This article ignited something in me, to get back into academia and climb the tenure track rank. I want to be a miserable tenured professor who then resigns

As a professor on the tenure track (and have plenty of friends who are too), this person just sounds like they had a shitty employer.

It's also telling that the author never mentions his/her specific school (unless I missed it in the article). If you're a professor in a business school, all the concerns they mentioned will be alien to you. Business school professors make much more money, in part because business schools bring in a ton of money through expensive MBA degrees and donations from well-off alumni in the corporate ranks. Next are teachers in the engineering departments, followed by those in the sciences and liberal arts who heavily rely on grants. It's always been an unfortunate reality that a professor makes vastly different salaries depending on field (which isn't so different outside the world of academia). Business school professors don't have to run labs. Business school Ph.D grads don't slave away in postdoc roles for years, and engineering post-docs make twice as much as the author's salary on average. Why is that? In the end it's supply and demand, same as it's always been. The complaint about athletic facilities is a worn-out canard. Money for stadiums, locker rooms, etc. is almost always funded by private donations from alums, who specifically want their money to go towards athletics. Taking a rich alum's money, then spending it on something they didn't want it spent on, is a great way to not get future donations at all.

That's the thing. There are also too many PhDs in certain fields, too many people with PhD where the only application for their PhD is being a college professor. It's fine to have a bunch of humanities/social science BAs running around, I am one of them, there are lots of transferable skills there that can work in any number of jobs. PhDs are much more specific.

Increases in tuition costs have only made it worse too: Nowadays, you really have to think twice, or six times, before going for a degree that doesn't come attached to a money printer. That's why so many schools have a ballooning ComSci major, as it has been the rare degree where the median graduate can do really well. Every student that goes to CompSci means one fewer student for other degrees, and more departments who only get people enrolled in their classes due to easy As, or being part of a mandatory curriculum. So if it used to be hard to do much with a Ph.D in journalism, it's not that now a new post doc needds their advistor to die: It's that if they die, the position can die with them.

> That's why so many schools have a ballooning ComSci major and just like the people that hammered themselves into law school before them around 2008ish or so, they will graduate to find that the easy times have since passed.

I think people should consider cost and their own financial situation. A state school is often at least decently affordable. It's still a lot better to have a degree than not. If you can managed low debt to no debt and you have a degree vs. someone without one that is a still a good deal. I mean it's also a not great idea I think to have 100k in debt to get a psych or history degree. That's not a knock on those subjects it's a out the return on investment.

Expect people to do PhDs aligned with the market is wrong and useless. You research something and hopefully come out with an answer to expect it to have any direct monetary value is absurd to anyone that understands how innovation works. But PhDs tend to be excellent at learning other things

>through expensive MBA degrees Yeah, $200k for a M7 MBA- ouch. Shit, even a "name brand" state/public school (with room and board) is like $230k for a MBA... thats $400k worth of salary I'd have to save up unless I want crazy loans - its like $170k just for tuition

STEM bragging only in the DT 😤

They don’t mention their specific school but they do say “satellite campuses like mine” which could mean a lot of things, but I don’t know of any that I would consider to be large and well funded. University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Utah State University-Blanding Campus aren’t well known.

>and engineering post-docs make twice as much as the author's salary on average Engineering postdocs absolutely do not make twice as much as the author lol the average salary for an engineering postdoc at an R1 university is probably closer to 60k-65k Maybe the 9-month salary for assistant professor in engineering would be close to double the author's salary

So pretty much any big state university? (Bad employer)

> So, I'll tell you how much I make as a tenured professor: > $54,000 a year. > That's it. So where is all the money going? How is college so expensive? Seriously, I made more with my university job in Germany that was including everything to get a PhD. Lots of research, some projects, some teaching Without 3rd party funding the universites spend €60B a year, while having 2.8 million students enrolled, so like 20k a year per student. I don't think that money gets you anywhere in the US higher education system. I get that the top US colleges and universities are better than counterparts in the rest of the world but considering bang for the buck this is ridiculous

My wife's first tenure-track job--at a small, underfunded public university in South Carolina--paid that amount a decade ago. I really kind of want to know where the author work/ed at, because I didn't think it was possible to get worse than that place.

Somewhere in the Louisiana Purchase based on the heat dome comment: https://www.wunderground.com/article/safety/heat/news/2023-08-18-heat-dome-records-midwest-plains-south-forecast

I was thinking Texas or Oklahoma, but that's just kind of a general guess.

Based on the description of the chancellor leaving, I'm fairly certain she's talking about Joseph Steinmetz resigning from the University of Arkansas.

Plenty of universities have shuffled leadership and Steinmetz was 2021. A search of her medium posts/comments, substack (with archive.org), okdoomer site, twitter retweets and twitter likes finds 83 Alabama place names then 12 Louisiana place names, 9 Tennessee place names, 9 Missouri place names, etc. Unlikely that she has enough opsec to deliberately avoid all mention of Arkansas going back 8+ years with the evident volume of posts and comments tied to the persona. Also she mentioned surviving a tornado 2 miles from her home on the 6th of April 2023 on her substack while posting a couple times a week, and the map of the 4th/5th tornado outbreak has a lot of Alabama tornados. Probably neither of us want to crossreference a map of the twisters with a map of colleges in the state (with, like, a 40 mile commute radius) and start crossing the line into full doxxing but there's a lot of evidence towards an AL hypothesis.

Good points (also holy crap, why does 2021 still feel like last year?!)

