“more and more tenure-track faculty lines are being converted into term-limited (i.e., contingent and paid less, but not quite as contingent and low-paid as adjuncts) and adjunct lines.”
Yes, this tends to occur when the university/unit budget is tight, that is, when adjuncts are used to cut corner (but not used to strengthen program delivery).
Here in California most community college positions are held by “freeway flyers”, professors teaching at several area colleges to cobble together enough income to survive, with no benefits. Again, one CC class earns me $2250 gross for the term. Class hours are paid $50 per hour, no pay for office hours, grading, prep, etc… I am fortunate that I teach high school and don’t have to try and earn a living off the community college system, it’s incredibly difficult to stay above the poverty line doing so. Here’s an article about the freeway flyer: http://www.guildfreelancers.org/news/2015/4/15/freeway-flyers-make-up-the-bulk-of-faculty
I’ve always wanted to know exactly where the money goes when we pay for an education? Seems that buildings which are built are usually from grants, most professors don’t get paid that well either, and if those jobs are being redirected to temporary positions with a turnover rate just as high as their salary is low. Seriously, you’d think that when we pay for tuition, books, dorm, food, sports, and additional materials for classes that Universities would be swimming in enough cash to pay our educators well.
Even adjuncts who are well paid at their day job are underpaid for teaching. It doesn’t matter that they don’t need the money.
This is the sentence that caught my eye: “Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions.”
My husband (a fulltime, hybrid lecturer/admin fellow at a large state school) always is commenting about the non-stop announcements he gets from the University, announcing a “New V.P.” He calls them “V.P. of Student Hand Holding” as large state schools admit underprepared kids & then hire V.P.'s at $200k/year to figure out how to get them to graduate… Teaching is not a priority; but graduating kids who can’t perform at a college level is.
And, I agree with the point someone made about lecturers often being the best teachers. No one has ever taught a tenured faculty member how to teach…they may know their subject matter, but rarely do they know anything about pedagogy.
Well, as others have noted, there’s the skyrocketing proportion of coleges’ budgets that are going to administration—that’s one place to look, I’d argue.
I challenge your generalization. It makes sense that people make it, though, because this is a generational shift—your claim used to be (for the most part) true, but it’s less and less so. In more and more fields, some sort of pedagogical professional development and, often, experience is built into a PhD program.
@dfbdfb You may be correct that there is more teaching/pedagogical prof development now than when my husband went thru his program in the late 90s. Back in the '90s, the “pedagogical development” was being assigned to teach a lecture or 2 during the semester & run the review sessions. Maybe it’s more nowadays? As an ITS fellow, my husband is increasingly being called upon to teach profs how to use the latest tech in their teaching. And what he observes is a real lack of interest in teaching from the tenured faculty – it gets in the way of research, I suppose.
"I’ve always wanted to know exactly where the money goes when we pay for an education? "
I had seen my university’s annual budgets over a 10-year horizon a couple of years ago. My university is a medium size research flagship state university. If my memory serves me correct, the expenditure side is about the following:
Faculty pay and benefit: about 30%.
Staff pay and benefit: about 25%.
Student aids and scholarship: 15-25% (increasing fast over time).
Tod administrators’ (president, provost, VPs, Deans) pay and benefit: about 1%.
The remaining major items are debt servicing (interests and principal), capital expenditure (road, roof, etc.), operating expenditure (utility, etc.).
A university is basically a people operation. The majority of expenditure is on people. Faculty and staff’s cost ratio at my university has been quite stable over time with a total of about 55%. Many people fail to understand how costly staff support can be (25%). Here we are talking about the kind of staff support for student mental health, student advising, student career development, faculty grant application and compliance, equal employment office staff, first-generation dedicated staff, physical facilities staff, PR, HR, etc. These staffs, in general, earn little, but their benefits are decent.
Because the cost of benefits (particularly in the area of healthcare) to faculty and staffs increases at a speed faster than tuition, a little bit of cost cutting (pay on a per course basis) happened in my university, but our situation has been far better than many other universities. The cost cutting concentrated in humanities with the use of more adjuncts. The medical school has also been asked to contain its loss (almost all medical schools in the US are losing money like crazy).
