[HN Gopher] Has the 'great resignation' hit academia?
___________________________________________________________________
Has the 'great resignation' hit academia?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 83 points
Date : 2022-05-31 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| etempleton wrote:
| A few things have happend recently:
|
| 1. Covid was hard on education from kindergarten through college.
| Systems and processes that were already stressed to the max
| became overloaded and everyone was asked to do more and sometimes
| take a pay cut or have reduced benefits while doing so.
|
| 2. Society stopped valuing education as much. While once
| educators traded lower pay for the prestige of being a professor
| they can't really say it is a worthy trade anymore as a vocal
| minority do not value education at all.
|
| 3. Faculty no longer run colleges/ universities. Once faculty ran
| everything, but as regulations have tightened and colleges
| started getting sued for any number of things professional
| administrators started being required because the jobs got
| bigger. In theory this has created less work for faculty, but
| they now feel disconnected and impotent.
| 13415 wrote:
| I'll leave for sure, but for other reasons than in CS. In CS
| people leave because they get better salaries and have better job
| prospects outside academia. In my area, people leave because of
| lack of career prospects, almost no tenure-track positions,
| favoritism and corruption. But the decisive reason for me is that
| our small & poor European country has switched to the new "Pan S"
| for open science publications. This may seem like a good idea at
| first, isn't it great that every publication for a funding
| authority needs to be open access? Well, the problem is that in
| my area there are at most two good and free open access journals.
| At most. Every top journal is run by traditional publishers, and
| funding authorities have explicitly stated they will discourage
| and limit payment of open access fees. Ironically, the better the
| journal, the higher the open access fees, and the less it is
| possible to get funding for them.
|
| As nice as open access sounds in theory, in practice this new
| "Plan S" policy will mean that bullshitters who game the system
| and shouldn't even be in academia will win big time and can spit
| out one crappy publication after another. I've met people in my
| profession who literally said "Who cares if its false? It's
| another publication in your CV!" The difference between fringe
| journals and the top journals is unbelievably high in my
| discipline, people used to even count bad publications
| negatively, and a few publications in top journals used to give
| you a tenure-track position. To give you an idea of the
| difference, the former have acceptance rates of about 100%, the
| latter have acceptance rates of less than 5%. Now the top
| journals won't even count any longer _at all_ in evaluations by
| our funding authority. There is so much crap published nowadays,
| they should limit the allowed number of publications /year;
| instead they are going for the opposite, a large number of
| publications in fringe and even self-published open access
| journals. Some of my colleagues are already literally starting
| their own journals.
|
| I admit that there are many disciplines where open access works
| better, but not in mine. Maybe "Plan S" will have great and noble
| effects in 20-30 years from now, but for the generation in-
| between it's a complete disaster for anyone interested in
| quality. For me that's the decisive reason to leave.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| What is your discipline and country? That sounds like some
| ridiculously narrow minded thinking on the part of the funders.
| AlexanderDhoore wrote:
| Can anyone show me statistical evidence that this "great
| resignation" is anything more than a story made up by the media?
| jxidjhdhdhdhfhf wrote:
| It doesn't even really make sense as a concept. People resign
| from their jobs and then what? Maybe a small extra portion of
| the elderly retire early and a small portion become stay at
| home parents. The rest find new jobs.
| babypuncher wrote:
| The "Great Resignation" name is fearmongering, meant to make
| people think something bad is happening. Unemployment is at
| rock bottom; people aren't quitting, they are moving to new
| jobs. That is just the free market at work. Yet for some
| reason the "free market ooh rah" people seem the most upset
| about it.
| p1esk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation
| [deleted]
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| The BLS's records of the labor force participation rate alone
| are pretty intense. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-
| situation/civilian-lab...
| somenameforme wrote:
| Graphs with zoomed in Y axes make eyeballing often
| misleading. Consider the data:
|
| 2000-2016: -4.3% LFPR
|
| 2016-2020: +1% LFPR
|
| Current: 0.2% below what we were in September 2015 (while
| currently in a sharply increasing trend)
|
| The graph is eye popping, but the numbers themselves don't
| seem particularly exceptional.
| jldugger wrote:
| I mean, we celebrate when GDP growth rates hit 3 percent,
| and here we show a 4 percent decline in the workforce that
| generates that GDP so I don't think it's _that_ misleading,
| perhaps as a lucky coincidence. Travelling 7 years in time
| is a rather huge deal.
|
| Really, where this chart is misleading is that there are
| likely different cohorts. If stratified by decade of birth
| I would expect boomers to be most of the difference, and
| maybe even millenials offsetting it. And if so, there are
| at least two great resignation stories to tell:
|
| 1. Boomers resigning, as long predicted. in the 2008 crisis
| everyone expected them to retire but that didn't really
| happen. maybe happened this time
|
| 2. The rest of us resigning one job to start another,
| filling the vacancies created by story #1, and creating its
| own cycle of job hopping for salary bumps.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Boomers resigning, as long predicted.
|
| Changes are probably at the margins but those can still
| be significant in the aggregate. There are obviously many
| people (of all generations) that can't afford to just
| pack it. But there are also a lot of Boomers, among
| others, who--thanks in part to a long bull market--don't
| _have_ to keep working and there are a lot of reasons to
| imagine why now might be as good a time as any to wind
| down full-time employment.
| fullshark wrote:
| Here's some data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
|
| I'm not gonna claim anything here but do agree what firms /
| business are mostly complaining about is key employees changing
| jobs more so than leaving the workforce entirely.
| ghaff wrote:
| In professional circles, maybe you see some people retiring
| sooner than they would otherwise would have. Don't know. I
| haven't really seen that myself though. [ADDED: That's not
| really true in healthcare. I had two primary care doctors
| retire on me over the course of a year.] Certainly I've seen
| a fair bit of motion among fairly senior employees between
| companies but I don't know how it compares to the baseline.
|
| What anecdotally _is_ the case is that there are a lot of
| staffing issues for service sector jobs.
| pojzon wrote:
| > In professional circles, maybe you see some people
| retiring sooner than they would otherwise would have.
|
| Mother was working as a teacher for over 40 years. A real
| teacher by calling. Kids loved her, always got the most
| flowers and chocolades etc.
|
| Unfortunately she had to retire prematurely because the
| work conditions became terrible.
|
| Goverment wants you to do more and more for the same pay.
| On top of that ppl quit and you have to fill in for them
| too. Slowly the situation will resemble retail sector.
|
| Healthcare and Education are the two sections we should
| NEVER be cheap on.
|
| Unfortunately our rulers dont see that.
| mcshicks wrote:
| America spends more per Capita than any other nation.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/236541/per-capita-
| health...
