Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[Scersk '97]

Sorry if I used imprecise terms, Scersk, but what I should have written is that almost no schools outside of the community college and junior college systems care about teaching.  I have multiple examples of early career academics at different types of institutions who ask the department for copies of their own course evaluations months later, only to find the original envelopes are still sealed because no one in the department ever looked at the reviews.  And yet the department decided to bring back/not bring back those academics without ever considering the evaluations.  Similarly, when a department does decide to send in a more senior faculty member to observe a lecture, it generally comes at the end of the year after future hiring decisions have been made for non-tenure track, and the observer is generally an academic with no training in education.

While I don't doubt much of what you've said above, I still have to take issue with your first sentence. Let's just say, without naming names, that I'm pretty familiar with a "university"—neither a community college nor a junior college—that takes teaching evaluations quite seriously, particularly for courses with multiple sections taught by different instructors. Around campus, it's also pretty much an open secret that most university decisions follow a "customer-centered" model. I'm sure there are faculty members at this place in question that never have had a teaching evaluation that mattered; I'm also have a strong hunch that teaching evaluations factor quite strongly in many hiring and "letting go" decisions, particularly in the humanities. It's part of making sure the students keep coming back for more.

Schools don't care about instruction quality.  They just don't, because it does not matter to their business model.  Good teaching does not increase donations or grants.  Good teaching does not increase application numbers or quality of applicants.  Good teaching does not really increase prestige in US News or Times Higher Ed rankings.  When parents or students pay tuition, they are not paying for instruction.  Tuition is paid for the credential that comes at the end and all related career advancement opportunities.  Very few people--parents and students included--care about instruction quality in the end.

Well, in a sense, exactly. How we both likely differ with those who run institutions like the one I impugn above is regarding what constitutes "good instruction." They define it as "what the students like," quality be damned. Thus, the credential is worth to a certain extent what it's printed on. I suppose if everyone drinks this kind of Kool-aid, instructional standards will continue to sink as credentials continue to be issued. No one will care until planes start crashing and our electrical grid goes down.

As for the economic reality of academics being similar to other professions: this is untrue.  Very few professions work this way.  Academics go to school after college for about 4-7 years and then often have postdocs, fellowships, etc.  The universities try to increase the number of grad students, because that provides them with cheap labor for teaching and research, but they don't care that these grad students can't get jobs when they graduate.  

I overstepped my bounds here. I guess I meant "professions" in the sense of white-collar jobs with a modicum of respect. What you say about the academic "difference"—really, just another screw job—is spot on, of course.

Unlike doctors, lawyers, nurses, academics do not have their value increased by government regulations requiring that all instructors meet certain standards of competency.  Therefore, sometimes unqualified or immoral people take jobs from the well-trained.  (I could name names of famous "professors" who are former terrorists, famous criminals, or just people who once wrote a book but lack real expertise, but if I did so I'd risk insulting political sensibilities on both sides).

Would that we did! I wish there was a qualifying exam in my super-flabby discipline. Trouble for the untalented.

Tenure has also done great harm to the younger generation of academics.  Many older academics see no reason to retire, because they make the top salary they can, they teach jsut a few classes they have taught for many years, and they often work with the assistance of TAs.  Many older tenured professors, especially at the mid-range schools, are actually surpassed in accomplishment by the much younger non-tenure track academics at the same schools.  The older professors just benefited from better much job markets in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.  Eventually these older professors will die, but it will be too late for the current younger generation.  Moreover, the movement away from tenure and even toward more adjuncts, means many fewer overall opportunities for new academics despite the fact that more undergrads are in college than ever before.

Agreed, in a restricted sense. That many Baby Boomer-era professors are holding on by their fingernails, trying to ameliorate the retirement tanking, is not helping anyone. But without tenure, what's to prevent universities from jettisoning "productive but not willing to kill themselves" older academics with things like families and hobbies in favor of the newly-minted masses yearning to make below a living wage?

But then she got to the department of about 2 dozen faculty members and found out that there was an administrative office with 5 administrative all making more money than she did.  One administrator had only two jobs: she scanned documents and xeroxed documents for the department.  Even the photocopy lady made more money than the young academic who had spent 6 years in graduate school, was one of only a handful of experts in the world in her very relevant field, and who was being tasked with teaching some of the more well-attend classes in the department.  Teaching is supposed to be the main role of a university, but teaching is not valued.  Making photocopies is more valued.

Quoted for truth: I've come across similar stories. Bloated administrative budgets, at the primary, secondary, and higher education levels, are a major evil.

[Rosey]

Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track.  It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track.  This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts.

To this specific point, I think you hit the nail right on the head.