On the expenditure side, student aids and scholarship was the one really losing control. The overall operating environment called for a more generous aids and scholarship to make college more affordable. Over that 10-year horizon, this expenditure components went from around 15% to around 25%. To make up this, capital expenditure has been reduced. For example, old windows would not get replaced and we are still using heat and generating CO2 like crazy.
Too many people also fail to understand that the cost of top administrators accounts for a very small fraction of the overall budget. Think of this way, how many people are we talking about here? Just 20-40 depending on the size of the university. But in a typical university, we have thousands of faculty and thousands of staffs. I am a faculty union member, and I understand why people always point their fingers on top administrators. But the fact remains that even we get rid of all top administrators today, this one-time effect will be no more than 1%. With a natural level of inflation at say 2%, the tuition will still go up next year.
Yes, the rapid rise in the cost of health care adds cost to the employer while not being that noticeable as a compensation increase by the employee. (Think about it: do you think you got a raise if your pay remained the same but your employer had to pay more for “the same” medical insurance for you?)
That is probably a significant part of the job market problems overall, not just in academic jobs.
Of course, the job market problems caused by the increasing health care bite negatively impact the ability to afford college by students and their families, increasing financial aid need.
Be careful about that claim, though—so, for example, a couple places I’ve worked at, salary and benefits for positions like deans and even some vice-provosts were counted as faculty expenses, because even though they didn’t teach any classes they were technically faculty with an administrative assignment, and had the right to return to the regular faculty once they stepped away from administration.
Tossing in a few observations on the growing percentage of teachers in universities who are NOT fulltime, tenure track: First there are enormous cost pressures for state universities - that state support has fallen from representing approximately (really approximately) about 75% of the full cost of educating a student down to about 20-25% of the cost of educating that student. The money has to come from somewhere so it comes from raising revenue and lowering costs.
SURE, these pressures exist everywhere. But recognizing they exist, putting them in context with the full set of choices that states make in their budgets, is important to understanding this trend.
At the same time, the idea that students are in college, at least in part, to learn to think and to be challenged intellectually - this idea is disappearing from state university campuses. In its place is the conviction that a university degree is a certificate that promises access to employment; the process of learning and growing is not particularly relevant anymore. This may sound harsh but look around us and you can see VERY clearly the anti-intellectualism and anti-science attitude. The prevailing notion is that anybody can teach this stuff; deep understanding, active research agendas do not matter. I’m sure that there is a middle ground someplace but right now, there is little support from university administrators or state legislators for the notion that students are in college for any reason other than the degree, despite pressure from employers to produce graduates who can think and write.
The more that students are treated customers who need to be made happy and content all the time; i.e., NOT challenged to work harder or study more, just customers who need nicer dorms and super cool climbing walls - this all pushes us to where we are now. The ideological notion that universities will improve (on undefined parameters) when subjected to competitive forces - really nice idea, we all like choices and complacency can ruin quality. But the resulting distortions in expenditures on non-academic factors was predictable.
Finally, all PhD granting institutions are responsible for contributing to what clearly is an over-supply of PhDs in many fields. The lower ranked ones struggle to cancel these programs for many reasons, partially because those students teach but also because it is a source of prestige for a professor to say “hey i teach in a program with a doctoral program.” But it is wrong, plain and simple, to continue to participate in this process. It is much the same as law schools that are now facing declining enrollments and a serious surplus of law school grads.
@prof2dad At many universities, the 30% vs 25% that you’ve got for faculty versus staff – that has flipped. The staff category includes a zillion administrators at all different levels. At my university, I’m always shocked to see the first response to any identified “problem” is to define a new job description to hire someone (non-teaching) to solve the problem. Even presumably academic programs (like our first year experience program) is run and (largely) taught by non-teaching staff.
This is actually a big deal—a very big deal—for this whole discussion. Tied in with it is the way that a college education has moved from being a public good to being a private good.
Colleges were complicit in this, by the way—they started selling degrees as a ticket to social class advancement, which is a good thing, but it laid the seeds for their own fiscal destruction, as people started thinking, basically, “Why should I pay for their kid to do better in life?”
“prof2dad wrote:
Too many people also fail to understand that the cost of top administrators accounts for a very small fraction of the overall budget.”