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Maybe you should put forward an affirmative argument of non-
| existence or continuity with the past, etc. Otherwise, you are
| just asserting formless skepticism -- with no evidence.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Hmm; I think of it more as the null hypothesis - it is the
| alternative/proposed hypothesis that would need evidence in
| my mind. I.e. my daily necessary-for-sanity assumption is
| that 10 million gazillion things are pretty much the same
| today as yesterday; if a headline/claim is "This thing has
| changed/Occurred!", _that_ is what needs evidence in order
| for claim to be relevant /substantiated/interesting.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Or just google it.
| mcnamaratw wrote:
| Do you have any evidence of this?
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Skepticism is appropriate when there's no evidence, in
| general. No opinion on this matter.
| [deleted]
| dominotw wrote:
| great musical chairs
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It's the result of moronic short-sighted managers and HR
| departments that would rather pay replacements 50% more than
| the existing employee than to give the existing employee the
| 25% pay bump necessary to keep them.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I think this is closer to the truth. People are changing
| jobs, changing careers, going back to school, etc. more
| frequently. But I don't buy the narrative that people are
| just dropping out and living the van life or whatever. At
| least not in significant numbers.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The plural of anecdote is not data, but my employer has
| definitely felt this. In the last year they've lost
| approximately 25% of empoyees (who were _very_ long-term, not
| temps and young people only) to retirement and job moves, which
| is extremely high compared to baseline.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| To add a little color to the bare link already posted:
|
| Back in 2000 the Department of Labor started tracking the
| number of people quitting their job. The number has bounced
| between 1.5 and 2.5 percent during that time. The number
| recently went up to 3 percent, and is staying high.
|
| From that it appears "something" is happening. Given the lack
| of historical data it is impossible to tell if it is normal
| variability or something interesting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Resignation
| rednerrus wrote:
| How is this possible? Hasn't academia been cranking out more
| academics than they've needed for the past 40 years?
| hintymad wrote:
| The number of administrative staff in universities has been
| increasing faster that that of faculty. I was wondering if this
| is the culprit of run-away cost of universities and the culprit
| of general stagnation of faculty salary.
| lvl102 wrote:
| It's difficult for me to feel bad for these institutions. They
| jacked up tuitions and caused an entire generation of people to
| carry lifetime of crippling debt.
| wmeredith wrote:
| > They jacked up tuitions and caused an entire generation of
| people to carry lifetime of crippling debt.
|
| Please dig deeper if you care about this issue. My wife works
| at a state school and _by far_ the overwhelming factor on
| rising tuition has been the systematic defunding of state
| schools since the 1980 's. Our state university currently
| receives about 20% of what it once did from the state 40 years
| ago.
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| It's not like universities are just lining their pockets. I'm a
| humanities professor at a small liberal arts college with a
| high tuition, and we struggle to pay professors fair wages
| (when compared to peer institutions, which doesn't even account
| for differences in cost of living, and we're in an HCOL city).
|
| I do not fully understand the economics of higher education--
| they're complex and often opaque--but a few things to keep in
| mind:
|
| 1. Tuition seems absurd, but very few students pay the sticker
| price. At my institution, average cost after aid is 39% of
| average cost before aid, and less than some of the private K-12
| schools in this city. 2. "These institutions" are not a
| monolith. See above--especially when it comes to prestigious
| schools, many students aren't paying close to sticker price. 3.
| Families and students expect much more from colleges than they
| did a few decades ago, both in terms of facilities and
| staffing. I don't know if anyone's done a study of student
| wellness center staff sizes, but I wouldn't be surprised if
| they doubled over the past two years. 4. The sciences (and
| things like conservatories) are particularly expensive because
| of equipment/lab costs. Someone has to pay for all this. I
| think more should come from the corporate America (not sure
| how), which benefits greatly from these programs, but I'd
| venture to guess most comes from tuition and government grants.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Here's my counter argument: public high schools do it for far
| less. Outside of maybe 40 research institutes in the US, the
| rest offer about the same education as a good public high
| school. It's really not unheard of to hear college grads say
| they got better education at their high schools vs college.
| Secondly, these schools are TAX EXEMPT. They use endowments
| to basically buy buildings all the time. A great example of
| this is NYU. Really a mediocre school but happens to be the
| biggest real estate player in one of the most expensive
| markets in the world.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| I'm surprised it took them so long to get fed up, reaching the
| mid-career level. I realized doing my PhD that all of academia is
| a toxic house of cards built on cheap grad student labor, foreign
| student tuition and grant beggary, and the false promise to
| students of at least an interesting (if not particularly well-
| paid) career. If it took you until mid-career to realize this . .
| . you weren't observant and I don't really feel that sorry that
| you were asleep for so long.
| qmmmur wrote:
| Yep! I was warned almost immediately and had good supervisors.
| It doesn't change the fact that academia is built on wage
| theft, precious contracts and volatile sources of income. Don't
| even get me started on the middle manager bullshit.
| ska wrote:
| A bit over-egged, but there is not denying there are a raft of
| problems in academia.
|
| On the other hand, observant or not, it's still (nearly ) the
| only game in town for some sorts of things that people want to
| do. Some people pursue that for a long time hoping things will
| shake out ok for them... as it does very much for some.