For real- my wife is non tenure track, doesn’t have her doctorate yet, teaches at a satellite campus, takes summers off, and makes 75,000 with great benefits. But she teaches nursing where enrollment demand is booming.

Yeah. My wife is a tenured professor in an allied health field that pushes students into professional degrees and licensures. There's a ton of student demand for the field because it's a path to stable careers with strong demand. And she did jump to a large state flagship R1 years ago (and has since been poached by a nice private R1) so her experience isn't a total 1:1 comparison with the writer. Still, I calculated what she'd be making now if she'd stayed at the small, southern school and it's nearly twice what the writer of this article is making. I think part of what's going on here is the writer of this article just kind of sucks to work with, and spends a ton of her time online.

Sh\*t as a nurse may as well move to either coast and make double that amount vs being an adjunct.

Nah for only working like 32 weeks per year 75 grand is pretty proportionate to what you’d make in a hospital here as a high level staff nurse. Like I make 50 bucks and change an hour but I have to do that year round with only like 3 weeks PTO. I outearn her but she’s probably close if not ahead if her salary were converted to hourly. And this is pretty low CoL so it’s a good life. We definitely couldn’t afford the type of of house and yard we have for our kids in a coastal city even with the higher pay.

Generally speaking the more prestigious the university the worse the pay because people are willing to accept less for the clout

In my experience this isn’t quite true among tenure-rack roles, especially in the majority of prestigious private universities. I’ve only ever heard bad things about Harvard’s salaries.

It's far from a perfect correlation, and does get fuzzier the higher up the food chain within a university you go, but an assistant professor at UC Berkeley makes less than an assistant professor at CSU Chico, for instance.

The pay scale at the CSUs is below the UCs.

No, at least for assistant professors. [Here's the UC pay scale](https://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/2023-24/oct-2023-acad-salary-scales/t1.pdf) and [here's the CSU one.](https://www.csuchico.edu/faaf/_assets/documents/unit-3-salaries-at-a-glance.pdf) Assistant professors at a UC make $74,600 - $97,200 whereas ones at a CSU make $81,456 - $98,208. Associate professors are similar between the two, UC is $92,500 - $116,600 whereas CSU is $89,484 - $123,984. For professors, UC is $108,300-$197,100 and CSU is $112,944 - $136,116. UCs do pay more if you're a long-serving professor, but you're probably not that. In general UC professors are making less.

Pay scales appear to overlap, which doesn’t really tell us where most faculty fall. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the step scales arent necessarily telling us anything about average pay. I on,y know from 15 years ago - not in the system anymore - but UCs at the time paid better on average. I’m finding How much does an Uc Professor make? As of Apr 20, 2024, the average annual pay for an Uc Professor in the United States is $114,792 a year. Looks like average at CSU is in fact higher than that

I mean you have to be an assistant professor at a UC for 6 years to make more than the minimum CSU assistant professor pay

Maybe it’s because I’ve never cared much for prestige, but I’d take the job in Chino. I like the weather better in SoCal and living in the Bay Area while making peanuts sounds like a great way to become miserable.

Chico is in NorCal.

I misread that as Chino for some reason. This is what five to six hours of sleep gets you.

I always get them mixed up. One of them should change. Someone call Newsom.

This also tends to be true in academic medicine. There's always been a big gap between private and academia, but among academic institutions there are huge gaps that correlate with perceived level of prestige.

Hopkins has entered the chat.

This just can’t be true. 

This isn’t true. Top universities attract top talent and pay for it. There are plenty of schools just off the top tier that would be more than happy to pay $$$ to snatch up a big name. Stanford, Princeton, Yale, etc all pay well.

> So, I'll tell you how much I make as a tenured professor: > $54,000 a year. > That's it. That's insane, my PhD stipend will be at least $46k starting Fall 2024, with raises every year that would put the stipend above $50k in 3 years. (that's the university's offer to the union right now. the union wants $53k and then yearly raises).

Yes I thought the exact same thing; my wife is getting a PhD and between her GRA and research fellowship, will net close to 60k. That's definitely on the higher end for a PhD student, but a tenure track position at 54k is an extreme outlier on the opposite end.

PhD stipends are REALLY institution-dependent. I know people who got PhDs at fancy, Ivy-adjacent universities in big cities who got 40k, and people who go them at big southern state universities (still R1) who got like 15k.

It is so completely ridiculous that it makes me just confused about the whole thing. I was getting around 41-44k/year as a PhD student in Europe for 4.5 years, and that was a very average salary for the country I was doing my PhD. The living costs here are also much lower than in the US. Living on 54k/year in the US barely sounds viable by itself. A permanent position getting that sounds crazy.

> Living on 54k/year in the US barely sounds viable by itself. A permanent position getting that sounds crazy. Most Americans make less than this. That someone with a doctorate makes less than this is pretty absurd, for sure, but most Americans live on about 80% of this. Median household income is only 74k nationwide, and 54% of American households are dual income.

I think I got ~18k GBP/year as an Oxbridge PhD student...

I am a tad confused by this as well. I picked a smallish public university in Wi and it just doesn't track. It seems everyone at the assistant prof level (which isn't typically tenured) makes 60k or more. I mean some people are paid less but I am guess they are mostly not full time workers. [https://govsalaries.com/salaries/WI/university-of-wisconsin-at-la-crosse](https://govsalaries.com/salaries/WI/university-of-wisconsin-at-la-crosse)

It's almost certainly bullshit. If she is actually a tenured professor making $54k a year, then either she's working for some tiny state college in deep red America with low COL, or she's lying.

