[HN Gopher] Oxford accused of relying on young academics employe...
___________________________________________________________________
Oxford accused of relying on young academics employed on gig-
economy terms
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 144 points
Date : 2024-11-17 10:43 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| atemerev wrote:
| So, you will be taught only by people who do not need to earn
| money to live. I.e., aristocrats. This is by design, I suppose.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is the foundation of all academia currently. It's a nice
| pyramid scheme while you've got it, I just finished witnessing my
| youngest brother go through it in grad school and his defense is
| on Tuesday.
| wslh wrote:
| > It's a nice pyramid scheme...
|
| Before I became aware of criticisms likening universities to
| pyramid schemes, I recall hearing a Stanford professor managing
| a large research team say something like: "For this project, we
| have around 150 PhD students exploring it further in many
| directions". I was astonished by the sheer scale of their
| capabilities, especially because I liked the subject and had
| hoped to explore it as a hobby with just a few like-minded
| friends.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I've had similar experiences on a with various ideas for
| compilers and for C++ debugging.
|
| Although I'm my case, the other people were mostly at FAANG
| companies, rather than academia.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| And who gets, uh, takes the credit when one of the PhD
| students "breaks through"?
| GordonAShumway wrote:
| Yep! Ask any PhD candidate in America how they love those
| poverty level wages!
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| Academia can be criticized as unsustainable as the OP does
| because the number of graduate students exceeds the number of
| secure employment positions available after one defends one's
| dissertation or does a postdoc. However, the American model
| of PhD students being impoverished while studying isn't the
| only one. In several European countries, the norm is for PhD
| students to be university employees under contract that
| receive a pretty standard middle-class salary. In various
| other countries, decent middle-class funding may have to come
| from outside the university, but it's a semi-automatic
| process for anyone whose research plan was solid enough to
| get accepted as a PhD student in the first place.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Shouldn't they be paid a decent wage for the teaching,
| itself?
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Dude, I went through the European PhD system and it's not
| as glamorous as you depict it. First of all, you forgot to
| mention that the norm is to give contracts of 50% to 75%
| FTE. Secondly the hours worked and the vacation time is a
| complete forgery that you are basically forced to sign.
| Although the contract is nice on paper, in practice the
| norms and expectations are different. Thirdly, unlike in
| the US, in Europe you often don't have a graduate school
| (although it is a thing) so you are in a very vulnerable
| situation where you invest 3 to 5 years of the best years
| of your life and during those years your graduation is
| completely at the mercy of that supervisor.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| There is no "European PhD system" in terms of funding, or
| the duties expected of a PhD student other than the
| production of the dissertation. Different countries
| around the world do it differently, and that is true even
| within Europe.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > the American model of PhD students being impoverished
| while studying
|
| This might be true in some cases, but I suspect that
| ultimately it's only the wealthy who can pursue these
| higher degrees. Yes, the pay might be low but that doesn't
| mean they are overall impoverished.
|
| Put another way, the cost of education is one thing, but
| being able to afford the process might be a higher bar, for
| some, or more.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Higher education doesn't want to shed its clergy status. It's
| like they can't figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit
| or just this crazy godly thing that is _priceless_ but somehow
| has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to
| value ...
|
| They sell indulgences at this point, and I don't think it's a
| false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must
| pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do
| you question the price of something that's equated to a gift from
| god or certainly using the same language - more or less.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Well put, and that's a good part of the reason they're going
| the way of the Catholic Church.
|
| That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But,
| tomato/tomahto, ya know?
| graemep wrote:
| Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and
| the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades.
| ta988 wrote:
| Like a star near the end of its life.
| II2II wrote:
| > Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the
| price for their product or be doomed as a person.
|
| One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the
| university. Employers also play a role, when they demand
| accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do
| research on what type of training they need to enter a field.
|
| As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude
| of people work within universities and those people have very
| different motivations from one another. Heck, they have very
| different motivations from one another even if they have the
| same job title. Painting them with one brush is excessive.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I never said "professors" or "deans". I mentioned higher
| education specifically, as an industry. It's the same as the
| wedding industry, they don't give a fuck that they sell so
| much stuff around the romanticism of weddings regardless of
| its true value.
|
| Behold the romanticization of the diamond ring.