I have no specific data to back it up (lots of anecdotal "evidence"), but I strongly suspect that the most important factor in the rise of adjunct faculty as a percentage of academic faculty is the glut of Ph.D.s.  Over the past 2+ decades, far more people pursued a career in academia than there were jobs to support them. It's great for industry: my company, for instance, benefits from the huge salary differential between academia and industry through the employment of some very smart and highly-educated people who either couldn't or didn't want to engage with the academic rat race. But that's probably an option open only to those in STEM fields: I'm not sure a Ph.D. in English qualifies someone for a challenging job or a high salary in private industry.

But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

[Towerroad]

Does anyone else get tired of this academic bleating? No one put a gun to the heads of all these PHD's and said, "You must work for crappy wages in a demeaning job." For that matter, no one put a gun to their heads and said "You must go to grad school and get a PHD." Sorry, but if you are a 22 year old BS or BA and you decide to get a PHD there is no shortage of information about what the job market looks like when you make your decision. If you made the decision just to avoid the "real world" why should the rest of us care, it is your life. If you do not like what is on offer in the world of academia the find something else. Millions of other workers in this country have had to. Time to grow up.

[Scersk '97]

Does anyone else get tired of this academic bleating? No one put a gun to the heads of all these PHD's and said, "You must work for crappy wages in a demeaning job." For that matter, no one put a gun to their heads and said "You must go to grad school and get a PHD." Sorry, but if you are a 22 year old BS or BA and you decide to get a PHD there is no shortage of information about what the job market looks like when you make your decision. If you made the decision just to avoid the "real world" why should the rest of us care, it is your life. If you do not like what is on offer in the world of academia the find something else. Millions of other workers in this country have had to. Time to grow up.

Typical. ::roll eyes::

"My life sucks, so yours might as well too!"

All occupations are under attack; academia is yet another sector of society from under which the rug continues to be pulled, i.e., where the conditions of employment are going through such rapid disruptive change that many of those who signed up under a different set of rules are feeling cheated. Most academics, regardless of what people like you and much of the rest of society erroneously parrot, did not choose to do what they did in order to "avoid the 'real world'"; rather, they chose, because of aptitude and interest, to pursue a relatively narrow academic path in order to do great research or teach well. (One might hope both.) It's the nature of the business that academics are not exactly well-suited to a variety of career paths—that's why they're rewarded, in a proper world, with things like tenure and the flexible scheduling necessary to pursue material deeply. Let me tell ya, they ain't doing it for the power and big money—that's for the academic administrator class.

Your vocation is likely the next against the wall as this anti-revolution goes on and on. And who will be out there trying to warn you before it happens? Those lousy academics. Who's trying to get your children to think more clearly so they might be able to help all our sorry asses? Those lousy academics.

[Swampy]

Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

It would be nice, Keith, if you would keep your right-wing politics off eLynah.  It adds nothing.

In a manner of speaking, I'll back up Keith.

Obama Care (aka ACA) uses mandates on employers to expand the U.S. system of employer-supplied health insurance. The obvious answer is to abolish this system altogether. Why should employers be responsible for health insurance at all? And why should a government program open up this can of worms in the form of unintended labor-market outcomes?

(This is an entirely different question from why did employers start to offer health insurance benefits and why to so many of them voluntarily continue to do so?)

But if we step back, the problem is that disease is somewhat of a random process, so insurance is appropriate protection against the bad luck of disease. But health insurance in the U.S. has become so expensive that many can't afford it. So we have a choice. Do we say tough luck to those who can't afford it, stay healthy or die? Or do we decide that everyone should have protection against the literally crippling effects of disease? If the latter, we need a way to provide insurance to those who can't afford it.

But this itself is a loaded question. Health insurance in the U.S. is so expensive because the healthcare system is so expensive. Compared to other countries, administrative costs are high (I've heard 3 x Germany's), and so too are the costs of drugs. Come up with a standardized system so your doctor's office doesn't have to have a full-time staff dealing with umpteen different insurance companies, and you'll begin to cut costs. Control price-gouging in monopolistic drug markets (protected by government patents), and you will cut even more.

So now we come to see more of a solution. It's called single-payer insurance, and just about every major industrialized country that has it also has national healthcare costs much lower than the US's and healthcare outcomes that are much better.

[Swampy]

This is not a political issue.  The cut in non-tenure track (generally adjunct) faculty is directly related to federal government mandates, primarily the health insurance law.  Whether you call it Obamacare or ACA, it has been named by the schools as the reason they cut the ranks and/or hours of non-tenure track instructors.  This isn't politics.  It is fact, no matter which party or politician you support.