| seydor wrote:
| Some of these things can be done by anyone yet academia
| gatekeeps the academic creds for itself. E.g. anyone can do
| machine learning research, but you can't publish in a journal
| without being affiliated to a university
| freyr wrote:
| That's not true at all. Papers come from industry all the
| time. I know of independent researchers who make up an LLC
| name and use that as their affiliation.
|
| Most people who publish in journals are affiliated with
| academia simply because that's where the vast majority of
| basic research happens.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Start your own journal? It doesn't necessarily matter that
| citations to it won't be tracked in Scopus or whatever when
| it's first launched. Even the gatekept academic journals
| aren't automatically accepted into citation databases and
| academic search engines, it usually takes several years
| after they're launched to be fully accepted. Or discard the
| journal framework entirely--as long as people who are
| interested in the work can find the work, it's fine.
|
| Edit: One of the most important papers in fracture
| mechanics was published in a campus newsletter. The
| publication venue doesn't matter that much.
| abcc8 wrote:
| That, or you were fortunate enough to matriculate into a
| program at a world-class research university with adequate
| support and funding, where your peers have graduated and gotten
| their desired next positions, and where you felt you were
| learning and gaining valuable skills? Sure, not everything is
| great all of the time, but not all PhD experiences are like you
| describe either.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| I went to a world class research University (an Ivy, top 15
| in my field). The environment is still toxic, pay is low, and
| still very few got the professorships they sought.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Where is this mystical world you describe? Are you
| tenured/tenure track faculty at a major university?
|
| I have a wide range for friends all from top tier
| universities, none of them had the experience you're
| describing. Today coming from a top tier program at a place
| like Harvard, MIT, Cornell or Yale means you have a _shot_ at
| landing a tenure gig at a mid to top tier university, but it
| sill requires a long run of post-doc wandering. The
| environments are still toxic, and the majority still end up
| fleeing to other careers to make a living.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Yeah, I realized before finishing my PhD that academia was a
| Ponzi scheme and I was one of the bag holders at the end.
| Tenure track positions haven't been growing for many years now,
| yet degrees are being awarded at far higher than replacement
| rate. TBH, I should have realized it was a list cause when I
| found out doing 3 postdocs wasn't an unusual situation.
| blahblarblar wrote:
| It's not that they weren't paying attention. It's more that
| academics egos can't handle the loss to their identity of not
| being an academic anymore.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| That's not entirely the individual's fault. With many (or
| most) academic fields, leaving academia for industry is seen
| as failing, and leaving the institution means leaving the
| network.
| blahblarblar wrote:
| It's definitely partially academia that does this. When you
| are a grad student you are paid so poorly and worked so
| hard it is difficult to build a substantial identity
| outside of being an academic. Academia is good at marketing
| itself as a noble cause that imbues very high status if you
| can ever "make it" so quiting is giving up on that lofty
| dream. Where in industry it is definitely "not cool" if you
| build your identity around your job. That creates a helpful
| firewall that pushes people to develop something outside
| their work.
| foldr wrote:
| This is very true. The only way I coped with it was by
| basically just cutting off any contact I had with people in
| my former field, with the exception of a couple of friends.
| Or at least, I like to think that I cut off contact. A more
| realistic assessment is that I simply ceased to exist to
| most of those people as soon as I left the field.
| blahblarblar wrote:
| I did the same thing. It wasn't conscious, it was more
| that they lived in a completely different world from
| where I went. We couldn't really relate as much anymore.
| Like we now had very different approaches to life.
| Academy moves so slow. When I check up on people I'm just
| shocked at how little has changed with them.
| [deleted]
| lvass wrote:
| Caring about something like this is all about ego, though.
| What good is this network if you're stuck?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >cheap grad student labor, foreign student tuition and grant
| beggary, and the false promise to students
|
| Don't forget about those sweet, sweet tax-free endowment
| investment gains.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Not sure I count as mid career yet(graduated 2018, starting PhD
| 2022) but I can certainly echo the sentiment. I work in life
| sciences academia and if it were not for me leaving for school I
| 100% would be swapping to industry. I'm even quitting a bit
| earlier than anticipated because I'm fed up.
|
| I've been getting a lot more recruitment outreach this spring,
| some good some bad. The biggest thing is that they're offering
| sometimes up to 2x my salary. My institution already compensates
| much higher than most schools (I make 70k, most research techs
| make like 30k-40k) so this was quite striking. Also hours are
| better, etc.
|
| A better barometer perhaps would be the postdocs I know, the
| majority of which are not bothering to pursue academia. Only 2
| that I'm aware of landed tenure track faculty jobs. I personally
| have no plans to stay in academia unless I somehow land a tenure
| track faculty position at a R1 university which might as well be
| like winning the lottery. I'll stick to industry or leverage my
| training to go into patent law/science policy/biotech investing.
| qmmmur wrote:
| I'm a post doc now and it's as far as I'm tolerating to go. The
| system is and I personally can have a much better life just not
| being in it. M
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| Mid-career would be associate professor or equivalent in non-
| teaching institution, where you begin to establish your own
| group, and have your own doctoral fellows.
|
| A postdoc/research associate would be early career researcher,
| where you still are a member of a research group, but might
| have bachelor's and master's students under your supervision.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| A standard career is about 40 years, so mid career is about 20
| years in
| seydor wrote:
| nothing else actively promotes and engages with minorities as the
| academia does. If these people can't make it in _that_
| environment, i doubt they can make it in open competition. On of
| the 'good' things of academia being turned to a paperpushing
| administration exercise is that it's easy (albeit boring) to do
| that kind of job at any level.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| In the UK at least there is huge discontent about the recent
| pension cuts. The salaries already suck (especially in a
| technical field such as CS), but a 40% cut to pensions as a
| reward for the efforts put in to handle COVID is just too much.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Yeah, I'd expect anyone who can get out of the field to do so
| in the UK; the pensions fiasco is the opposite of a staff
| retention effort, and in general the profession suffers from a
| lack of respect.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| My understanding, as well, is that as much as the tenure track
| situation in NA is on the disastrous side of bleak, the
| European and specifically UK tenure track (or equivalent)
| situation is almost worse.