|
| You just, I don't know, you convince people in their
| vulnerability, in love, hey, this is what love _really_ is,
| an expensive ring, venue, etc
|
| Higher education at this point _preys_ on the dreams of the
| parent /child via a financial vector.
|
| It's highly pathetic that such a highly regarded element of
| society has the same business model as a movie theater, which
| is roughly "now that we found the people that want the real
| movie experience, we get to charge them $10 for popcorn and
| $7 for a soda".
|
| Then the family walks out of the movie theater "hey we're
| broke, but you really showed us the value of a real movie
| going experience, we'll cherish forever". I guess? What is
| this nonsense?
|
| Part of any good experience involves not getting ripped off,
| on any level.
| ak_111 wrote:
| "Selling indulgence" is a bit of gross generalisation though.
| Getting a medicine or technical degree from a top-tier
| university _does_ prepare you technically for a very
| technically demanding job. Whatever replacement you imagine for
| this phase of such occupations will end up reinventing
| something very similar to university. Do you imagine people
| should jump straight into these occupations without undergoing
| some kind of training /testing that they reached a certain
| level of technical understanding of their occupation?
|
| The problem is that many universities have accreted huge
| management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not
| unique to universities.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I'm not really beating around the bush. A university cannot
| normalize the prices of all of their majors around outlier
| majors that have more market demand. They cannot also bundle
| a "premium" package of the college experience (which
| evidently now involves indentured servitude, which I'm
| guessing comes after premium room and board pricing?). Check
| the whole bill, everything is out of whack.
|
| Drop the prices of 90% of majors, that one should be obvious.
|
| Sharing the wealth should be obvious too, but that one isn't
| either apparently. So they overcharge, and then don't pay
| their own.
|
| It's massive pricing issue mired in severe levels of piety
| and self importance. No one wants to replace universities,
| they want them to stop scamming.
| ak_111 wrote:
| I am arguing this is mostly explained by universities being
| taken over mba-type managers: launching new products (i.e
| non-sensical degrees), turning university study into an
| "experience", ... is all the sort of thing that mba type do
| and not unique to university (see Boing, Intel, ...)
|
| But the core idea of university remains as sound and
| essential to a well-functioning society as it gets. From
| time immemorial you needed gatekeepers to recognised
| professions who: a) provide hands-on training to the next
| generation b) certify that a trainer has reached a
| sufficient level of mastery to practice the profession.
| Calling this process "selling indulgence" is my issue with
| your argument.
| kergonath wrote:
| This comment and the whole tread are completely surreal. What
| clergy status, exactly? The second paragraph makes absolutely
| no sense, either.
| vr46 wrote:
| I took a position at a prominent London university to teach one
| of their courses and I did it for the love of it, because it was
| less than two days contracting for an entire term of lecturing
| and marking. Forget that coming into college to teach was
| effectively an entire day of my time for a two hour lecture or
| seminar, I think I was paid by the hour. This practice goes on
| everywhere and the real losers are the students/customers.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| All UK universities do this. Not necessarily a bad thing unlike
| how the article portrays it. PhD students (and depending on the
| institution, postdocs) in the UK get a stipend that has no
| mandated teaching hours. Teaching allows PhD students to earn
| some extra income within the university.
|
| We certainly still have a compensation problem in academia.
| Bright STEM PhD grads don't want to earn PS30-40k as a postdoc
| when earning PS150k+ in big tech or finance isn't unusual.
| However, PhD students earning a little side income by marking lab
| reports or programming assessments isn't necessarily bad.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Was about to say the same. Haven't PhD students usually done
| tutorials and supervised labs to undergraduates for the extra
| cash. Certainly was the case in my electronics undergrad course
| a few decades ago.
|
| > in 2023-24 one in five tutorials (20%) were taught by hourly-
| paid tutors - typically PhD students or academics at the start
| of their career.
| njjnjj wrote:
| Depends on the university. 25 years ago now but a number of
| the PhD students I worked with had mummy and daddy paying for
| everything. One enterprising guy had a side business selling
| cocaine. Most were slumming it in house shares and taking on
| casual work. Only the blessed had teaching appointments. I
| was blessed until I realised it was a curse.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Living conditions are worse for non-FTEs in America where there
| isn't the NHS and housing is more expensive.