“Be careful about that claim, though—so, for example, a couple places I’ve worked at, salary and benefits for positions like deans and even some vice-provosts were counted as faculty expenses, because even though they didn’t teach any classes they were technically faculty with an administrative assignment, and had the right to return to the regular faculty once they stepped away from administration.”
Regardless of how careless I was (say the number that I provided has a 20% error; say I failed to count 20% of top administrators in this group), with a 1% base, the true number (1.2%) would still be very close to 1%. I do not see how this can in any way change my earlier statement.
“@prof2dad At many universities, the 30% vs 25% that you’ve got for faculty versus staff – that has flipped. The staff category includes a zillion administrators at all different levels. At my university, I’m always shocked to see the first response to any identified “problem” is to define a new job description to hire someone (non-teaching) to solve the problem.”
This, to some degree, also occurred in my university. I understand your concerns. Things are not always been done in the most sensible way. But I have some thoughts on this.
Some of these newly added staff positions were requested by the faculty. In my university, grant support staffs has seen big increase because the faculty complained about too much paperworks and new compliances. When an academic unit has difficulty placing their students, the faculty in the unit often want to see the hiring of a career development staff to help placement. The list goes on.
I had seen the pay distribution of the newly added staff positions in my university during that 10 year horizon. I can tell you that the majority of new positions have fairly low pay. The addition of these new position would never be on the campus newspaper. But when say a new VP position is created, you bet everyone will notice it and jump on it. But this is actually more of a rare incident relative to the entire population of newly added staff positions, which has a size of hundreds.
I had asked a few top administrators why new staff position were added to deal with identified problems/issues, the most often answer that I got was something like the following: “Someone got to do it. I cannot ask our existing staffs to do so much additional work. You know, the staffs are not paid well. If I put these additional work on any of them, I will lose him/her. I can only hire a new person.”
Looking around any campus, you will notice that there is a high turnover among staffs around us, right?
@prof2dad, that’s not the way the math works.
Also, might I suggest that your one datapoint isn’t necessarily representative, even if it’s accurate? There is plenty of work out there documenting the growth of administrative costs but not faculty costs nationally over the past couple decades, after all.
“There is plenty of work out there documenting the growth of administrative costs but not faculty costs nationally over the past couple decades, after all.”
The 1% number that I provided was about top administrators, president, provosts, vice provosts, VPs and Deans. Their pays are high, they are very visible, and thus they have received most criticisms from the faculty. I know this because the faculty and the top administration in my university have a big fight on this every 3 years when the union contract is re-negotiated. This thing comes up again and again. What I have been saying is that this group accounts for such a small fraction of the entire budget. Its proliferation has little impacts on the overall budget and tuition.
The articles that you cited mostly lumped low-ranked staffs into the category of administration. As @profdad2021 and I stated above, these rather low-ranked staffs proliferated in a significant way that it has far more implication on university budget and tuition due to its size (there are thousands of low-ranked staffs).
“Be careful about that claim, though—so, for example, a couple places I’ve worked at, salary and benefits for positions like deans and even some vice-provosts were counted as faculty expenses, because even though they didn’t teach any classes they were technically faculty with an administrative assignment, and had the right to return to the regular faculty once they stepped away from administration.”
If you do not like the number that I provided based on my university. Let us estimate this number for UC Berkeley.
On the UCB administration website, it lists a total of 32 positions.
http://www.berkeley.edu/about/administration
Let us assume the average pay and benefit to this group is 700K (if you do not like 700k, change any number that you deem reasonable) each year. So the total is 22.4 million.
The annual budget of UCB is about 2.5 billion. So we are talking about 0.9%, which is very close to the 1% that I provided.
Increasing college costs and declining job prospects for both high school graduates and college graduates with non-specific majors contribute to this type of thinking. It should not be surprising that this is happening.
The US historically has not been that intellectual. But it used to be possible to get jobs that earned a living without more than a high school education, so the less intellectually motivated has less reason to go to college then than now. For those more intellectually inclined, a non-specific bachelor’s degree was seen as something of value in the job market, rather than as just a bare minimum qualification.
^^ Truth. I guess the question then becomes: Does any of this actually matter, then?