|
| I know you pointed out salaries, but the vast majority of
| junior academics are not interested in chasing higher salaries.
| They are there for their research and the opportunities to
| pursue that research.
| udp wrote:
| The salaries suck but this is the UK. If you're in the correct
| social class to be an academic you should have your own
| independent means, and use your academic salary as nothing more
| than rent for the townhouse you're staying in while away from
| your country estate. /s
|
| (Somehow this is both sarcasm and the literal situation of
| people I know.)
| pmyteh wrote:
| When I was a postdoc at Oxford there was an article in one of
| the university magazines complaining that full professors
| could no longer afford one of the lovely giant late-Victorian
| villas in North Oxford that used to be occupied by academics.
|
| Hilariously, it turns out that was _always the case_. The
| profs with the fancy houses were never doing it on their
| university salaries; they were doing it on family money.
| Meanwhile, one of my colleagues resigned and left because he
| couldn 't afford to pay rent for him and his partner in
| Oxford on a postdoc salary. Plus ca change...
| _Wintermute wrote:
| I'm in academia in London at the moment and this really
| struck true. All the senior staff bought their houses for
| pennies 30 years ago which are now worth millions, and don't
| seem to understand why the more junior staff are so worked up
| about salaries. Rent is 50% of our pay cheque and any house
| within an hours commute is 10x annual salary.
| [deleted]
| icelancer wrote:
| > huge discontent about the recent pension cuts
|
| I get this, but these are almost all ponzi schemes when
| "guaranteed" by the government or some form of bureaucracy. We
| deal with it in the US. Chicago and Philadelphia public
| pensions are underwater with no way to solve the problem, so
| elected officials kick the can down the road until it blows up.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Wrong. In the UK the universities collectively are part of
| USS, the biggest private pension fund in the UK The annoying
| thing is that this was in rude health until the university
| management controlled board decided to take a pension
| valuation during the middle of COVID. The driving factor is
| that 10 years or so ago the university sector was deregulated
| such that universities are no longer capped in terms of the
| number of students they can take. This has lead to vicious
| competition between universities to hoover up as many
| students as possible. As a result they are no longer willing
| to cross-subsidize each others pension funds.
| icelancer wrote:
| >> As a result they are no longer willing to cross-
| subsidize each others pension funds.
|
| >> universities are no longer capped in terms of the number
| of students they can take
|
| >> Some form of bureaucracy
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Fair enough, was just pointing out it's not (primarily) a
| government backed scheme (in theory at least).
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Universities are in trouble. I know of three that are unable to
| hire for senior and middle positions. They've been advertising
| for months. Here (UK), Brexit is partly to blame, along with post
| Cov19 fatigue, and aging population with many retiring. As I've
| said in other comments, the main problem is that academia has
| become hideously corrupted by "professional management" values
| leading to de-skilling as good people leave.
| pvaldes wrote:
| This didn't started with covid19. It started with Bologne.
| randomsearch wrote:
| > As I've said in other comments, the main problem is that
| academia has become hideously corrupted by "professional
| management" values leading to de-skilling as good people leave.
|
| As I've said in other comments, this is correct - I can confirm
| this is the case at several top tier UK universities.
| cehrlich wrote:
| I don't know about other parts of the UK, but I interviewed for
| some (senior) lecturer positions last year and the salary was a
| joke by London standards. I'm not comparing to lofty SWE
| salaries here, but just compared to what it takes to make a
| decent living in London.
| krastanov wrote:
| What does "senior and middle positions" mean? Are you talking
| about something that has the potential to be a tenured
| position, non-tenured academic positions, or non-academic
| positions?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| By senior I mean "senior or associate professors and
| lecturers" like myself, and by middle I mean postdoc full
| lecturers with at least 5-10 years. I don't know what to say
| about the word "tenured" because it's meaning seems very
| different in the UK than it is used in USA. In the US I get
| the idea people think "tenure" makes you impossible fire. Yet
| here I know of two full professors with over 20 years
| service, scores of publications and teaching awards in their
| pockets who were "let go" (forced quit). I know many more who
| are planning to quit, and there seems a dearth of
| replacements to step into their shoes.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Where are you based?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Institutions? I'm actually really lucky in that I teach
| internationally at multiple institutions, university and
| non-university. What's useful and interesting is it gives
| me a broad taste of politics (as well as a way to stay
| out of the melee).
|
| That's why I'm quite confident in saying generally
| "universities are in trouble". I've seen it over time and
| geography. Not all places of higher learning are. Some
| private and state entities are thriving. What is killing
| the universities, in my opinion, is they're caught in a
| no-mans-land, as neither fully state entities, nor
| private concerns.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Ah, interesting. Yes, our current position is deeply
| unhelpful. State enough that VCs will jump to follow some
| arbitrary after-dinner speech by the Minister, but
| private enough that we're competing in a 'market' with
| each other and carry a bunch of financial risks directly.
|
| Colleagues in other countries have suggested that "each
| unhappy university system is unhappy in its own way".
| Hugely constrained funding in some countries, direct
| government interference in others, rampant casualisation
| in a third, a collapse in scholarship in a fourth...
| [deleted]
| arghnoname wrote:
| I had the training and a reasonable chance at an acceptable
| offer if I went on the academic job market, but I bailed
| out and went into industry instead of trying my hand on it.
| To my mind, it doesn't make sense to try to break into and
| establish yourself in such a competitive field with all of
| the problems of academia.
|
| I also knew plenty of more senior professors that left the
| field, which didn't encourage me to backfill it. Strangely
| enough, whatever difficulty there may be in the more senior
| ranks, entry sure seems like a grind.
| TSiege wrote:
| Interesting. Are you in STEM or some other field? As an
| outsider I'm curious if this is specific to some fields
| or the same across academia
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| CS/EE, so yeah, the blight affects all areas, even the
| ones you'd imagine were "safer".