|
| By contrast, Stanford's FTEs c. 2004 received such benefits as:
|
| - Choices from 9 health insurance plans
|
| - Vision, dental, mental healthcare, and long-term care
|
| - Employer-matched retirement contribution 1:1 up to 5% of
| salary, plus free 4% of salary
|
| - Access to then closed mutual funds like Fidelity Magellan
|
| - Secret discounts like on luxury vehicles
|
| - Credit union with 0% VISA debit foreign currency exchange
| rate
|
| - 50% discount on tuition after being an FTE for 10 years
| jltsiren wrote:
| When I was a postdoc in Cambridge, the problem was that there
| were too many PhD students and postdocs who wanted to teach.
| Not because of the compensation but for the experience. A lot
| of people wanted to try a career in the academia, and they
| needed teaching experience for that. But there were not enough
| undergraduates for them all to teach.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJEmE7IYoLk
|
| Summary: colleges are way too selective today at the high
| end.
|
| Boomers got into elite schools far more easily, although
| there were less schools.
|
| It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because the
| huge increase of schools down the long long LONG pecking
| order of school "eliteness".
|
| But the boomer thing is spot on.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It's a bit of a disingenuous argument however, because
| the huge increase of schools down the long long LONG
| pecking order of school "eliteness"
|
| Ehn, it really doesn't.
|
| Harvard admits significantly less undergrads than Penn or
| Columbia, and in personal experience, the "Ivy" cachet
| doesn't really help that much in most industries outside of
| High Finance (which itself tends to targets Penn+Columbia
| instead of Harvard). Harvard was historically
| overrepresented in MBB+Management Consulting, but that
| industry is dying now that Accountancies and Implementation
| firms are bundling MC, and companies increasingly do
| strategy in-house.
|
| Prestige is a finicky thing. 30 years ago UChicago was not
| viewed as "prestigious" compared to Harvard (it was
| Claremont McKenna with snow back then), but ask high
| schoolers today and UChicago has a strong brand value.
|
| Also, ime, I just don't bump into Harvard grads anymore at
| high level positions (Director and above). Harvard
| historically overindexed on MBB and Boutique Consulting
| recruiting while Penn+Columbia targeted Wall Street and
| Stanford+Cal targeted Sand Hill and YC. Consulting slowly
| started withering away, so recruiting is tough.
|
| That said, Harvard does very well in China (largely thanks
| to John Fairbanks and Roderick MacFarquhar in the
| 1970s-90s), but they aren't as driven as UPenn has been in
| trying to diversify their international presence.
| robocat wrote:
| Paraphrased: it used to be easier for boomers to get into
| say the top 2%? I can only guess that the meaning of elite
| has changed.
|
| Aside: a comment with the word "boomer" in it is usually
| offensive in my experience. But doing worry, you'll get a
| different word applied to you when you reach the same age
| cohort. Disclosure: not a boomer.
|
| There are two types of people in the world: those that
| split the world into two groups, and those that don't.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| And the third one that can't be placed in any category,
| let's not forget.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| FYI you really don't need teaching experience to get a good
| academic job. The number one criteria is excellent
| publication record.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That's an extremely broad statement. Biology, physics,
| architecture and history are pretty different professional
| cultures.
| notahacker wrote:
| And different academic jobs can be mostly research or
| mostly teaching
| oersted1234 wrote:
| Most UK universities place a lot of value on teaching
| experience. If you have a PhD degree from Cambridge or
| Oxford, a decent publication track record and significant
| teaching experience, you will typically get lectureship
| (assistant professor) offers straight after you finish
| your doctoral studies. Some teaching experience will be
| valued more than having a stellar publication record,
| especially if you have a good research plan. It makes
| sense because most lectureships involve at least 40% of
| teaching and supervision.
|
| Going back to the main topic of this post, using too many
| underpaid academics to teach creates some perverse
| incentives that are IMHO destroying Oxbridge. Many
| professors are no longer teaching. Teaching is a great
| filter. It makes sure they stay up-to-date, they are
| technically good and they take pride in their research
| field. Professors that are really good and passionate,
| i.e. Terry Tao-like personalities, are often getting
| displaced by ladder climbers. This is especially common
| in experimental fields and really disheartening.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| It depends on what kind of academic work you're looking
| for, right? If you're going for a teaching career, then
| yes, of course you need to have some teaching experience.