I agree with you about the facts, although I think adversaries of the mandates overstate their impacts. See my earlier comment about Keith's remarks. My post starts with a factual analysis that most definitely leads to a political conclusion.

Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track.  It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track.  This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts.  However, that still leaves almost 24% of the instructors a non-tenure track.  That includes visiting professors on one year gigs that generally pay very little with almost no chance of long-term employment.  It is not easy to move to Ithaca for a low-paying one year job.  It also includes adjuncts, only a small portion of whom are brought in from industry/practice, and most of whom are PhDs with excellent qualifications who work for just a couple thousand dollars per course per semester.

In general, elite schools like Cornell have higher proportions of tenure-track faculty. Schools in major cities, Columbia or Harvard for example, may have higher percentages of tenure-track instructors, but I don't think drastically higher than isolated schools like Cornell or Dartmouth. I'd be willing to bet SUNY Cortland looks more like U. Mass. Boston than Cornell.
 

I am not an academic, but there is no profession that has felt the negatives of economic upheaval in the last 10 years like young academics.  We still value higher education and throw money at it, largely because of the unlimited student loan system (which is also due to government statute that practically prohibits default on student loans).  Schools build more and hire more and more administrators for higher and higher salaries.  Yet schools find new ways to hire fewer faculty and pay less.

There's so much bullshit in higher education today, and in the U.S. political-economic-social formation that a Princeton professor even wrote a book about it.

I love Cornell and root for its teams, but Cornell is quite guilty of this too.  When I get a call from some Cornell student asking for money, I tell them no.  Even with our poor investing performance recently, Cornell's endowment is about $2 billion, right?  Cornell builds and builds.  Cornell hires more and more administrators.  Cornell raises tuition, now to $50,000/year before room and board.  Yet the one thing they do not value is teaching and who teaches the students.

Most of us participating in this forum probably share this sentiment. We also probably share a similar attitude towards high-quality education and rigorous standards, not only because Cornell is an elite institution that sits firmly in this niche, but even among elite institutions Cornellians take a certain pride in that Cornell is known for low grade inflation, high student workloads, etc.

So this forum is a biased sample among people interested in higher education. If you go to RateMyProfessor.Com, you'll see one of the criteria for rating courses is how easy they are, with easier being better. How many of us would endorse this standard now, or even when we were still students (for the alums among us)?

One more thing.  While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities.  They generally don't care about teaching ability at all.  For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts.  For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule.  Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

I don't disagree with you. But I do think there's a big difference between, say, Princeton or MIT (Category I), Penn State (Category II), University of North Dakota (Category III), and Bemidji State (Category IV). The top-tier places can afford to look for people who are great researchers and great teachers. But don't forget, part of what makes someone a great researcher and/or teacher is a strong library, PhD students who can really help undergraduates, a budget that regularly keeps computer equipment up-to-date, a departmental enrollment and faculty large enough that each individual regularly gets to teach in their area of research, etc. It also depends on a culture that supports both teaching and research.

At lower-tier institutions, things are very different. There "teaching excellence" really means putting butts in seats. Research dollars at places like Bemijdi are probably so small, that the research grant-alumni donation model can't work. Instead, tuition dollars (especially out-of-state tuition) counts much more. So teachers better keep those little dears from Chicago and Milwaukee happy.

And at all kinds of institutions, university politics can put anyone on the spot. If the administrators don't like you and you have below-average teaching evaluations, that becomes a liability. Whereas if the administration likes you, then your teaching evaluations might be nothing more than a wink. The reverse also works. If the administrators like one professor and dislike another, the first might get tenure based largely on teaching evaluations even though the research record is weak. But if the administrators don't like you, no amount of evidence for teaching prowess -- not only evaluations, but also students well-prepared for subsequent courses, better average test scores on exams, in-class observation, etc. -- will not be enough to stop the administrators from using a mediocre research record against you.

Why they may not like you could because you're a junior version of Howard Zinn or Milton Friedman. Or, it could be because some alum or politician thinks you are. Or, it could be that some dean wanted to pad their own resume by merging your department with another, but you spoke out against this idea. One of the few good quotes from Henry Kissinger is, "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."

[KeithK]

Thread drift be damned. It's intelligent discussions like this that keep me coming to ELF in the off season.

It's the off-season.  This is largely the only reason to come here for the next few months.  Even when the discussions are TLDR (at least while I am in theory working).

[KeithK]

Obama Care (aka ACA) uses mandates on employers to expand the U.S. system of employer-supplied health insurance. The obvious answer is to abolish this system altogether. Why should employers be responsible for health insurance at all? And why should a government program open up this can of worms in the form of unintended labor-market outcomes?

