingly relying on adjunct professors to teach a large portion of their classes. ​​According to some reports, roughly 75 percent of instructors teaching college-level classes in the U.S. are not on a tenure track and more than half of all faculty hires are part-time and paid next to nothing. One report found that nearly 25 percent of adjuncts rely on public assistance programs, with 40 percent unable to afford basic household expenses.

So, there are too many people around with PhDs who want to teach college.

The answer is to have fewer people doing PhDs. Go get some other job.

22 thoughts on “Prices are information”

  1. Fewer Unis with grants only (unless u can pay for yourself–no Govt loans). As in times gone by.

    The only reason that scum Bliar wanted 50% at Unis was to finish off Marxist brainwash schools had begun.

  2. I remain exceedingly proud of persuading an offspring not to do a PhD.

    I am bewildered that so many people want to be academics – I got into it only by chance and although it suited me I did tend to warn others against it as a career.

    Mind you, I would like the pension scheme to survive long enough to see my widow out.

    Still, rejoice, rejoice! The lame-brained juju man who is Vice Chancellor at Cambridge has announced his resignation – though deferred for a year, alas.

  3. To me, the attraction of research was that I wouldn’t have to bestir myself to find a job (a franckly terrifying propsect – where did one start?)

    But happily the University was made of sterner stuff and gently said “it would be best for all concerned if you didn’t seek to do research here, and went into the wider world to contribute there; here, here’s the calendar for a bunch of science-y, engineering-y companies that are coming to visit to recruit great intellects like yours…”

    And so it came to pass that I spoke to persons from Plessey and from Ferranti (that latter was very strange, as I recall the gentleman spent most of the interview explaining why it wasn’t Ferranti’s fault that Bloodhounds weren’t quite the success that had been hoped for. All I knew about them was the Airfix model of a Bloodhound launcher towed by a Landrover…)

    Ah, to regain the innocence of those days.

  4. Dennis, Dispensing Wisdom. Or Something.

    At a time when the collegiate educational system in ‘Merica is contracting, and that contraction is accelerating, Mia Brett’s solution to the plight of adjuncts is to make them more expensive and less productive.

    Sounds like a plan.

    Note that Mia Brett has a PhD in History…

  5. So, being an adjunct professor is a shit job that generally goes nowhere. At first I was going to ask, why do they bother? It’s not like there are no other jobs. Then it occurred to me that these people are largely dimwits, teaching intersectional nonsense by rote, in woke madrassas. They’re probably not up to working full time in a fast food joint or driving a delivery truck.

  6. MC said:
    “So, being an adjunct professor is a shit job that generally goes nowhere. At first I was going to ask, why do they bother? It’s not like there are no other jobs.”

    Status – amongst their friends at least. The problem is that they choose a (for them) higher status job because they prefer status to money, but then demand to be paid more.

  7. High time universities system was reformed. Centuries ago, lectures were appropriate because that was the only effective way of passing on information or thought. Nut now? If we were starting from scratch would we honestly say the best way of educating anyone is to say it out loud, just once and hope for the best?

    When I was at university, we had a very eminent Eastern European Professor of Statistics as a lecturer. The trouble was, he had only half a lung left, so unless you managed to sit in the first couple of rows, you couldn’t hear him; if you managed to sit in the first couple of rows, you couldn’t understand him.

  8. I think the ultimate cause of the social dysfunction here is the fact that the higher the level of abstraction at which someone works, the greater the level of integrity required of them to compensate for the lack of immediate feedback.

    It is this presumed additional integrity that attracts the extra prestige. In the case of someone working successfully at a high level of abstraction, the integrity is likely present and the prestige may well be justified.

    Conversely, once that prestige becomes an end in itself, the demand for jobs working at high levels of abstraction, without effective validation that they are being done successfully, will expand to match the money allocated to pay for them.

  9. BiTiN,

    “And so it came to pass that I spoke to persons from Plessey and from Ferranti …”

    Neither of them exist any more, whereas all the universities do. In a world where we’re expected to work until age 68, it’s quite rational to choose an employer which has survived for centuries.

  10. Completely off topic – for which apologies, but…..

    Meat production may cease because we run the risk of running out of CO2 to stun the animals. WTF? Can we not stun them differently? Would a massive electrical brain zap not do the trick? Can we not shoot them in the head? We must go without because Peppa needs to not suffer? I’m not advocating any cruelty at all – but we can as a developed nation not manage to kill an animal humanely without relying on a gas? The Chinese and Russians must think we have gone insane.

  11. Andrew M

    It’s clear that the names of the Universities persist. It isn’t at all clear the the entities themselves do.

    But actually, (with 100% hindsight, bien sur) I’d prefer to do something useful and rewarding than to cleave like a scared adolescent to the tit of some overgrown high school; so I’m glad they kicked me out. [And life has been interesting, and apparently useful]

    FWIW, it often struck us as amusing that the university had a department of education/teaching, but that either that dept wasamazingly incompetent, or the Uni was rather bad at learning from them how to teach us…

  12. dearieme
    It’s what Toope can do in the remainder of his term that should worry you. Like a burglar leaving a turd on the carpet there is a lot his successor may find hard to clean up.

  13. “Meat production may cease because we run the risk of running out of CO2 to stun the animals.”
    I’m confused. Isn’t the reason that so many air-headed cretins are protesting is because they claim there is too much CO2 in the world and want the levels to be reduced?

  14. The ‘growing concern’ is concentrated in the gang that is not getting the pay they think they are due. The rest of us, including students and their parents, think they and the hordes of administrators are paid too much.

  15. As to alternative methods for killing then good luck with that with the animal rights and environmental activists . Coyotes have been attacking people in Vancouvers Stanley Park for over a year and they spent most of it telling people not to go to the park and have reluctantly finally agreed they need to be culled (the coyotes that is not park goers) and so far have managed the grand number of 4
    It does appear that the coyotes have more rights than the people

  16. Yeah BniC. PETA’s placed a bounty on crocodile killers.

    Of course good old Johnny Howard cracked down on the wicked guns people used to kill them with too.

  17. PETA’s placed a bounty on crocodile killers.

    Would it be unethical to feed PETA members to the salties? Mind you, they probably wouldn’t taste too good.

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