| If you're after a research career, e.g. a research
| fellowship like the ones from the Leverhulme Trust or the
| Royal Society of Engineering, then you really do need an
| astounding publication record and I don't reckon that
| having any teaching experience is going to help you with
| that.
|
| Not least because in academia, either you teach, or you
| do research. You can't do both.
|
| >> Teaching is a great filter. It makes sure they stay
| up-to-date, they are technically good and they take pride
| in their research field.
|
| If that's your experience, that must be something that
| depends on the field of research and we must be in
| different fields. In CS, teaching is indeed a good
| filter- in the sense that it separates the teachers from
| the researchers. I have the direct experience of my PI,
| who has not done a day of research after becoming a
| lecturer. Because there is no time. Teaching takes so
| much admin work that there's no time left for research. I
| mean any above-junior academic position takes too much
| admin work, but teaching really gets the cookie. My
| experience so far has been that senior academics who
| still take an active role in research find ways to avoid
| teaching like the plague. Although you can't really
| escape it. You'll at least mark some papers in your
| subject, whether you like it or not (and with TA-ing from
| PhDs or not).
| oersted1234 wrote:
| IMHO, this also applies if you want a research career. At
| the end of the day, you eventually need a permanent
| position. Most professors at top UK universities got
| established in Academia by doing a PhD and getting a
| lectureship straight after their PhD or sometimes a
| postdoc. Lectureships demand significant research _and_
| teaching _and_ supervision experience.
|
| A high-end fellowship like the ones you mention is also
| fine if you want to improve your publication track
| record. In some fields getting a lectureship after your
| PhD or postdoc might be extremely difficult as the market
| is too crowded.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _depends on what kind of academic work you 're looking
| for, right?_
|
| It depends on where you are. British universities value
| teaching more than American ones, which are more focussed
| on research.
| jvvw wrote:
| When I read the article when it came out, I was a bit annoyed
| that it singled out Oxford as it's the same at all the
| universities. It's also been that for a long time - I earned
| comparable amounts as a DPhil student and post-doc teaching at
| Oxford and another UK university. More recently I've worked as
| a tutor for The Open University and the pay for that has felt
| in a similar ballpark once you take into account all the
| marking and prep you need to do.
|
| When I did it, I had my DPhil grant/post-doc salary and it felt
| like side money rather than being my 'job' and I was partly
| doing for the experience, for my CV (good to be able to put
| 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it!) and partly because I enjoyed it. I
| felt quite lucky to be offered tutoring jobs at Oxford as they
| were much sought-after by DPhil students.
|
| I think it's also worth pointing out that not all Oxford
| colleges are 'rich' and many have buildings and grounds that
| are expensive to maintain. I don't think most of them are
| better placed to pay more than other UK universities.
|
| There's an argument to be made that people teaching at
| universities should be paid more, but it does feel unfair to
| single out Oxford.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I was a bit annoyed that it singled out Oxford
|
| Oxford singles itself out as elite, thus _" good to be able
| to put 'Lecturer at Oxford' on it [the CV]!"_. They are being
| held to that standard.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| It is definitely a bad thing: as a postdoc you have to
| constantly uproot your life chasing the ever-elusive permanent
| contract so good luck rebuilding your social circle from
| scratch every five years. And God help you if you're married or
| (the horror!) want to have children.
|
| It's also not good for the Universities, who are constantly
| losing institutional knowledge and having to retrain people
| from scratch. Did you offer a kickass course on Neural Networks
| last year? Well, too bad, the guy who offered it is now gone.
| But here's a fresh guy with a PhD in economics, and that's just
| as good.
| njjnjj wrote:
| That has improved. Back in 1998 I was managing PS8k a year (!)
| part time, which was really a full time job, while being told I
| was privileged to have such a position at a prestigious
| university. With little experience I didn't know any better.
|
| Woke up one day, said fuck it, pissed off my doctoral advisor,
| a somewhat rotten old tenured professor by suggesting that it
| wasn't worth doing this any more. Looked around and picked up a
| job for PS26k within a month. Never looked back.