I can't imagine how anyone could defend the current system of employer provided insurance except by arguing that the transition costs and disruption of elmininating such an entrenched system would be unacceptable. What one would replace it, on the other hand...

[billhoward]

The Cornell endowment is about $6 billion.

Cornell total endowment is sixth in the Ivies, still a lot compared to Ithaca College or Syracuse, not so much compared to the rest of the Ivy League or Stanford. Another way to look at endowment is endowment per student. Princeton has 10 times as much money in the bank per student as Cornell. If their endowment throws off 5% a year, they've got ~$150,000 per student; Cornell has $15,000.  

Code Select Expand

[b]
School  U-grad  Grad Total  Endow(B)  Endowment/student[/b]
Princeton  5,113  2,479  7,592  $22.70    $2,989,989
Yale   5,275  6,391 11,666  $25.60    $2,194,411
Harvard   7,181  14,044 21,225  $37.60    $1,771,496
Dartmouth  4,248   1,893  6,141   $4.70      $765,348
Penn  10,337  10,306 20,643  $10.10      $489,270
Columbia   7,160  15,760 22,920   $9.60      $418,848
Brown   6,316   2,333  8,649   $3.30      $381,547[b]
Cornell  13,931   6,702 20,633   $6.20      $300,490[/b]
Data: Wikipedia


[Scersk '97]

But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

One hopes this is the case. Is there any data that suggests the minting of PhDs is slowing down? (If I weren't such a lazy layabout, I'd try to find it myself. I hope someone else has done the digging.)

Perhaps when the baby boomers go, we all finally get to be paid for reasonable work.

And then pessimism takes over: fat chance.

[KeithK]

But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

One hopes this is the case. Is there any data that suggests the minting of PhDs is slowing down? (If I weren't such a lazy layabout, I'd try to find it myself. I hope someone else has done the digging.)

Perhaps when the baby boomers go, we all finally get to be paid for reasonable work.

And then pessimism takes over: fat chance.

Even in a free market there is no guarantee that we reach an equilibrium state where there is no surplus/scarcity. There are other factors involved besides cold, rational economic decisions. People often make decisions that do not optimize the likelihood of future economic success. I expecte that this is especially true for younger people for whom the consequences of oor decisions are less severe (no family, no debt, more time to change course).

[Rosey]

All occupations are under attack; academia is yet another sector of society from under which the rug continues to be pulled, i.e., where the conditions of employment are going through such rapid disruptive change that many of those who signed up under a different set of rules are feeling cheated.

Isn't this the story of all employment ever? What exactly is special about today's job markets? I feel like people romanticize history a lot, glossing over the ugly details of what life was actually like.

Furthermore, in almost every respect life today is much easier for the overwhelming majority of people than it was a century ago.

People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

[David Harding]

You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

Over on South Hill, the "full-time contingent faculty" at Ithaca College have followed the part-time faculty in unionizing.  http://ithacavoice.com/2016/05/ithaca-college-full-time-contingent-faculty/  Now the administration is trying to keep the two unions from joining forces.

[KeithK]

People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

It's unfair that I can't make a living manufacturing buggy whips!  Outlaw cars!

In all seriousness, I totally understand why people feel this way.  It's a natural reaction to changes in the world that affect ones life negatively. I feel for them (honest, I do!). Life isn't fair though.

(This said by someone who works in an industry that often feels like it's stuck in the 60's. Just without the funding levels.)

[Scersk '97]

People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

But what if what some scientist trained to do in his 20s leads to a breakthrough in his 30s in, say, cancer treatment: Does he deserve to be thrown out on his ass when he wants to scale back his research in order to better impart what he's learned throughout his career to the next group of potentially brilliant scientists? Or should he strenuously retrain himself (probably unnecessarily, from the pedagogical standpoint of teaching undergraduates in the great majority of courses) in order to keep abreast of "what others actually need?"

Never mind that some administrator somewhere might not have seen the monetary benefit in the course of research this scientist pursued during his 20s or 30s but was able to pursue because of the protection afforded by tenure. Nor might said administrator see the benefit in the research he pursues in his 40s that leads to another, unlooked for breakthrough. Bean counters are often pretty myopic that way. It has always been so, and that's why tenure came about in the first place.

I mean, Kyle, I know it's your bent, but how you're inveighing here against, one assumes, tenure is just another version of "my life sucks, so should yours." It's my problem with the libertarian take on labor economics in general, which seems to assume that one can and should just pick up and move on when there is no longer any need for one's labor unit in a particular situation. There's a whole lot of inefficiency inherent in all those stops and starts, some of it created by an economic system that isn't set up that way to begin with and some of it due to just being a human being.

Would that we were all perfect automata living in a libertarian utopia!