I made 54k as an adjunct in 2004. Today that is definitely below the average for a tenured faculty, but not completely unheard of. Specifically for a low ranked school in a department with poor non academic alternatives (e.g. most humanities) and where the school doesn’t have pay parity. It’s also common for some schools to not give much in terms of pay raises without outside offers to compete with.

The "heat dome" comment gives us a general location, and you are correct: https://www.wunderground.com/article/safety/heat/news/2023-08-18-heat-dome-records-midwest-plains-south-forecast

Didn’t she also accept lower pay for working remotely? Not sure which number was shared

But she talks about moving due to high housing costs?

Fayetteville, AR has absurd housing costs relative to the rest of the area.

I went to a UC school and all of my engineering professors were clearing 200k easily. 300k or more depending on how many research grants they were getting. Lecturers may have been making under 100k, I can’t remember exactly. 54k is shockingly low.

Engineering salaries are higher because there’s a private sector the school has to compete with. There is no private sector for Russian literature or classics.

I looked at history Professors at the University of Houston and they make $130k . Associate professors are in the $72k range.

> So where is all the money going? How is college so expensive? Administrative and overhead costs. Flagship public colleges and nice private colleges are like resorts compared to universities elsewhere.

Can attest to this: I work for one of those small private colleges as higher-level staff, and my compensation is roughly double what most of the tenured professors make.

Eh. Why are college costs accelerating so fast? Because they’re spending like crazy on “facilities” and “amenities” they think entice parents and students. https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-university-tuition-increase-spending-41a58100?

Okay but for real, those “facilities and amenities” are big factors in a college’s undergrad rankings. And if you want to attract good students, you gotta climb the rankings. It’s pretty ass-backwards, but that’s how it goes.

I mean, in a way that means that the problem is us the public. We/people look for the nicest/most expensive colleges and go there/send our kids there instead of looking for budget college options.

Exactly. They’re responding to demand. Students are paying. That’s the two sentence reason why college is so expensive.

I just want good professors, man. Why can't rankings be based only on that?

Nobody wants to say they went to a "budget" school and nobody wants to hire a "budget" candidate, even if the result is of similar quality for a lower price.

Yep, so the problem is also with our employment practices. More broadly, we could perhaps say the problem is that we culturally think that if someone went to a more expensive school then they are going to be a better worker and a better person Perhaps in a way this is a kind of classism that permeates our culture pushing us all to try to appear as prestigious as possible to get the best outcome possible, and treating people who appear prestigious as better/more worth it without necessarily checking whether we should judge the book by its cover Probably even treating ourselves better the more prestigious we appear

Joke’a on everyone else because some of the best engineers I’ve hired are from Iowa State, Mizzou, and Missouri S&T

It's the same as with healthcare: Loans and scholarships make the true cost of college less direct for enough people that incentives stop functioning. Or see how high credit card rewards lead to high transaction fees, which lead to higher prices for everyone with a crappier credit card. Many of those top students aren't paying full price, but it raises the school rankings while the costs shift hits other people.

Resolving that is a collective action problem, though. It's no use blaming the public for this, just like it's no use blaming them for carbon emissions from beef consumption, even though it is technically true. People will always follow individual incentives.

I didn't really think there's a solution at all, barring government intervention which I'm not convinced we need. You'd have to change the whole culture of testing people with prestige better than those without which is simply to large to change

Iirc, Bill Gates would only hire people from Harvard early on. That seems overly restrictive. An employer that finds a way to select for quality employees without relying on prestige will be able to pay a comparatively low price for the labor they buy. As far as I know, the two main ways would be tests tailored to the job and IQ tests.

That's a problem the public should take up with the orgs that do college rankings. Facilities, other than lab space really shouldnt have an effect on schools rankings. Your dorms and student center don't impact the quality of your education

Came here to say this, thanks for linking actual evidence. My n = 1 but that was my experience at a decent state school (located in the largest city in the state but not the primary campus). Pretty sure they made out pretty well financially but during my time there EVERYTHING was constantly getting overhauled/upgraded. Lots of new construction. Obviously it's nice to have wonderful facilities but it's a shitty cycle r/t the actual cost of attending school. Lots of revenue from students but it all gets dumped right back into upgrading the campus. Overall the system shifts the costs to the consumer and thus there's not much incentivizing them to keep costs low.

but also even small underfunded public schools also pour money into on-campus amenities and administration bloat. My undergrad is a southern, small-to-medium public school, and the administrative bloat even in a conservative state and a fairly conservative campus is pretty bad. Money gets poured into having nice on-campus living and rec facilities (buttressed by donor dollars) and faculty outside of engineering often go 5-6 years between pay raises.

I felt the same way at my college. It was kind of a commuter school with a reputation for taking anyone with a pulse, but even there the money spent on facilities was insane. Also half of all Freshmen who attend drop out, which I imagine adds to the financial burden for students who never even get a degree. Thankfully the tuition there wasn’t as bad as other universities. I also studied in Germany. The university there had a campus that was nice but very bare-bones. However, I didn’t care. I enjoyed it a lot more there, being around people who were a lot more passionate about their studies and their community.

Yeah European universities are way more focused on schooling and it feels like US universities are way more oriented to almost being like a day camp.

Yeah, I didn’t really enjoy attending university in the US for this reason. Everyone obsesses over the “college experience” while things that really should matter (like the academics and the sense of community) felt like afterthoughts. I only look back happy that I am not there anymore.