| pmyteh wrote:
| We don't have tenure as such in the UK (it was abolished by
| Thatcher). We do have jobs with permanent contracts; these
| used to be really quite secure (occasional department-closure
| redundancies notwithstanding) but the current batch of senior
| managers seem keen to make everyone afraid for their jobs. My
| own university (Liverpool) attempted more than 50
| redundancies on the basis of dodgy performance metrics last
| year and generated six months worth of industrial action.
| There are also (increasing) numbers of teaching and research
| staff on casual and temporary contracts. Some of these are
| postdocs, others equivalent to US adjuncts or Visiting
| Assistant Professors.
|
| Our middle and senior management are increasingly a separate
| class. It used to be that management was done by established
| academics on a temporary basis: the department's full
| professors take their turn as head of department, for
| example, and the Pro-Vice-Chancellors (deputy Presidents)
| would have recently been senior profs. Nowadays, heads of
| department tend to be externally recruited as such, there's
| an increasing group of senior management that have never been
| academics, and those that have been are essentially part of a
| separate management track that doesn't really interact with
| the career paths of the rest of us.
|
| The traditional governance measures have also broken down: it
| used to be that the faculty Senate was (probably
| over-)powerful; now management is corporate-style in the
| hands of Vice Chancellors-as-CEOs with their senior
| management colleagues and carefully selected 'independent'
| non-execs serving as oversight.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >unable to hire for senior and middle positions
|
| As usual with these claims, chances are it's due to the fact
| that these positions don't pay enough to be competitive.
| lozenge wrote:
| Maybe, but UK universities don't have much headroom. They
| can't raise their student fees past the government set level;
| the government funding per student has decreased; only the
| oldest institutions have massive endowments; and they don't
| spend crazy amounts on sport, admin or pampering students.
|
| Some of them can try to squeeze their student base a bit more
| (increase accommodation prices, reduce subsidies in the food
| halls, etc) but the students don't have access to private
| loans so they can't afford much.
| jknoepfler wrote:
| I mean... If the voters won't pay more taxes to fund their
| own educational institutions, then that's that yeah? The
| people are letting their centers of learning rot because
| they don't value them.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think this would be such a problem if the
| job wasn't getting so grim. It's HR 101 that salaries help
| with recruitment but are less important for retention and
| that a cash raise can't substitute for a poor working
| environment. Even with the 20% salary cuts of the last
| decade I don't think they'd have much trouble obtaining
| enough staff (outside London) if people felt respected.
| pvaldes wrote:
| And the surrealist list of artificial obstacles and
| requisites unrelated with the job, (but copy-pasted since
| middle ages by inertia in each job offer) will alienate your
| desired target
| meling wrote:
| Prof. from Norway here. While it sounds like the situation in the
| US and UK is worse than our own, I'm seriously considering moving
| to industry after 20 years in academia. Mainly fed up by ever
| growing admin, and stupid financial oversight regulations, and
| the general workload... and many other things that isn't wise to
| complain about publicly.
| upupandup wrote:
| For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it
| possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities?
| Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and
| come up with course materials.
| t_mann wrote:
| Definitely consider it! Financially, you'll barely break even
| in the beginning after accounting for commuting and how much
| work it is to set up a course initially, but emotionally it's
| very rewarding. As a nice perk, sometimes students (usually the
| smartest ones) will ask you if you have projects for them to
| dig deeper, so you've got a great talent pool at your hand.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Yes! Absolutely!
|
| In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested.
| Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find
| people who have a software engineering background and are
| looking to teach.
|
| Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any
| universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
| icelancer wrote:
| I am going the other way, humorously enough. I know a few people
| who are, too - people who made their mark in the "private"
| sector, made enough money via their own small business / startup
| / MANGA job, and are pursuing a graduate-level degree lazily over
| a half-decade with ideas of teaching part-time for fun.
|
| Surely doesn't help people who want to make actual money doing
| the job, but it doesn't seem like that's realistic for 90% of
| people anyway.
| tpmx wrote:
| Lol, no.
| rr808 wrote:
| Baby boomers retiring is going to hit most faculty very hard. Not
| sure if it means new opportunities for the younger staff or just
| the whole department will fall apart.
| joshgroban wrote:
| This is actually really scary. As American universities become
| less powerful I shudder to think of what kind of radical politics
| and cultural narratives will sweep the nation.
| Clubber wrote:
| Are you being serious or sarcastic?
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Or China will take over advanced manufacturing.
| nikanj wrote:
| Turns out making increasingly complex things was a better
| strategy than making increasingly complex financial
| instruments
| daenz wrote:
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Isn't this exactly the opposite of the current state? That the
| overwhelming power of Universities in the US is what spreads
| cultural and political movements? I think you could argue that
| the entire Woke enterprise is centered on Universities
| particularly elite ones.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| > entire Woke enterprise
|
| How are you defining "Work enterprise"?
|
| Note: Work should be Woke. Error on my part.
| all2 wrote:
| No, no, I think GP means "Woke".
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Indeed, edited to reflect that.
| themitigating wrote:
| Can you argue that is the source and/or the majority of the
| people? Maybe the views of a small number of academics have
| been amplified by those who have opposite political views and
| a dedicated audience
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Not a Historian but it seems pretty clear that a lot of
| activism comes directly out of Universities. Berkeley is
| famous in that regard for example. These movements do tend
| to ripple across the country.
| LightG wrote:
| /Start
|
| Subroutine: auto-detect use of 'Woke'; start flush opinion
| routine.
|
| Set recurring reminder note to user - don't ever get this
| intellectually cringe.
|
| /End
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Heh... I think this is subtle trolling.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My niece left academia for Draper Labs, where she has had a very
| productive career. Done far more for society than she would have,
| at a school. Instead of struggling for grants for her basic and
| applied research, often finding herself unfunded for a term or
| year unexpectedly, she's funded liberally and makes quick
| progress on important issues. Never looked back.
