25 years old and deep in debt

[Valmy]

"There are a lot of women's colleges that are doing fine," said Marilyn Hammond, interim president of the Women's College Coalition. "To say it's a sector issue would not be correct."

Well there are 40 left out of 230.  Not to point out the obvious here....

Well it does kind of eliminate the whole "what makes it distinctive" motif.

Well it is a niche market now where as before it was a mass market.  These things happen.

That has netted many young women from low-income backgrounds, she said, especially from black and Hispanic families. "This idea that young women don't want to go to women's colleges," McGuire said, is "an artifact" of an era when those colleges were perceived to be mainly targeting upper-class white women.

Probably not an option for small colleges who charge over $40,000 a year.  Just a hunch.

[grumbler]

I am surprised that it was Sweetbriar that closed - it has a pretty good rep locally, but I can see how they have priced themselves out of the market.  The big surprises were that
(1) the board didn't try harder to explore alternatives (instead, meeting in an "emergency session") and
(2) that the vote to close the school, and close immediately, was unanimous.

Those facts tell me that there's a lot more to this story that we don't know yet.

[Ideologue]

For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered... a liberal arts education...

On Tuesday, the college's leadership abruptly announced its closure

Well, I got what I needed out of the article.

[grumbler]

For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered... a liberal arts education...

On Tuesday, the college's leadership abruptly announced its closure

Well, I got what I needed out of the article.

Still wallowing in the self-loathing, eh?   Well, as long as you are enjoying it, who's to blame you? 

[CountDeMoney]

Yeah, I don't get the Sweet Briar hate...after all, they don't have a law school.

[Ideologue]

For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered... a liberal arts education...

On Tuesday, the college's leadership abruptly announced its closure

Well, I got what I needed out of the article.

Still wallowing in the self-loathing, eh?   Well, as long as you are enjoying it, who's to blame you? 

I don't self-loathe.

[CountDeMoney]

Here's a priceless one for all the higher-ed haters:

I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn't make ends meet.
One former adjunct describes a system that's untenable.
WashingtonPost.com

by Tanya Paperny March 6 at 6:00 AM
Tanya Paperny is the writer and editor at Bellwether Education Partners.


Last week was the first ever National Adjunct Walkout Day, a grassroots protest to push for fair pay and better working conditions. Protests and teach-ins took place on as many as 100 campuses nationwide, prompting at least one university to create a task force to address labor concerns. It's little wonder that a national movement has sprung up around the adjunct system, which offers little or no job security or access to benefits and significantly lower wages than regular faculty. I sympathize — I was an adjunct, and I could only tolerate the stress and exhaustion for two years.

I taught as many as five classes each semester at four campuses in D.C. and Maryland, crisscrossing town by bike and public transportation during work days that sometimes lasted 13 hours. I never knew what my employment would look like the following term and constantly applied for part- and full-time teaching positions in case I didn't get rehired. Many of the courses I taught—composition, professional writing and journalism—were required for undergraduate or graduate students, yet those programs ran almost entirely on the backs of adjuncts.

There were things about the work I loved. One student wrote an excellent research paper on creative arts therapy as a healing tool for depression sufferers; the paper landed her a fellowship working with cancer patients. When I saw students nodding their heads during lessons on essay structure or avoiding wordiness, I felt reenergized. In fact, engaging students was a challenge I loved. The working conditions were what drained me completely.

For one thing, there was the pay. I earned between $2,700 to $4,196 per course, which is generally better than the national adjunct pay average of $2,700. But my employers capped courses for adjuncts, meaning I couldn't teach more than two classes per semester at all but one of the schools. Fewer course offerings during the summer limited most of my course assignments and earnings to the fall and spring. In fall of 2012, I earned $13,600 before tax. The following spring, I made $14,100. One of my employers offered only two pay periods per semester for adjuncts, meaning I went three months without pay from that job. All told, I made between $27,700 and $35,000 a year from teaching. This is not an insignificant sum of money for many people, but was less than I was paid at my first job out of college, even though I have a terminal degree in my field.

And the schedule was untenable. In spring of 2013, I started my Thursdays at 8 a.m. in College Park, Md., taught at 4 p.m. at American University in Washington, D.C., and ended the day in D.C. with a Trinity Washington University class that wrapped up at 9 p.m. Some days I spent almost three hours commuting. Weekends were for grading papers.