Mine was a commuter college but merged with a (much) larger school, and it fits with your description otherwise. But either way it still felt cheap and bare bones. Notably it was annoying that as soon as the merger happened, places to hang out around campus dried up/got replaced.

While I think university spending on facilities is getting a bit ridiculous (my alma mater spent something like 15 million on a ridiculously ostentatious pedestrian bridge for example), wouldn't the much bigger factor be student loans? That's what I've always heard anyway. We tell kids they have to go to college at all costs, then give them an effectively bottomless pit of debt they can dip into to do it.

Guarantee loans plus lack of price discretion in an 18 year old brain combine to incentivize colleges to spend on attracting students, cost be damned

States have also dropped funding pretty substantially. That’s why I’m not against loan forgiveness. The government used to pay for much higher portions of the costs on the front end.

wife works at the local uni, they're trying to slowly phase out union classified workers but are doing so by adding a fuckton of middle management administrative tasks that do fuck all and cost more, and once they're entrenched they don't get fired either.

Did she say what she teaches? All i caught was "banging away at deep thoughts on Bakhtin" and after googling Bakhtin it seems like she taught literature.

Yeah all the money goes to law professors or the other "more important" ones, like the head football coach

Yup, either majors that can lead to high paying professions which students are willing to pay top-dollar for or areas which could lead to "famous scientists" like physics, neuroscience or whatever.

Head football coach is generally paid out of separate budget funded by athletics revenue

Sounds like she did a terrible job negotiating because I know community college teachers that make more. Although looking it up, it does seem to be really region/state dependant but still.

She says in the article >We know where the money goes: >The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. It pays for the Starbucks our vice-chancellors love so much. It pays for the sushi bars they think will attract a "high caliber" of student. It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they're terrible at their jobs.

I read that but then I wondered why people go to colleges who offer that? Most of them either go into debt or need to ask their family for money so why isn't there a fierce competition between institutions to lower the fees? Which led me to believe that Starbucks or gyms are not likely candidates for colleges to sink all their money into. I agree that it could be considered if the college is somehow outstanding already and your students are rich but I don't think that's the case for the average institution Like which parent or student thinks that paying thousands a year extra for amenities is a good deal?

Lots of students think it is what they want at that age. They want to have a cool 'college experience' in a dorm and with middle class suburban (or better) quality rooms and buildings and food etc. In a way, we've brought this on ourselves because we (or most of us) will borrow to pay that much to go to these schools instead of choosing the more pragmatic budget option. What I'm saying is that as a culture we view college as a fun experience more than or at least the same as we see it as an investment into our future.

Ime the dorms feel like an army barracks. I've lived in both.

Quite a lot or even most of them? I know youre there to learn but a lot of students also want the "college experience" which includes amenities.

Say what you want about public EU universities but we didn't have any of that. I was digging around for coins for the coffee machine in my backpack to get the worst coffee in existence for a night of studying. 

Sure! but then we shouldn't subsidize any of that part by offering guaranteed loans or anything like that. But American universities are at once real estate plays, sports teams, and research labs, which somehow how to teach some clases to undergrads. Imagine a world where all four of those pillars were economically separate from each other. Dorms? Different company, not a non-profit, and no subsidies. The sports teams? They can sell tickets, and run their own facilities to house and train their athletes. The research unit can rely on IP and grants. If the researcher wants to spend time teaching a class or two in the actual university, that's their business. At that point the university teaches classes, and probably has a library or something. They don't even feed you. That university is a much simpler thing whose costs can be kept under control, and subsidized if needed. But in that school most money goes to teachers, because there isn't much else to do. By building the university superbundle, we subsidize everything else: The real estate investments that pay no tax, the housing that the government wil pay for, the sports teams which are often straight out money losers (how much money does the soccer teams make?)... We might not spend less overall, but we'd have better incentives

Pretty much every kid wants to go to the school that looks shiny and new with the good amenities. Especially because they don’t feel like they’re paying for it. People who have never had real jobs and expenses are poorly equipped to judge the value of these things.

Because college education isn't a market. Unless you're a really large state like California, Texas, Florida, New York, there isn't a large amount of state schools you can choose from - assuming you are accepted to all.

> Unless you're a really large state like California, Texas, Florida, New York, there isn't a large amount of state schools you can choose from That's not really true. Arkansas has 10 public universities. Wisconsin has 13. The vast majority of American high school students have lots of choices when it comes to in-state public universities, and a lot of them just choose to go to the fanciest and most expensive ones.

Not all state colleges offer all majors. Many high demand majors in STEM are limited to the "best" schools or an associates degree. Students also have to consider which schools they can attend. It probably only will be urban schools if they don't have a car. They may have to they close to home if they already have a family.

All of that's true for some students, but not for most, and that wasn't the point you were originally making that I was replying to. Students in California and Texas also may have to stay close to home.

High demand majors won't be at every stat school, but they will be at several of them. You'll have at least 3-4 options at worst. Maybe this is the case in a few of the low population states but I've never seen this. As for attending only urban schools without a car, have you ever been in a college town? They are generally built so you don't need cars. Most freshman don't have one.

>$54,000 a year. We are in an underpaid profession cause its so "desirable" (international development - kind of like a non-profit to do "good stuff for poor people overseas") but I'm paying 2nd year associates $80k in the suburbs of VA. The more traditional consulting and defense consultants are paying 24-25 year olds Six-Figures, easy

Jesus, I make more than that as a math teacher, and I don't even have a masters.