|
| Something is broken in Academia.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Years ago i had an option to start an academic carreer (after
| finishing my studies), and the basic situation back then was
| publish-or-parish for titles and etting your own EU/locally
| funded projects/grants and doing most of the stuff yourself,
| while being limited a lot by paycheck (you're still a public
| employee) and promotions to tenured positions, because basically,
| the person there had to die, since it was impossible to remove
| them, and almost none of them retired voulontarily...
|
| So I said "nope".
| mikewarot wrote:
| Here in the US, I expect a lot of K-12 teachers to be leaving the
| field. The additional demands created by Covid were the last
| straw for many. Their employment contracts are such that they
| have to give months of notice, so I expect all to be quiet until
| August, then panic everywhere as slots can't be filled.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Why wouldn't you have expected them to leave last summer? I
| have a couple friends here in CA who did.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'm guessing the hope that the 2021-22 school year would be
| better.
| blululu wrote:
| (Public School) Teacher pay is largely structured to encourage
| retention. The salary is pretty lousy if you only do it for 2
| years, but if you stick around for 40 years it is a well paying
| job in most States. The pay increases for seniority and the
| compounding interest of pensions add up to a very good salary.
| There is also the other problem that a lot of states require an
| education degree to teach in public schools which is somewhat
| specialized. A lot of mid-career educators that I have spoken
| with find that their skills don't really qualify them for a lot
| of jobs and becoming a private school teacher typically means a
| pay cut.
| munk-a wrote:
| To be honest though - even rather senior teachers in the
| states can expect a large pay bump if they emigrate to
| Canada. There is pretty decent competition to get into the
| teacher's union up here but due to the much more reasonable
| salaries for a career that most people enter due to their
| love of the field folks are happy to stay in the public side
| of education.
| brianwawok wrote:
| And in college, the situation is reversed.
|
| My econ prof was from Canada and told us all the time what
| a better racket the US is to make money. All while making
| us buy a $90 book that he wrote and changed editions
| yearly.
|
| At least he was honest that he was robbing us blind.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| It's literally not structured to encourage retention,
| definitely not at the same school. Those salary schedules on
| district websites? Those are for new hires. So someone with
| 40 years of experience in one school will be paid less than
| someone hired with 40 years. Raises aren't at all guaranteed
| each year and even when you do get them, they often don't
| match the salary schedule of someone hired new to the
| district.
|
| Also 40 years of experience doesn't pay much in general. I
| was paid more as a new associate developer than I would have
| with 40 years of experience and a masters degree as a
| teacher.
|
| Pensions don't have compounding interest, they are defined
| benefits. And often they are in place of social security
| (though the amount you pay in as a teacher is basically
| equivalent to social security taxes). They can be good, but
| it's risky and depends on the state. Lots of states like to
| raid the pension fund and then promise to make it up later
| (but rarely do). Cutting pensions is also a popular move to
| score political points, so it's possible that you could
| always end up with little to nothing by the time you retire.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Well now they're discussing also teachers to require to be
| armed guard as well. Brilliant idea eh?
| bsder wrote:
| Teachers are not waiting. I know of several who retired mid-
| year. That _NEVER_ used to happen.
|
| Covid didn't break their back--shitty parents did. Covid just
| ran the parental shittiness meter up to max.
|
| And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now have
| multiple students who actually had a parent _die_. In a normal
| year, that would be rare and that child would get lots of
| counseling. With Covid--it 's too common and the teachers have
| to deal with it. Just like everything else.
|
| And people wonder why teachers are quitting ...
| muaytimbo wrote:
| Studies show that students didn't learn almost at all during
| covid (1). Understandable that remote learning likely isn't
| good in general and that teachers were not trained to teach
| in this setting but parents might have realized their
| children were not learning at all and fair or not placed this
| blame on the teachers.
|
| 1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022376118
| prepend wrote:
| > practically all teachers now have multiple students who
| actually had a parent die.
|
| This is extremely unlikely and if you know multiple teachers
| with this condition you just have really bad luck.
|
| Only about 60k COVID deaths are 30-49 [0] with another 200k
| for 50-64. This is about 25% of COVID deaths in the US.
|
| There's 50M school kids between k-12 [1] so the odds of a kid
| having a parent who died is really low: 1:50M/60k _2 for
| typical age range of school age kids or 1:50M /260k_2 if you
| lump in the older age group, but I think that age group is
| less likely.
|
| So if you're a teacher and teach 7 classes of 30 students
| your odds of having a single kid with a parent who died is
| 50% so certainly not "practically all teachers."
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-
| deaths-... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=3
| 72#PK12-enroll...
| samatman wrote:
| > _And, to put a cherry on top, practically all teachers now
| have multiple students who actually had a parent die._
|
| This can't possibly be the case. 67,366 adults between the
| ages of 18 and 49 have died (of COVID) in the US during the
| entire pandemic. There are 25 million children of primary
| school age in the US.
|
| Why explains this discrepancy? Social media. Every teacher
| _has seen other teachers mourning the death of parents on
| social media_ , and that feels like something that actually
| happens to you.
|
| But no. It is absolutely not the case that practically all
| teachers have multiple students who lost parents to COVID.
| The math is completely off.
| crmd wrote:
| My sister got a masters in education and taught for 5 years in
| the NYC school system, hating every moment of it. A big SaaS
| company took a risk on her and hired her as a salesperson. She
| is crushing it, working from home, and occasionally reminiscing
| about the night and day difference in well-being between
| working at schools vs a real company.
| kd913 wrote:
| At some point, this nonsense has to stop. Both in the UK and the
| US.
|
| 1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna cripple
| the economy and are vastly unsustainable. Especially given the
| ridiculous payback terms that change on a whim every year, and
| vastly unsustainable interest rates. People aren't earning enough
| to pay them back either.
|
| 2) Grants are being used as a negotiation tactic, with EU horizon
| funding being held hostage by the NI protocol negotiations.