| blibble wrote:
| it's portrayed as a bad thing by the union because these phd
| students doing supervisions/tutorials aren't union members
|
| it really is that simple
|
| phd students love doing supervisions, they literally queue up
| around the block for the teaching experience and the tax free
| cash
| mmooss wrote:
| > phd students love doing supervisions, they literally queue
| up around the block for the teaching experience and the tax
| free cash
|
| Maybe they have no choice and are being exploited. PhD
| students current and former that I've spoken to definitely
| think they are being exploited.
|
| As examples, look at the comments from actual PhD students
| and postdocs on this page.
| blibble wrote:
| I lived with three of them, they loved doing them
| Marsymars wrote:
| Loving your job isn't mutually exclusive from being
| exploited. The best job I ever had was in a
| academic/research-tangential position out of school, but
| the pay was bad and the effort/reward required for
| advancement was unreasonable, so I left after a year.
| blibble wrote:
| yeah, they were being paid 3x the minimum wage, and were
| paid for prep time
|
| vs. the alternative available part time work
| (sainsburys/tesco)
|
| definitely exploited
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| The article is talking about full-on lectureships, for example,
| this part-time role, initially advertised as full-time,
| according to the article:
|
| >> One of Oxford's top colleges, Christ Church, which had an
| income of PS42.6m in 2022-23, is currently advertising a
| stipendiary lectureship in modern European history for PS15,244
| to PS16,983.
|
| For comparison, 15-16k was the range of my PhD stipend at
| Imperial College London between 2017-22 (I never got a clear
| answer what it was supposed to be exactly, from the admin, so I
| had to estimate it from my monthly pay, which fluctuated). It
| always stayed below minimum wage (so I didn't have to repay my
| undergard tuition fee loan). That's normal for PhD stipends,
| but it really shouldn't be for a lectureship.
|
| I believe what you're thinking of is TA work: "marking lab
| reports or programming assessments". I did some of that, during
| my PhD. I don't remember the pay rate but it was less than
| minimum wage and the jobs were part-time and didn't last for
| more than a semester obviously. That kind of job is, indeed,
| ideal when you're looking for "a little side income", but a
| lectureship is supposed to be your main line job, not a side
| hustle.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| To be fair, Imperial is the best paying UK university by far.
| Postdoc positions at Imperial pay better than Lecturer/Senior
| Lecturer positions at other universities.
| yunohn wrote:
| That may well be, but quite surprising to learn that the
| best paying university is still paying under minimum
| wage...
| maxmynter95 wrote:
| As someone who got accepted into an Oxf'd DPhil program, did
| not get a stipend and had to decline the offer it certainly
| stings when you say "not necessarily a bad thing".
|
| Because it definitely is a class barrier, and since my spot
| wasn't filled by someone else, also a lack in research output.
| motohagiography wrote:
| what do the people who make and manage money learn, and could
| clever people be taught this skill too? maybe instead of spending
| their afternoons on the golf course like wealth managers they
| could pursue research and teach. how difficult could it be?
| graemep wrote:
| Because money does not come out of nowhere.
|
| A lot of people make money from zero sum games, or from things
| with a small positive sum socially (e.g. selling something for
| a little bit less than someone else).
| motohagiography wrote:
| not with that attitude. how much time does it take to manage
| a portfolio? people who work for charities do it, many of
| them part time. if professors were given responsibility to
| manage some portion of the endowment and paid as a percentage
| on the return they generated from it they could do a lot
| better.
|
| I was raised in this institutional class that had contempt
| for "trade" and it's a cover for meekness, envy, and a
| smallness that justifies some pretty terrible worldviews. I
| love brilliant people, but someone with the mind to be an
| academic is only ever poor becuause of their own fatuous
| snootery. they do it to themselves and they moralize their
| envy by blaming "systemic" factors while affecting an
| unworldly out of touchness that makes them repellent to
| anyone with responsibility.
|
| perhaps I have a bit of a chip from being outside of it, but
| having managed some personal success in spite of it, the
| problems of bureaucracy are the problems of children to me.
| kleiba wrote:
| What do you mean "accused of"? This has been the official and
| government-wanted policy for years in some countries, so much so
| that there are specific laws that ensure young academics by
| default cannot expect a long-term career in academia.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Yup. They deliberately overload the front of the pipeline. It
| can attract smart people from overseas and also save plenty of
| money. They usually openly argue that the university's job is
| training for the rest of the economy so it only makes sense
| that they don't have enough long-term positions for people.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| A reader may also be "shocked and appalled" that research
| universities like Stanford abused employees by keeping them
| "part-time" for years at a time to cheat them out of benefits
| received by FTEs.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| Stanford has a business school, doesn't it?