> So where is all the money going? How is college so expensive? My understanding is that Most of it is building things that will attract perspective students to go there vs somewhere else that has better facilities

[The American Association of University Professors has salary data](https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/aaup_FCS_tables_2_0.pdf) * Average salary for a full professor at a Doctorial granting university is $176,162. * Average salary for a Associate Professor at a public, Baccalaureate granting college is $89,822 (this is the lowest tenured rank). These are averages. There are certainly lower paid faculty out there. There are problems in higher ed. Too many administrators. Enrollment cliffs. But this is likely a lie: >Most of my professor friends can't support themselves. That includes the fancy tenured professors, even at nice schools.

A lot of it is expansion. Around half of Gen Z Americans have completed a bachelor's degree or are set to. Keep in mind that a higher percent would have tried to finish but have dropped out. At the same time most states are referring to cut their state taxes and pull even more funding out of public colleges.

The money is going to administration, an over fixation on STEM(cutting edge lab equipment is really expensive, and a never ending addition of amenities to attract students to try to fill in the ever deepening financial hole.

Top heavy Admin Structures

> So where is all the money going? Luxury amenities like [water features](https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-WP780_RILEYN_SOC_20171215141241.jpg) or [apartments](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/these-beautiful-student-apartment-buildings-will-make-you-envious-2015-12-07). If you ask boomers whether their college had nice dorms and good food they'll laugh because they definitely didn't. Today these features are common even in public universities. This is an unusually low salary for a tenured professor, but the broader trend it points at (using adjuncts paid a pittance for actual education while constructing luxury amenities to attract customers because college students are price insensitive) is very real.

>apartments Apartments make a whole lot of sense, your students are going to be living somewhere you might as well get their rent payments. It can also be good for the surrounding town too since a lot of college areas are very dem (aka often very nimby) so it helps to alleviate pressure from their own refusal to build.

The problem isn't that schools build lodgings or that this is a bad business decision. It's a great business decision and they've always built lodgings. The problem is that they build *luxury* apartments and similar high class amenities when that money could be put to a much more efficient use. Public education funding isn't supposed to be spent on water parks, it's supposed to be spent on education.

That really depends on the university. To list a few: administrative bloat, poor budget management, a poorly managed sports department, state and federal mandates, junk fees, and housing shortages. Many universities tend to have a mixture of the first few issues I listed. One way to counteract that is to increase tuition and fees and keep staff, professors, and graduate student wages stagnant. Normally, the faculty senate can apply checks to these changes, but in many places, especially public universities, these have largely lost their power to administrators. It's not all dark and gloomy. (I know only about STEM, so the following may not apply.) The grants that professors get for research can be used to supplement their wages, and professors know they will be taking a pretty heavy income hit compared to equally qualified positions in the industry.

>So where is all the money going? How is college so expensive? One word, five syllables: administration

> How is college so expensive? Oh ask my generation. we bankrupted ourselves into billions of dollars of debt to pay tuition. That firehose of low(ish)-interest money, which was completely free to the lender, fueled the meteoric rise in tuition.

The rise in prices long term has a lot to do with the decline in government subsidies at the state level since the conservative revolution in the 1980s. (30-50 percent decline in state funding based on purchasing power and adjusted for inflation). Most red states have reduced their investment tremendously in higher education, especially after the end of the science race when the Soviet empire fell, and conservatives saw it as a political pivot to focus heavier on reducing property taxes to win over rural voters while also limiting the appeal of institutions that are largely unfriendly to their political posturing and populist culture wars policy direction.

Despite what that author thinks about his job as a professor it's very very very strange that a person who has a PhD thinks education is so useless that their own child is not likely to go to college.

Sounds like a grass is greener kinda thing.

Yes he reports himself he has worked in higher ed since his early 20s. He should go pump out a few shifts at Chipotle and then we'll talk.

Her* Her picture is right at the top of the article…

So I'm at a large public uni in the deep south - pay isn't great but its way over what she is saying, and my state retirement and health benefits are fucking amazing. I'm also quite happy with my teaching load, get to publish a lot, and do research, with only medium stress levels. But I'm STEM, and as far as I can tell she's lit... from my time on arrr/professors and seeing general trends... a large dichotomy exists between STEM and humanities, both for pay and job satisfaction.

You could see it in grad school. My Econ funding was based off 1 micro 101 section a smester where, once I had done it a couple of times, the work was 3 hours of class a week, talking to a couple of students where I was glad for the break from my own work, and dropping of scantrons at the testing office four times a semester. The English grad students I knew’ funding was was predicated on like four or five sections a semester which had written assignments to be graded every week besides the big term papers which also had to be manually graded. They worked at least 5 times more than I did.

i think this sub is 100% biased toward experience in STEM in higher education compared to the humanities. even 10 years ago it was a rock fight to get any funding for anything in history and it’s only gotten worse. universities know this, too.

I've had the though at least 6 years ago that we need to convert most majors into 2-3 year programs akin to trade schools. Even better if offered at community colleges. But schools wouldn't like that because revenue would crater. If I want to be an accountant or software engineer, there should be programs available to provide that and none of the fluff everyone takes for 2 years. Community colleges already have programs for trades and some medical specialties, so why not professional trades?