|
| 3) There looks to be a sharp drop off of Chinese student inflows
| post-covid.
|
| 4) We are hitting a bump where we will soon see the population
| curve drop, and a dramatically reduced number of people attending
| Uni.
|
| 5) As much as people decry the pension changes, I have seen the
| values given to senior professors and academics. They are vastly
| unsustainable.
|
| 6) University appears to be hitting a weird point of serving too
| many functions. It props up real-estate, loads millennials/gen-X
| with debt, acts as a adult school, and provides critical
| research. A lot of these functions should frankly be split up for
| different purposes.
|
| Don't even get me started in regards to the current ridiculous
| scheme used to train junior doctors and nurses.
|
| 7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what point
| does the value of this come into question? Professors barely
| learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open university
| degree.
|
| 8) At some point someone is gonna realize that the paper
| generated by some of these institutions is not gonna help in a
| rapidly shrinking junior job market. The nature of which appears
| to be rapidly changing.
|
| 9) Current Universities work on vastly exploiting their phd
| students, supervisors, postgrads and teaching assistants at close
| to minimum wage. People are gonna realize this isn't worth it,
| especially with rapid CoL rises.
| pmyteh wrote:
| FWIW on your (5) there's nothing unsustainable about the most
| recent iteration of the pension scheme. The problems are an
| interesting (if infuriating) combination of the employers
| wanting to kill the defined benefit scheme to save money, the
| government's regulatory framework being designed to protect
| pensionholders in closed defined benefit schemes and not to run
| functional private DB schemes (which are nearly all gone), the
| Trustee company being untrustworthy, and the governance
| arrangements being poor. The only people really committed to
| the scheme continuing are its members, for whom it's
| theoretically run but in practice have very little control over
| it.
|
| If you want an illustration of the magnitude of the problem the
| might resonate with HNers: the USS Trustee is aiming to achieve
| _CPI+0% investment returns for the next 40 years_. With long-
| run equity returns being what they are, that 's borderline
| criminal. (It's certainly not the investment strategy that
| universities will be adopting for their own endowments).
|
| The honest truth is that the USS was highly solvent on a going
| concern basis before the recent changes (which already involved
| prospective cuts of 30% to accruals only a few years ago). It
| only generates a deficit if you model closing the scheme
| tomorrow and shunting the entire fund into gilts in order to
| eliminate all investment risk. But even if you do that, the
| _scheme can still pay_ : it's explicitly backed by the combined
| assets of every scheme member, which includes all the richest
| universities and (hilariously) _the government_.
|
| Oh, and the present cuts will take it down to less than half
| the pension of our colleagues in the newer post-92 universities
| who are in the Teachers' Pension Scheme. What price a formal
| government guarantee?
| kd913 wrote:
| I am not particularly talking about the most recent iteration
| of the pension scheme which I can imagine being a lot more
| cut down and closer to traditional private pension schemes.
|
| Largely talking about my experience seeing my parents'(30
| year professors) pension who are in the Teacher's pension
| scheme along with other pension schemes.
|
| From my perspective, I was blown away by the figures they
| were being given. With my points in regards to a potential
| drop in grants, and funding from students. I fail to see how
| the figures I saw will be sustainable going forward.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Yeah, those days were ended years ago. The present
| generation of senior management are doing _very_ nicely
| though: their historically-acquired final salary
| entitlements with a generous accrual rate coupled with
| recent insane inflation in senior management salaries mean
| they 're going to make out like bandits.
|
| My own projected pension is PS13,180 a year, based on about
| 30 years' worth of (mostly future) combined
| employer/employee contributions of 30% of a salary of a
| little less than PS40k/yr. Big bucks it is not.
| e40 wrote:
| I'm not exactly sure what the GP was talking about, but if
| the pension benefits are guaranteed and greater than the
| return on funds invested in the pension, then the only way
| the pension plan could be sustainable would be in some growth
| scenarios. In many growth scenarios, though, it wouldn't be.
|
| This a problem with many public sector pension plans. Many
| cities across this country have pension plans that guarantee
| pensioners income that cannot be paid from the plan without
| screwing over future retirees.
|
| Clearly this issue has to be evaluated system by system.
| pmyteh wrote:
| Oh yes, absolutely. This particular scheme is very heavily
| pre-funded (currently to ~30% of salary, which is why many
| employers want it dead) and is sustainable as long as your
| investment strategy isn't 'putting the money under the
| mattress'. Yes, residual investment risk falls on the
| universities collectively (by deliberate scheme design) but
| it's certainly not one of the over-promised schemes of the
| kind you note. In fact, it's status as a nominally private-
| sector scheme subjects it to heavy regulation specifically
| to ensure that the government doesn't get left holding the
| bag.
|
| If you want far more detail than is sane, there was a
| 'Joint Expert Panel' set up by the employers organisation
| and the union to provide a way forward after the industrial
| action caused by the last attempt to abolish the scheme.
| Their report analyses USS in detail (rather than pension
| schemes in general) and is at https://web.archive.org/web/2
| 0220506092908/https://ussjep.or...
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| > 7) Given we have had 2 years of at home lecturing, at what
| point does the value of this come into question? Professors
| barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth 3x an open
| university degree.
|
| Two years of home lecturing that by all accounts has resulted
| in close to two years of lost progress if my observation of
| teachers complaining about ill-prepared students is anything to
| go by.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think I noticed more divergence in the level of preparation
| (although, didn't try to quantify it -- grad student here,
| limited responsibility/scope/ability to make change, so just
| informal observations). It makes sense -- with at-home
| instruction there's less of an opportunity to just passively
| check in with students, remote lectures are easier to ignore,
| and it is easier to cheat on tests when they are remote (so,
| unprepared students can get through more easily).
|
| In particular -- it was a real struggle to get my first year
| college students to do any group work (an opportunity they'd
| usually jump at, because 50% responsibility, right?).
|
| If this actually is the case, it is a really unfortunate
| outcome. I'm opposed to getting kids sick/exposing them to
| "mystery long-term health consequences." But setting them up
| for academic regression is also no good.