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Schwab. I worked across from it in the reclaimed basement of
| Toyon like some sort of hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk
| menagerie for workers. Their IT department was well-regarded
| because each department did their own thing, which was
| inherently efficient in flexibility, control, and service but
| not in cost of delivery. I was an obsessive control freak,
| wannabe computer science researcher, and LTT-like PC putter-
| togetherer masquerading as a Windows sysadmin playing with a
| $100k budget trying to get barcodes on every single cable,
| every single asset tagged, inventoried, and reporting basic
| info 24x7, having everything racked in a real datacenter
| rather than the housing draw NetBSD "server" desktop going
| brrrr behind my head, and adopting DR/BCP so that the
| organization could survive another semi-malicious Microsoft
| RCE worm or maybe a building fire (the datacenter had FM200).
| MrMcCall wrote:
| >> hidden Brazil ductwork steampunk menagerie
|
| As a huge fan of William Gibson, that's some lovely
| writing, my fellow greybeard.
|
| >> I was an obsessive control freak
|
| There are 'control freaks' and there are the rest of the
| sea of humanity. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Einstein,
| Feynman, ... I like my place in the set of the control
| freaks of the world. The key is to not ever try to control
| other people, only our own circumstances, including our own
| selves.
| hgomersall wrote:
| Not quite sure what point you're making, but it brings to
| mind what my academic friend often says which is that the
| economic faculty staff are the worst when it comes to
| contributing to the general tasks the whole set of academic
| staff has to do. It's almost like they feel the need to
| justify their constant advocating that being a shitty person
| is the rational thing to do, but of course it only ever works
| because other people pick up the chores.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| It seems that these days academia is mostly garbage for anyone
| who wants things like money, family or a healthy work-life
| balance.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| was it ever not "garbage"?
|
| When was it a high paid job with great work/life balance?
| njjnjj wrote:
| Throwaway account. Yes that is exactly what happened to me.
| Figured I'd do a PhD so took a research / part time teaching
| position after masters. Terrible money, demanding job, knee
| deep in politics. After about 12 months I said fuck it and went
| and got a job for 4x the money and a 35 hour week. No regrets.
| kleiba wrote:
| How did you get that job? I've read similar stories a couple
| of times here on HN yet I'm struggling to do the same. My
| main road block: not really having acquired the right skill
| set for industry after having focused for year to fine-tune
| my CV for academic positions. This is now kind of biting me
| in my rear side: I cannot do the rat wheel of academia any
| more, am not exactly young any more either, am sort of highly
| skilled in CS _academia_ but not really suitable for a lot of
| CS _industry_ positions.
| njjnjj wrote:
| I was on electrical engineering side of things. Honestly I
| looked for companies that had large quantities of
| engineering lay offs about a year beforehand and tried
| finding contacts and calling them directly. Turns out there
| were plenty of departments in the shit and needing hires.
| Landed a position at a defence company.
|
| CS I would have no idea about. I work for a company that
| does software now but tends not to hire any CS grads.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I think traditionally it was for people who were unmarried.
| Hence its connection to the church. So expecting enough to
| raise a family is a relatively new idea.
| aSanchezStern wrote:
| Not sure what the timeline on that is, but the University of
| Washington had housing specifically for PhD students with
| families in the 60s/70s IIRC
| derbOac wrote:
| Yes, a lot of public universities have had them. My
| knowledge of them at the two places I'm familiar with is
| that they're being phased out. One of them they were
| literally slated for demolition to make room for some other
| facilities (sport facilities I think) and another is still
| there but they opened up to other students and I think
| there was discussion of replacing them too, although
| they're still there as far as I know.
|
| My overall sense of universities is that, like a lot of
| places, they increasingly see people as disposable and
| don't invest in them as much unless they're unusually
| financially profitable. Student housing is probably a bit
| different because people are marrying and having kids at
| older ages, but in the cases I know of the housing and
| housing cooperatives were still being used and liked. The
| subtext of discussions that I recall was that this wasn't
| enough, that the land needs to be put to use making more
| money for the university rather than supporting graduate
| students.
