Lately, I've been finding myself frequently thinking: "That's Texas."

Let me get this straight. Take a course load of 4 double semester courses per year with 200 hours of class time total in the given year. Let's double it to 400 hours just to be safe to include exam marking and office hours. A single student paying $30k per year is paying $75 / hour / student, or an annualized salary of $150k / year.

True, you can't work all year round, but the average adjunct earns less than a single average student's tuition?! Where does all the money go? How is the market so broken?

At the end of the day, I make less than minimum wage teaching these students. I'm lucky that I have another job that supports me.

Colleges and Universities are not lean organizations. My department has significant amounts of overhead - people that in some cases work full time doing administrivia or extra paperwork and they require a salary. The buildings and labs also require upkeep and technology has a fairly high turnover cost. Add in the racket that is software + books and things add up quickly.

I'd estimate that my department has almost a 1 to 1 back office staff to professor ratio - simply due to the lack of automation (and no desire to automate) many portions of the work that is done at the school. Many of the back office staff are full time and they receive a regular salary rather than a flat fee per student.

EDIT: Another unrelated anecdote: I was recently talking to a PI at Rice's Engineering program who had just finished up his spring class. He got rave reviews of the class, all the undergrads really liked it. About a week after the class reports came out, his director came to him and told him that he was teaching too well and that he should be spending more time on writing grants. If his classes liked him that much again, he would be disciplined (I've no idea how, but he was nontenured, so it sacred him enough). He then taught a 'worse' class in the fall. Whatever those students are paying for, it sure is not the education.

Don't students have to pay for software and books? Where I went to school the library didn't stock any textbooks, and there was an extra per-credit hour "technology fee" slapped on to the regular tuition? You'd think the "technology fee" would cover all required software, but it only really paid for things like Microsoft Office, Peoplesoft, etc. Specialized software had to be bought separately (glares at Adbobe) at the student's expense.

Don't students pay for those separately? How does that add up for costs on the school's end?

The real reason the adjunct-professor position pays so low is because that's the value applicants are willing to accept / that's the cake society assigns.

If that class of employee demanded, or held more prestige, we would see efficiency gains elsewhere in the business.

Student debt.

Look at the housing market: in the 70s you could buy a house for much less because houses cost less because people didn't have more money to overpay. With a thirty year explosion of the mortgage industry and the idea that anyone should qualify to own a home, suddenly consumers had extra money to outbid people on buying houses. This broadly increased property prices with no signs of slowing (unless the money runs out, as per '08). All of that debt is increasing people's ability to buy (raising demand, increasing prices) but not increasing their ability to pay (suggesting some kind of time limit).

Now look at the education market: in the 70s, you could buy an education for much less because people didn't have more money to overpay. The cost of education was in line with normal market mechanisms. But with a thirty year explosion of student debt and the idea that everyone should go to college and qualify for loans if they can't pay for it, prices broadly increased.

The problem is, for many, there is no alternative. "I'm the first one in my family to be able to go to college." "Not going to college makes it impossible to find a job." "I have to get an education." When "No thanks, that's crazy, I'll do something else" is not an option, prices are going to do crazy things. Perfect example being healthcare costs.

I think "Don't go to college" is the best advice today. Learn to program early, start working as a freelancer when you're 18 and graduate from highschool. By the time your friends graduate from college with a bunch of student debt and can't find a job because they don't have job experience and employers want to hire people that know what they're doing, you'll be making and saving a lot more money freelancing with 4+ years of experience under your belt already. Experience is waaaaaay more valuable than degrees. Might as well get it early.

* 80% fewer lawyer jobs because algorithmic contracts will kill the rest of the lawyer jobs that e-doc review didn't kill already. The 20% that remain will be lawyers/programmers.

* 80% fewer medical doctor jobs because all surgery will be done by robots because it's safer, radiology will be automated because it's more accurate, and most diagnoses will be automated through DNA analysis and readings from wearables. Doctors will need training in presenting (quite possibly bad news) results to patients and training to run the machines. The 20% that remain will be doctors/programmers.

* 80% fewer jobs in "driving vehicles" or "packing things" (truckers, factory workers, Uber drivers) because self driving cars will be mature 20 years from now.

* Restaurant jobs will still be around. But the cooking will be automated for 80% of the food sold in America.

* Business process automation paired with private equity firms and competition from startups will automate away a surprising amount of managerial roles.