|
| All in all, 0/10 pandemic, would not pandemic again. Not sure
| there could have been a positive outcome. Not sure what the
| least-bad option could have been. I wish we'd done more,
| though. I think we may have failed.
|
| I wish we'd tried some really out there strategies. A pet
| idea I wanted to suggest was having the students on campus
| and organizing them by major into units -- so, your
| dorm/floor (depending on the size of the building) is all
| your-major students and it forms a unit. Call it the Harry
| Potter strategy. You can socialize normally with each other,
| maybe classrooms are assigned to a given unit. Maybe a grad
| student is assigned to (live with?) the unit (hard, though,
| grad students have their own lives going on and I guess they
| wouldn't want to restrict themselves enough to safely
| interact in person with the students -- I don't think I
| could). Lectures could be broadcast to the unit, with some
| local representative for the instructor. No interactions
| between units, but at least the students would have _some_
| peers to interact with. But I don 't anyone would have been
| brave enough take responsibility for this sort of thing
| safety-wise (I certainly wouldn't), and I don't know that I'd
| trust the average school to work out all the details. But if
| it worked out, it could have been really something!
|
| Actually, I guess we're far along enough to see if anywhere
| tried that out, and if so, if it worked out.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > Professors barely learning how to use a laptop are not worth
|
| I have a lot of friends and acquaintances that are university
| professors and it was frankly embarrassing how many of them
| could not be bothered to learn to adapt to online teaching.
| There was endless complaining about basic things that anyone
| who works in an office doing meeting with remote teams has to
| learn.
|
| There are entire industries based around providing educational
| content online, and even more based around creating engaging
| content online. It's more or less a solved problem and someone
| with a Phd should certainly be capable of learning a few new
| tricks. You're not tasked with some impossible challenge,
| you're just being asked to rethink how you teach for the
| benefit of hundreds of students paying collectively millions of
| dollar to learn from you.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| No matter how much people say it, online learning is a vastly
| inferior product to in person teaching.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| > 1) Student loan plans (especially in the UK) are gonna
| cripple the economy and are vastly unsustainable.
|
| Why do you say that about the UK? I'm not from there and this
| is the first I'm hearing about problems with UK student debt.
| pmyteh wrote:
| They're backstopped by the government, in that they're
| written off after ~30 years if they weren't paid off in that
| time by the 9% marginal income charge. The scheme was
| designed as a backdoor graduate tax rather than a
| conventional finance agreement, and the government has been
| using them like a credit card to fund the universities off-
| balance-sheet. Which will be difficult to continue.
| kd913 wrote:
| So the current plan 2 loans are about 15k per year of study.
| So for a typical 4 year course, that is about 60k worth of
| loans.
|
| If you take a 6 year medical course, you are on your own for
| the 2 extra years at least from a maintenance grant AFAIK.
| Hence a lot of students, especially those in London
| struggling for their 5th and 6th year of study. Don't even
| get my started in regards to the junior doctor salary.
|
| The payback terms of this is 9% of everything you gain beyond
| a specific threshold i.e. anywhere from 20-25k.
|
| After 30 years, theoretically the loan gets wiped off
| (unlikely). Already there are talks of extending it for the
| next gen plans by another 10 years.
|
| The interest rate for this student loan is RPI + 3.5, and
| adjusts higher the more you earn. Effectively becoming almost
| impossible to pay back apart from those who are the absolute
| highest earners.
|
| So far, we have seen the government repeatedly change both
| the repayment threshold, and the time before it gets wiped.
|
| Given NI rises, I have seen effective marginal tax rates up
| to 60%.
|
| At the end of the day, the rich are gonna pay it off
| immediately and avoid the problem, the middle get loaded and
| pay back far more than necessary during the loan lifetime,
| and the bottom may get it wiped off but forget the idea of
| having savings or disposable cash.
|
| https://www.student-loan-calculator.co.uk/
|
| The current system basically reduces massively disposable
| spending for middle and low earners, doesn't affect the top
| earners. It also is an effective black hole given most people
| aren't expected to be able to fully pay back the loan. This
| will have a massive impact on the economy and government
| finances. Especially given this is an open blackhole.
| RandomWorker wrote:
| I left academia for a software company, not midway my career but
| at the early start.
|
| The decision is easy when you have mouths to feed, wages don't
| keep up, and I can earn double my salary doing the fun part of my
| work (ML+optimization+data/energy modelling in civil engineering
| space) literally the next day. I was working with all kinds of
| companies to help them get started with this kind of work.
| Instead of sending my students I just leapt and it's been a
| tremendous experience. If I return I will be a better professor,
| however not publishing for a couple of years may kill that dream.
| Right now, it's a great feeling not to have to worry about food
| and I can actually focus more on doing my job better. I feel bad
| about leaving my group, but they can find someone more hungry
| than me that wants it more.
| samvher wrote:
| What you mention as "the fun part" does sound pretty
| interesting. Sounds like you're contracting/consulting? Any
| advice on finding assignments in the field? (For someone with a
| DS + non-civil engineering background)
| xtracto wrote:
| I left academia after 8 years (4 PhD, 4 Postdoc) to go into a
| startup (non US). For me, I was disillusioned with what being
| in academia meant: Publish or Perish meant publishing whatever
| crap mid-work you had for the sake of putting something out. At
| the time I was also a blind-reviewer in a couple of
| publications, and the amount of trash papers that arrived due
| to the same issue was astounding (and no, I didn't get paid to
| do that).
|
| I would love to do research and science, but I just hate the
| current status of that "industry".
|
| And this is considering that I traded a "comfortable" life in
| Germany, with all the great social safeties in there (I didn't
| have a problem with the language) for a Mexican based startup
| with very high risk. And the pay was even not that different.
| After 10 years of my decision, I can say I took the best path,
| given that it took me to work in other startups that have been
| doing amazingly well and for which I've got some good amount of
| stocks.
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