| mustafa_pasi wrote:
| Or even research experience. In many fields industry is now
| years ahead and academia lacks the funds and the man power to
| compete. AI and biotech are two examples.
| tpoacher wrote:
| I wouldn't say this is the case, though it probably looks
| like this at a superficial level, and is a trendy soundbyte
| that seems to have gotten a life of its own lately. Plus a
| lot of what you call 'industry' is in fact driven by
| universities, e.g. via collaborations or spin-out companies.
| Deepmind, e.g., a notable example when people point to Google
| as a research lead in the field, was effectively almost
| exclusively driven by Oxford academics through their
| university positions (at least in the beginning, I haven't
| kept up).
|
| The bigger problem is universities (are forced to?) behave
| like corporations more and more as opposed to academic
| institutions, in order to survive silly politics (national
| and not) but without having the requisite corporate
| infrastructure and corresponding personnel. Instead, all jobs
| are offloaded to academics, and made part of their "progress
| and development report" or whatnot as the main driving
| factor. Which then dilutes the quality of both teaching and
| research, cuts down on creative time and replaces it with
| mountains of bureaucracy and counterproductive deadlines,
| forces people to cut corners just to keep up with it all, and
| eventually burns them out.
|
| Example: we have recently been asked to enter a cleaning rota
| for the office, because management fired the cleaners. And I
| think it's ridiculous and a sign of things to come, but I do
| it anyway. I don't know if refusing to clean will somehow
| find its way on your probation record as "not good academic
| citizenship", but it's not something I'll refuse to do anyway
| because I know everyone's in the same boat and I don't want
| to cause trouble for my team. But, then this behaviour gets
| normalised, and honestly, at this point academics might as
| well start mowing the lawn and cleaning the toilets too.
|
| But academia still has better structures / people built
| around attacking the more 'creative', less profit-driven
| problems, whereas industry is has different incentives, which
| seriously constrains where that research can go in its own
| way. And a lot of the time, when you look under the hood,
| industry claims are little more than hot air trying to get a
| quick buck, or they're the last little brick building on
| years of academic work and then going full PR and taking all
| the credit; whereas academia does things "slow" and steady
| for a reason.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| is this news? this sounds like every university in the US, which
| uses underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid
| phd candidates and postdocs to do most of the research
|
| not saying this is right -- adjuncts and postdocs absolutely need
| to be paid more commensurately with the value they provide -- but
| it has been the status quo for a long time; the bigger problem is
| that it used to be a temporary stepping stone to professorship,
| whereas now universities are perpetually and increasingly relying
| on this cheap labor to cut costs, making the path for academia an
| increasingly tortuous one. It's highly counter productive because
| who wants to go through all that instead if you can get a job in
| industry that values you much more? The result is that you don't
| get the best and brightest educating the next generation, except
| maybe at a few universities - Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, MIT,
| etc. - where the prestige itself is enough of a draw.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| this is all my opinion as a 3rd year phd candidate who is
| thoroughly disillusioned. in STEM science there are two types
| of labor: thinking of experiments to do, and actually doing
| experiments. doing experiments is high-skill, manual labor. you
| often work with dangerous materials for crazy hours (some
| experiments take 10 hours to just do and you have no choice but
| to work from start to finish) and do tasks that are physically
| and technically challenging. as such, the fair market wage for
| this labor is actually pretty high. when i was an employee at
| Stanford, I was making nearly 80k in salary alone and i had
| fantastic health, retirement, and vacation benefits. oh, and i
| had overtime as a union employee to boot.
|
| higher institutions realized that they could conveniently
| circumvent the rightfully high cost of labor to do experiments
| by hiring "graduate students" who they can pay poverty wages to
| do the manual scientific labor in exchange for a degree. as a
| student i am classified as a 20 hour per week worker, 20 hour
| per week student, and paid 37k a year. to be honest i wouldn't
| mind this if i actually were allowed to work 20 hours per week
| but this is not the case. the expectation, is that you will
| work 50-60 MINIMUM. and don't even get me started on postdocs.