* 80% fewer retail jobs because Amazon has helped make it so you can just walk in and pick something up and walk out and be charged for it, without any human involvement.

20 years is the difference between 1994 and 2014. I might be wrong about some of it, but I think people underestimate how much the job landscape is going to change and how important of a skill "programming" (which means a lot of different things) will be. Everyone should learn to program. And basic income, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Interesting; this contrasts with the claim of liberal arts graduates who maintain that simply being competent critical thinkers is all that's required for almost any job.

Programming requires “training and education”, too.

But for many jobs, especially if you have connections that let you bypass filters designed to winnow the applicant field down to a manageable number that throw out lots of otherwise-atrocious candidates, you can demonstrate that other than by the degree that is “expected” for the field.

Computing is by no means unique in this respect (and the big players in computing are as much known for near-total exclusive preference for top schools as is the case in the worst of other fields.)

Are you implying that you don't need skill and knowledge to program?

Or that it's impossible to get skill and knowledge needed in "other reasonable paying jobs" mostly outside of formal education industry?

That only works in industries like software etc. If one wants to be a lawyer, doctor etc they have no choice but to go to college, right? Some American students are going abroad (Germany etc), that could be a short term option.

For lawyers in some US jurisdictions, including California, no; California, for instance, requires general education of two years of college or “demonstrated equivalent intellectual achievement” prior to study of law, and several options for the study of law, including what amounts to apprenticeship in law office or judge's chambers. So traditional college or law school is not strictly required.

The top law firms employ small percentage of employed lawyers. And not even a huge percentage of graduates of top law schools. And aren't even the kind of work some people going into law want to do.

Confusing “what you need to get a job at a top law firm” with “what you need to be a lawyer” is like confusing “what you need to get a job at Google” with “what you need to be a programmer”.

> And the legal field is generally oversupplied with lawyers so if you don't work at a top law firm you won't be making a great living for a long time.

If you avoid undergraduate and law school debt (and especially if you are a paid employee instead of a paying student during your legal education), you can make a great living at a substantially lower salary than if you don't; and olif you do a legal apprenticeship, you come out with real-world experience most law students won't have (and quite often a job in the office you apprenticed in, if it was a law office and not a judges chambers.)

If you don't get an apprenticeship, then your options after passing the bar with self-study are essentially (it seems to me):

1. low-paid government work (like public defenders)

2. setting up your own practice (hard to build up a client base initially)

3. working on contract/temp basis for another law firm with variable prospects

Law school isn't just about credentialling and signaling; it also sets you up with a valuable alumni network that helps you get work. Anecdotally it's easier for an aspiring programmer without a network to get a referral into a tech company; go to a few meetups, hackathons or conferences, build a portfolio/github, meet a few people and ask them if they'll refer you (I've both gotten a job and helped someone get a job this way). And very few people ask or care about where you went to school when they can see your work instead. Again I may just be biased because I know the tech field better but it seems to me that it's harder to demonstrate your legal skills since you can't exactly post a sample contract or legal opinion you wrote, on Github (or maybe there's a portfolio site for lawyers too, who knows).

> Confusing “what you need to get a job at a top law firm” with “what you need to be a lawyer” is like confusing “what you need to get a job at Google” with “what you need to be a programmer”.

Again, not knowing the legal field well it seems to me that even mediocre programmers do better than mediocre lawyers because of the supply-demand differences between the two fields.

There are very small numbers of people who choose that route (and very low awareness that it even exists); as I understand, there are mere dozens actually doing it any time in California recently.

One of the more common routes, reportedly, is people who are already employed (e.g., as paralegals) in the office they become apprentices in.

and getting into medical school is basically luck of the draw; there are far more overqualified applicants than necessary. thinning that herd a bit isn't going to hurt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdAfILoJWcI

And his lectures are available for free.

If you get a degree, lots of what you learn will be outdated fast. The most important things you learn will be on the job actually making things.

> Unless maybe you are going to a top 1% CS program, there is little need for a degree in software engineering.

I think you missed what I just said. You say there "is" little need. But I'm not looking at the present. We still don't know if we do for the long-term. (Well, lots of people think they do, but they're only guessing, not going on evidence obviously.)

Note that it's simply not true that people would learn the same material independently that they would learn in a classroom. Yes, it is theoretically possible, and some people can pull it off, but it's not at all universal or even common. A lot of people need the environment to learn better. Online lectures just don't cut it for everyone. So yes, "you need to go to college" can be true regardless of how good online lectures are, and we still don't know if what people get out of a CS degree will on average give them an advantage compared to those who don't get one in the longer term (though I don't really have statistics for the shorter term either).