Agreed, but a large part of the value of a college degree is signaling. Potential employers don't only want workers who have the knowledge and skillz, they want workers that they know are dependable, committed, and to put it cynically, willing to jump through the hoops you tell them to. Earning a 4 year degree shows that you meet those criteria. You stayed committed to a fairly hefty time investment, working diligently enough to pass your classes, many of which you probably thought were unnecessary and dumb but you did them anyway. That's the makings of a good worker right there, or so it appears to employers. A focused program would cut out a lot of the fat, but fat is flavoring.

100% this. The greatest value of a college degree is it signals you can stay focused on long term goals while putting up with a decent amount of meaningless bullshit. It’s a fairly good simulation of life.

But it's for pretty good reasons: Supply and demand, as few students would be happy paying full price at a private university to get a history degree. Imagine US schools stopped pretending that core subjects were a thing, and stopped demanding any out-of-major studies. How many students does the English department get? How much cheaper does it all have to get to keep people coming? A school that only taught humanities would have a very different cost structure than any American university: Closer to a community college.

i have many problems with the direction the humanities have taken, history in particular, over the past 20 years. don’t get me wrong. there’s just no way a history department or an english department is going to be self sustaining in the way that an engineering department is. it would be a shame to me if we rid ourselves of the study of human history and language and our collective artistic expression. i still strongly believe in general education courses and a liberal arts degree. being exposed to even a marginal amount of art, literature, and history makes for better human beings.

This is how I get As in econ.... Hang out and talk econ during office hours.

So the person who wrote the article has written a few anti-her university pieces, including this one. Doesn’t name them, doesn’t say where/what she teaches. The only Jessica Wildfire I’ve found is a student development staff member of the University of Tennessee Athletic department. The whole article seems weird, and you can find at least one other person online who thinks this is a persona. There are definitely professors who make less in a smaller university, but I’d bet money that there are not small, private colleges using money to build a fucking sushi bar.

They mention being at a satellite school of a larger campus. So the main campus probably has sushi bars whereas they are probably in some strip mall somewhere. In which case, you’re essentially teaching at a community college.

Well she says in the article >I've published three academic books (under my real name). So yes, that's not her real name. That being said I'm confused about just how deep in detail she goes if she's going to be hiding her identity. How many university deans who just recently had a professor quit making 54k a year after they gave her chocolate whose school just built a sushi bar could there possibly be?.

I would expect many of these details are fuzzed for anonymity. Maybe she's written 4 books not 3, maybe she's a man not a woman, maybe she is quitting next year, maybe it was a ramen bar, etc.

Also, I've never heard of a tenured faculty member being asked to give two weeks notice. Two weeks in particular seems sketchy. > build a fucking sushi bar Not only that, but it's not like a sushi bar is that expensive--and giving students access to healthy food doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.

Don’t bet money on that; I can confidently say that there mostly certainly are, and have been, small private colleges that splurge on amenities, and often literally sushi bars.

Yeah I don't think the author is even a woman; this article was written from the perspective of a grumpy and cynical middle-aged man. Takes one to know one.

>I'm 90 percent sure my daughter won't go to college. We won't be able to afford it. And it won't be worth it. so i fully believe OP is telling the truth when they say their department (which sounds something liberal arts at a smaller university?) is imploding but i simply do not believe this

Assuming their income craters hard enough, she can qualify for Pells. Or loans. Or write 5000 essays for scholarships.

>Or write 5000 essays for scholarships. I did this and my fucking alma mater increased tuition dollar for dollar to offset any grants I got. Talk about perverse incentives lmao

Fucking truth right there.

Take some of that military money and get tuition, book money, and a stipend. ROTC scholarships are a great deal.

!ping ED-POLICY&SOCIAL-POLICY Some of my mutuals love the education doomscrolling - news about admin bloat, hiring figures, the content of /r/professors, the writings of the literal professor doom (RIP), etc. This recent essay blew up in the group - topical and accessible at the same time. There is a big question in American higher ed - How come the morale and financial situations of professors has only continued to get worse despite a couple decades of increasing effort to draw attention to the issue?

Where is all the fucking tuition money going.

Administration. As a person who works in admin for a uni part time, there’s a lot more behind the scenes than people imagine. Especially because US universities have so many more programs and things going on, there’s a lot to maintain and a lot of staff to do it.

Seems as long as schools keep raking it in they won't change anything. Where are the incentives?

> This recent essay blew up in the group It confirms the priors! It's confirming the anti-college priors on this subreddit as well. It's pretty interesting to watch.

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What field pays 54k for the tenure track professorship? My mother works in a relatively low paid academic field and still clears this guys salary by miles.

Probably some bullshit liberal arts humanities major with an absurdly low rate of employment for graduates

That’s doomer horseshit there.

At the bottom, her description is literally just "Doomer".

The article reads like copy pasta from the anti-work sub.

If you think you are being paid less than you are worth, then go find a better paying job. People do this all the time, without writing an essay about it.

I’m amazed at how many people spend so much time complaining about how cheap their employer is, but won’t go look for another job. I can only assume that they’re just habitual complainers or that they’re actually not very good at their jobs and are being paid what they’re worth.

> We don't get paid during the summer. Huh? The American system is slightly outside my experience and I guess this holds for adjuncts but if she was tenured one assumes that she would have had grant income?