| the PhD market has become so oversaturated due to the over-
| training of PhDs that to be competitive you must do an
| additional 5-8 years of "training" as a postdoc (again at
| poverty wages around 45-50k) before you get the opportunity to
| APPLY faculty positions.
|
| this has had some predictable but unfortunate consequences. for
| one, institutions no longer select for the best and brightest.
| their number 1 criteria for offers of admission is "ability to
| finish the phd" aka willingness to be subject to these labor
| conditions for 4-7 years. of course you do need a minimum level
| of intellectual ability to get there, but trust me when i say
| this, the bar is low. and academia has suffered because of it
| imo. prestigious institutions get by as you mentioned by having
| their pick of the smartest AND hard working.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > this sounds like every university in the US, which uses
| underpaid adjuncts to do most of the teaching and underpaid phd
| candidates and postdocs to do most of the research
|
| Pro tip to anyone going to university (or has kids going to
| university). Find a low ranked state school that has a high
| teacher to student ratio. Also look at the percentage of
| classes with under 20 students.
|
| I did my undergrad at one of those places. Currently the ratio
| is 1:17. The percentage of classes with under 20 students is
| 60%.
|
| Because it's low ranked, the pressure to get grants isn't as
| high. Because each course has fewer students, the professors
| are much more available. As an example, a professor who had
| only 3 hours a week for office hours was thought of as
| "stingy". Most had about 6 hours. They'd combine the OH for all
| the courses they were teaching, and could easily offer 5+ hours
| because there are so few students (at times no one would show
| up).
|
| Only one humanities course was taught by a non-faculty member.
| Everyone else was tenured, on the tenure track, or a permanent
| assistant professor (i.e. spousal hire).
|
| The quality of education was pretty good, too. They probably
| had a lighter load than a top university, but I'm not sure
| that's bad. I went to a top 3 school for graduate studies, and
| took some of their undergrad courses while there. It was
| brutal, and the undergrads were clearly overworked. Worse -
| most of the work was just busy work. They weren't really
| working on anything more challenging than the folks in low
| ranked universities.
|
| Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are
| really what push you to work on interesting projects.
|
| If you really want the name recognition, go do a quick MS at a
| top school thereafter.
| vikramkr wrote:
| If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest
| focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting
| a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's
| as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios,
| low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own
| state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and
| have wildly different levels of funding and support for
| education. And being public does not make them immune from
| going the adjunct all the way route.
|
| Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time
| equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20
| students might not have a more available professor, because
| they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the
| same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the
| number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.
|
| For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody
| takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes
| everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes
| offered is quite small, but the average class size of the
| classes you take is quite large.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics
| directly and getting a sense of what current student
| experiences are like.
|
| And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going
| to get those statistics?
|
| The places that openly boast these things tend to be very
| expensive, and hard to get admission into.
|
| Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email
| the department and ask for those stats directly. Most
| people don't have that shortlist, though.
|
| > For class size, you can have dozens of small classes
| nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro
| classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the
| classes offered is quite small, but the average class size
| of the classes you take is quite large.
|
| And that's why you look at the percentage of classes with
| under 20 students. It's certainly easy to find universities
| with as good a faculty/student ratio as what I posted, but
| with only 20% of the classes having less than 20 students.
|
| Incidentally, if they have dozens of small classes, it's a
| good sign. A lot of departments will cancel a class if it
| has less than, say, 8 students.
| jjmarr wrote:
| > Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are
| really what push you to work on interesting projects.
|
| This outweighs pretty much everything else for me.
|
| Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big
| fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around
| really incompetent people.
|
| Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40
| people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that the
| courses are too hard.
|
| Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm
| being driven into mediocrity.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| was doing exactly that a few years ago as Postdoc at Oxford. Yes,
| the pay is very low, but those who do that (PhD students and
| Postdocs) do it to get some valuable teaching experience more
| than for the money. The amount of hours they give for such
| temporary assignemnts is very little per individual, or at least
| that's what I saw among my colleagues.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Universities are basically farms these days. They harvest funding
| from the research councils. Similar working practices and
| economic factors!
|
| Edit: I mean the research portion of course. The teaching part is
| more of a classic multi-level marketing scheme.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I've never understood how universities charge so much and spend
| so much when all the teaching is done by grad students for low
| pay. Seems like this is a phenomenon in both North America and
| Europe.
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