I couldn't keep up this circus for more than two years, though many of my peers have been doing it much longer. At some point, I realized there was no ladder out of adjunct purgatory, no full-time positions within my reach. Nobody, especially none of my supervisors, wanted to admit this. (To be fair, not all administrators realize the employment status of adjuncts on their campus — many of these hiring decisions are made at the department level.)

Ann Pauley, Trinity's Vice President for Institutional Advancement, wrote to me in an e-mail: "The majority of Trinity's adjuncts are employed full-time in their professions," meaning they have other jobs that provide their primary income. But according to national figures from the American Association of University Professors, this is not the norm: The majority of contingent faculty don't have careers outside of academia.

Anne McLeer, Director of Research & Strategic Planning at SEIU Local 500, says: "There's no question there's a role for adjunct faculty and professionals with outside experience coming in to teach a class or two. But the problem is a disproportionate number of classes, especially in the humanities, being taught by adjuncts who don't have any job security or opportunity to advance up the levels." This was certainly my experience. A 2013 survey of George Mason University's contingent faculty revealed that roughly half were financially dependent upon their adjunct earnings. I supplemented my teaching income with freelance writing and a part-time remote job, but that money only added up to the equivalent of one course.

Why are universities relying so heavily on this type of labor? According to Marisa Allison, co-author of the George Mason University survey, administrative bloat is at least partly to blame. "The university is the only space where you've seen an increase in middle management, in jobs that were never there before," she says. "That is definitely a culprit." In places like Virginia, sharp cuts in state funding for higher education are also leading universities to curb costs. Others point to rising executive compensation, especially for campus presidents.

And there are the graduate programs, which keep churning out people with MAs or PhDs, even though there aren't enough positions for these graduates to move into. For many of us, our graduate programs didn't tell us that teaching in academia was no longer a guaranteed — or even sane — route on which to rely.

Many adjuncts love their jobs and want to make it work. Take Mitchell Tropin, who has been teaching at Trinity and four other universities since 2008 after a career in journalism. Despite the lack of promotion opportunities or formal job security, he says he feels respected and valued by his Trinity supervisors. He finds being an adjunct sustainable only because he has already paid off his mortgage and his kids are all adults. But he understands how younger people can't make do.

After a year-long job search, I'm now an in-house writing coach and editor at a nonprofit education consulting firm. I'm compensated and treated very well, given access to a full slate of benefits, and I get to do what I love: help people become better writers. My teaching experience helped qualify me for this job, but that doesn't mean I'd ever wish the adjunct hustle upon anyone else. Nor do I ever—not even for a second—miss my old life.

The system is not incapable of change. The majority of adjuncts in the D.C. area — including those at Howard University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, American University and the University of the District of Columbia — are now represented by SEIU Local 500 and have access to collective bargaining, a channel to air grievances and negotiate for improved wages and other benefits. Union contracts have as much as tripled pay for some at George Washington University and won year-long contracts for Montgomery College adjuncts, says McLeer. SEIU has initiated activities to form a union at Trinity, and the administration has stated their relative neutrality. A letter from President Patricia McGuire in September of last year stated that "adjuncts are free to express their opinions without fear of retribution." Unionization isn't a silver bullet—it's going to take a lot to reform how universities structure their spending—but mobilizing those still doing the tough job I used to do will result in real — albeit slow — changes.

[The Brain]

Many of the courses I taught—composition, professional writing and journalism

[Berkut]

So, it seems to me like this kind went something like this:

1. Traditionally, classes at universities and colleges are taught by full pr part time professors who are employees of the school in question.
2. In some cases, it was seen as desirable to have classes taught by non-employees, for a variety of good reasons - a way to get outside experts involved, or visiting faculty from other schools. But this was seen as desirable not as a way of saving money, but as a way of having a more diverse pool of potential instructors. But overall, the vast majority of classes are taught by traditional full time professors/instructors.
3. Schools realize that the per course cost of an adjunct is a tiny fraction of what it costs to have a full time professor teach the class, so more and more and more classes are not just being allowed to be taught by an adjunct, but rather they MUST be taught by an adjunct, because the school isn't going to hire enough actual full time employees to teach their classes - instead, they just offer the classes as adjunct.