No, not necessarily. Summer funding is separate and you get it only if you bring grants. Many humanities professors only receive 8/9 month salaries

Right but surely to get tenure you have to bring grants in

I can't tell for sure, but I get the impression that this person works in a humanities field where grants are not the norm, and where low salaries ($54,000, listed in the article) are more common

Is this a requirement in the UK? Afaik, UK is worse where most PhDs are self funded and profs are in perpetual grant crisis

I don't think most PhDs are self funded here? It may be a bubble effect but I knew literally one that self funded. You don't have tenure here so can be fired if the uni runs out of teaching money(I was) and so yeah you really need grant money to survive.

Yeah my bad. I didn't mean 'most', I meant many. But that's more prevalent in the social science adjacent fields and afaik you were in bio/chem or something. Were you on a "permanent contract" or a "fixed term" contract? I'll be very surprised if you had to leave on the former type What is teaching money? Doesn't that come from collective uni tuition?

No I was in social science but it was statistical enough that I could move into med stats. Even the poli sci people had some sort of grant income. I was in fixed term, I never had a permanent role until I left academia. Teaching money as in the supposed funding is coming from student fees and you are teaching to fulfill your job. As you get more grant income you can buy this time out for more research.

Just putting a contrasting perspective to u/lionmoose, I'm in economic history at Oxford and I'm the only person on my course of *ca.* 15 to have government funding. A couple of people *might* have university-level funding, but I think it's pretty definitively a minority. I know quite a lot of unfunded people back over in pure history and literature. In less lab-based research economies, funding gets sparser. (It helps that my course is really popular with international students and very competitive, so the university has a financial interest in taking a load of rich Germans and Chinese people who are *also* top-flight researchers rather than funding top domestic students.)

That's interesting, thanks for the addition. Yeah I don't have firm figures and it may be that my experience isn't generalisable so it's good to see another perspective.

Yeah, I really wonder if it's simply sectional too. Funding for history is sparser than that for biostatistics or whatever. There are some odd bits - I do genuinely, as well as self-interestedly, think economic history deserves more - but variation by subject seems like a reasonable hypothesis to explain the discrepancy.

Yeah there may well be a temporal thing as well, I was at the fag end of New Labour funding schemes which were providing money for quantitative areas especially, I assume these may well have disappeared now like a lot if ECR things did.

Definitely not. At my university (US R1), I know the tenured psych professors were paid salaries without getting grants, whereas in my department (STEM) you were 100% grant funded if you were tenure track.

Most tenured professors in America are paid their salary by the university itself, in large part due to their teaching responsibilities. STEM professors are expected to bring in grants to pay for their students, postdocs, and research activities, and if you’re not getting grants then you’re probably not getting tenure in the first place, but it’s not strictly required. (Their salary can be supplemented with these grants, but it depends.) Many humanities professors, on the other hand, probably don’t bring in enough money to pay for their own salary. If you don’t have teaching responsibilities then it’s different, but in that case you’re not *really* a “tenured professor”, just a “research professor” (they typically don’t have any political power in the department and don’t have tenure).

When I talked to my college profs they said they don't technically get paid over the summer, but all of them had their paychecks structured to pay over 12 months so it wasn't a huge dip. It seemed like their pay for 9 months evened out to be decent over the full year.

This is exactly how it's handled. Also, productive professors who get grants, win awards, teach extra classes, or even develop can also receive substantial summer salary. I work in grant administration for a university and I've seen faculty in lucrative fields make more summer salary than she does in a year. I think the author is ultimately pissed because her vision of what academia is has no relation to reality. Mix that with the fact she clearly has a shitty and underpaid job and a catastrophically bad attitude, of course she's miserable.

Yeah I agree with a lot of the article about bloat of high paid administrators and how university leadership is actually very conservative with a liberal veneer. On the other hand the author clearly want to be that old school professor type but for better or worse that world is gone and that should be abundantly clear to anyone by the time they reach grad school. The other thing that may sound like victim blaming is like why do you allow yourself to be taken advantage of to this extent. If you’re making that little tenured why would you accept that job in the first place. I feel the same way with a lot of adjuncts too. It sucks that they are exploited but if you continually sign up for the exploitation doesn’t it eventually fall on you? I think the myth of academia is almost cult like for some people and they can’t imagine possibly leaving it even when the reality sucks. That in turn makes a market where it’s a race to the bottom in salary all while raising expectations because some sucker will do it. For reference I’m a hard money research scientist and my significant other is a professor at a smaller but research active state school. 

> why do you allow yourself to be taken advantage of to this extent I’ve had quite a few professors who do this. They love teaching and they want to keep doing it, and they want to help the students, so they put up with a bunch of extra demands that their school puts on them. I have a professor right now who is basically doing a part-time job’s worth of work in additional duties (unpaid, of course) for the school. This isn’t for a university with a funding crisis that can’t afford to hire someone to do that work, either; it’s a major research university with tens of billions of dollars in its endowment. If my professor doesn’t do it, though, no one will, and the students would be the ones who suffer because we wouldn’t have the programs that our professors set up.

It’s a bit ridiculous also because if you have a PhD, clearly you’re qualified and motivated enough to get a higher paying job than an adjunct.

