Has the college academic job market always been highly competitive and elitist?

[Mwfan1921]

@ucbalumnus

@MWolf

Universities cannot compete with industry in salaries and bonuses, so the only thing that they can offer is something like tenure. Without tenure, only people who industry is not willing to pay much will become faculty.

However, today, only about a fifth of college instructors have tenure and perhaps another tenth are tenure-track but have not gotten tenure. Would that mean that most college instructors are “people who industry is not willing to pay much”?

Exactly…most students today at universities/colleges all over the country take some classes taught by non-TT profs and/or adjuncts.

That’s why I don’t understand equating a school that uses non-TT profs and/or adjuncts to a for-profit university, as in this post:

Tenure protects the quality of teaching and of research, as well as the quality of the teachers and the researchers. Do you want to know what it looks like when you get rid of tenure? Take a long hard look at the for-profit “universities” - their abysmal quality of teaching, their lack of standards, their minuscule graduation rates, their predatory practices, etc. Is this what you would like to see as the sort of place you would send your kid?

Most of us have no choice but to send our kids to unis/colleges that use non TT profs and/or adjuncts…because that’s the model at many schools (non-profits), including some that are highly ‘ranked’.