This results in a situation where there simply is not as many actual full time positions available as one would expect, since schools will just decide that paying an adjunct to teach the class is so much cheaper than paying an employee. And now it is getting to the point where actually teaching a lot of classes has become the job of "mercenaries" who go about form school to school looking for what work they can scrape up, rather than actual faculty with an investment in the school itself (and the schools investment in them). This seems, to me, to be a pretty terrible model as it is being used.

[Valmy]

Yep.  Unintended consequences at work.

[crazy canuck]

This results in a situation where there simply is not as many actual full time positions available as one would expect, since schools will just decide that paying an adjunct to teach the class is so much cheaper than paying an employee. And now it is getting to the point where actually teaching a lot of classes has become the job of "mercenaries" who go about form school to school looking for what work they can scrape up, rather than actual faculty with an investment in the school itself (and the schools investment in them). This seems, to me, to be a pretty terrible model as it is being used.

I think you will find this comment on the strike now going on at a number of Canadian Universities of interest.

What's happening at U of T and York is symptomatic of a larger problem across Canada. Underpaid part-time staff teach a majority of undergraduates in Canada. For example, at U of T contract faculty and teaching assistants do 60 per cent of the teaching but make up 3.5 per cent of the budget. This is not an isolated problem. According to one study, the number of contract faculty in Ontario increased 87 per cent in between 2000 and 2014.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/why-u-of-t-york-strikes-are-more-than-labour-disputes/article23279298/

[crazy canuck]

bumping for Yi

[grumbler]

There unquestionably is a glut of people willing to take shit wages in order to teach.  In part, i am sure, that is a result of the poor employment prospects of many recent college graduates (not having degrees that employers are looking for), and in part because these prospective professors didn't think their career choices through very well (much like the lawyers now working as clerks or poorly-paid research assistants).

Both elements of the glut will alleviate themselves over time.  Kinda sucks for the people caught up in the system right now, but there are always people in this position; you can't save everyone from the consequences of their own poor decisions.

The strikes might work to cut down the number of temp positions the colleges are willing to fund, by increasing wages for those lucky enough to get the remaining jobs, but strikes have never really been successful in a glutted labor market.  When workers care more about having a job than how much they get paid for it, labor doesn't have much leverage.

[alfred russel]

So, it seems to me like this kind went something like this:

1. Traditionally, classes at universities and colleges are taught by full pr part time professors who are employees of the school in question.
2. In some cases, it was seen as desirable to have classes taught by non-employees, for a variety of good reasons - a way to get outside experts involved, or visiting faculty from other schools. But this was seen as desirable not as a way of saving money, but as a way of having a more diverse pool of potential instructors. But overall, the vast majority of classes are taught by traditional full time professors/instructors.
3. Schools realize that the per course cost of an adjunct is a tiny fraction of what it costs to have a full time professor teach the class, so more and more and more classes are not just being allowed to be taught by an adjunct, but rather they MUST be taught by an adjunct, because the school isn't going to hire enough actual full time employees to teach their classes - instead, they just offer the classes as adjunct.

This results in a situation where there simply is not as many actual full time positions available as one would expect, since schools will just decide that paying an adjunct to teach the class is so much cheaper than paying an employee. And now it is getting to the point where actually teaching a lot of classes has become the job of "mercenaries" who go about form school to school looking for what work they can scrape up, rather than actual faculty with an investment in the school itself (and the schools investment in them). This seems, to me, to be a pretty terrible model as it is being used.

The flip side is that college costs are exploding and have been for some time. That isn't because of direct teaching costs of course, but if you remove a source of discount teachers the problem is only going to get worse.

It actually doesn't seem so odd to me that many college teachers could have worse employment prospects than primary or secondary teachers. Sure they require more expertise in specific fields, but they don't need other skills. I'd put up with more crap and less pay to teach in college versus teaching first grade, for instance.

[Valmy]

It actually doesn't seem so odd to me that many college teachers could have worse employment prospects than primary or secondary teachers. Sure they require more expertise in specific fields, but they don't need other skills. I'd put up with more crap and less pay to teach in college versus teaching first grade, for instance.

The parents are older and more resigned to their children's failure at that point.