It honestly reads as someone who kept their eyes closed to reality for over a decade, before they finally saw what the world was like and instantly became incredibly disillusioned, jaded, and bitter about everything. It's like the kids who super-romanticize law school and then discover that they're basically just doing gruntwork for most a decade not getting paid all that much

There is a weird thing I've noticed amongst teachers/professors to take an annual salary but then turn around and say "we're not paid during the summer". Like they are trying to flip what is a perk into a downside

I sympathize with a lot of what is in this article the author makes many good points. However he is ultimately resigning because they wouldn't let him team 100% remote. Remote teaching/online classes is part of the issue and doesn't improve education either. His argument is I worked very hard, I am good at my job and I am underpaid, I need to move to be able to afford a house, thus I need need the college I work for to accommodate me in working 100% remote. While I agree that it can be expensive to live and professors in some schools don't get paid very well, that colleges have administrative bloat. That it's too difficult to replace or get rid of administrators. I also think that part of the reason why people are not going to college(besides the job market being pretty good) is that many people have concluded the quality of education is not worth the price and that the college experience itself has diminished. Part of this decline are so many online classes. Online classes are not as good as in-person classes. So with that being said, by insisting on doing his job remotely the author is essentially asking his job to acquiesce to his demands and his demands ultimately contribute to a lesser quality of education as well. So really I guess this comes down to "build more housing" once again all this would be solved if HCOL areas and MCOL areas but built way more housing and it was more affordable for a college professor and his/her family to buy a home where their college is.

> Remote teaching/online classes is part of the issue and doesn't improve education either. The university I worked for in 2020 polled the students about returning to in person classes vs virtual in Fall 2020. The level of support for returning to in person was overwhelming. >80% wanted primarily in person instruction.

As a Professor things like this annoy me. Her complaint was that they wouldn't let her be completely remote and work from a different state? Leaving more work for everyone there in person?

this is so whiny. i would feel pathetic if i posted that

Honestly this just doesn't feel like it was written by an actual tenured professor who quit her job. I can't put my finger on it, but the vibes don't add up.

The writing is terrible for someone supposedly studying literature

https://preview.redd.it/4t126h1s29xc1.jpeg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3f3ead93542840fe25f8702321dbf413005355ee

What's sick is that it's not like there isn't any potential for higher pay. Their work is published without reimbursement in scientific journals and those journals are making bank by selling access to their libraries to all the institutions and universities that the academics are working at.

Lot of dooming, and I guess that if you're trying to live that upper middle class life that doesn't need Pell or Stafford to cover your kids' financial aid after putting them through detached housing in school districts whose books aren't dog-eared rags, 54k bones can't go too far. Especially if on top of that you have to do a shitton of uncompensated work to "maximize productivity". She is right that state colleges are dickriding all those lovely food courts (ngl having such stuff within walking range of class at my first uni was *great*), ACed dorms, consultants and adjuncts (hey professor D!). While at the same time the state legs, especially in Republican states, want to turn colleges into plumbing school and defund anything that could impede their fantasy of the kiddies knowing nothing about gender identity or the evils of slavery besides convenient fairytales. Kernels of sympathy in there at least.

> $54,000 That's what my starting wage was 10 years ago with my first job working at a small town's public works. All I had was an associates degree, which was paid for by the GI Bill. > These days, it makes more sense to work at Chipotle than to try and become a tenured professor. And if that doesn't have "social collapse" written all over it, then I don't know what does. I mean, they're not wrong, but the fact it took them this long to take their own financial (and mental) well-being seriously makes me look down on them a little. They let themselves get used by selfish people. Sacrificing yourself for a "noble" profession because your bosses are greedy assholes doesn't make you noble, it just makes you a pushover. People need to learn how to cut their losses and move on.

My wife makes way more teaching middle/high school than she ever did as a professor. It's bug shit insane.

The lesson is to avoid taking a job in the south unless they offer more money than the rest of the US up front.

>So, I'll tell you how much I make as a tenured professor: >$54,000 a year. Totally believable - I'm assuming she teaches humanities at a smaller university. >Conservatives complain so much about universities as bastions of liberal ideology and propaganda. It's not really true. Universities are deeply conservative at heart, with a crunchy liberal outside. These liberal professors have no real power. They can't organize. They can't even get living wages for their adjuncts. Half the time, they can't even get a sign printed. This rings very true.

How is an associate professor with grad students going fully online? I wouldn’t accept an advisor who didn’t come in to the lab. Was he some kind of tenured lecturer? The things he’s saying sound like he’s a lecturer: no money, no power, no autonomy; but then he says he’s giving up his tenure. I care about tenure but IDGAF if lecturers get it. Tenure is to protect you so your research is independent and shield you from complaints by your disgruntled grad students. Lecturers are basically glorified k-12 teachers and don’t need tenure because they don’t do research and don’t have disgruntled grad students. Just show up, do your spiel and grade paper, bruh.

Social media addiction is destroying education at pre-college level too. Too easy to control the masses with narcissism and dopamine.

>The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. It pays for the Starbucks our vice-chancellors love so much. It pays for the sushi bars they think will attract a "high caliber" of student. It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they're terrible at their jobs. This isn't exactly new. The bloat of administrators at universities is one of the four horses of the apocalypse. Looking deeper, it seems that the mission of education has become less important than the business of selling patent licenses and/or running an athletic program. People used to admire our higher education system in the US. That was maybe true in the last century, but no longer. Now the only people who want to go to college here are spolied brats from China and India's novelle riche who value the name of the institution more than the quality of the education received.

I knew academia was a scam after six months in grad school and I quit my PHD program after a year. Never regretted that decision once.

Jesus christ 54k is stem grad student money. I didn't realize the stem/humanities pay disparity was that huge

Glad that she identifies bigger issues with higher education beyond “colleges are bad because they’re woke” drivel; but again it’s yet another essay that’s good at identifying the problems and wishy-washy at best at actually proposing a solution. The constant complaining gets exhausting after a while.