That's not always true. Most people seem to think they "need" a car, yet the price of cars isn't astronomical.

But you're right that even though the cause is noble (education available for everyone) our current mechanism of funding it results in runaway prices and for-profit scams.

I don't think everyone should not go to college and learn to code though. I think in the near future coding will be a basic piece of literacy, but only one piece. I think it's reasonable to imagine a future where just like people study english and learn to do some writing in english 101, they will also learn the skills to munge a csv file or write an sql statement in programming 101, and both will be part of a well rounded education.

The last thing this industry needs is a flood of high school graduates creating shitty insecure websites. I say this as someone without a degree, who knows first hand that although it's possible to make it w/o a degree, it shouldn't be anyone's first choice.

Cars are not subsidized in the same way that healthcare or education are subsidized, though. There are fancy, expensive cars for people who want/can afford them, and there are more modest cars for the rest of us. There are lots of manufacturers of cars from around the world (and those cars from foreign manufacturers are available locally).

Of course, there are fancy expensive schools, and cheaper schools, but the subsidies (or maybe some other force I'm unaware of) seem to make the 'cheaper' schools still get more expensive every year.

As to how to fix it, it's complicated. If the fed wants to continue to pump money into universities, they could federalize them, but it would be a huge transfer of power to transfer control of universities from the state to the fed. There's accreditation, the board of regents, and a variety of other organizations that would then be federally controlled. On top of this, since a university is such a large piece of a local community and requires infrastructure to support it, it makes sense to manage it locally. Further, the state would probably just play the same game if a university was federally controlled and still milk money. Really, the states need to realign their priorities and increase funding for the university system if they want stuff like this to stop. Removing federal student loans would help alleviate some of this pressure, but there's still pressure on universities to move to adjunct faculty to reduce costs as well, which is what the article was about.

More money entering an economy will certainly allow buyers to bid up prices (as with houses and college tuition). The question is which other prices are being bid up even more rapidly and which are remaining flat or declining on a relative basis.

These sorts of problems are why both illicit and legalized counterfeiting are so pernicious.

According to this article [1] in Washington Post, the first occurrence of Texas as "crazy" in Norwegian dates to 1957. Makes me wonder if it's used this way in other European countries too, and whether or not the etymology is independent.

It's worth noting that unlike the term "Amerikanske tilstander" ("American conditions") in politics (as shorthand for implying your opponent is pushing for whichever stereotypically bad thing about American politics fits best in the specific policy area), the use of "Texas" refers to wild west movies, and so is about 19th century lawlessness, not modern Texas (though there certainly is still a stereotype of Texas as being at least, well, somewhat Texas)

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/2...

Exact use of the term could have certainly evolved over time, of course.

Maybe you should switch to saying "That's Illinois" or "That's Chicago", they're the dysfunctional state now.

So no. The fact that Texas can fund state schools of reasonable quality with the spoils of these actions does not dismiss the fact that it's one of the most frustrating states in the union from the perspective of modern education and industry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Man

Why is the US science education so bad? Texas. Almost exclusively. Its primary opponent: California. Texas causes similar problems in many other fields, including patent law and taxes.

If I had the option to go to the school without paying for the team, I would have certainly done so. Though the school was still 'worth it' but dang it, I could have had more consumer surplus.

Another issue (probably not the first piece of fat I'd cut) is title 9 sports - schools have to make sports programs accessible to women and men and they most commonly do this by creating women's and men's teams. I don't have a good understanding of the law but there might be a better allocation of resources if they simply opened teams to both sexes rather than creating sexually differentiated teams.

Sure. I wasn't endorsing the system, just explaining it as I see it.

> schools have to make sports programs accessible to women and men ... might be a better allocation of resources if they simply opened teams to both sexes rather than creating sexually differentiated teams.

I think that only works in a world where women and men are both physically capable equally in all aspects. That's not reality though, and at the high performance levels these teams play at, that difference is likely exacerbated to the degree that for many sports mixed teams would really just mean a starting lineup of one sex, which is not exactly succeeding at making it accessible if that's the goal.

Interestingly, if there were enough variation in the peak mental abilities we might see a similar segregation at peak performance levels. I suspect that while there is evidence that men and women often have different mental aptitudes, that's on average and at peak there is little difference in potential (even though there may be a difference in occurrence). E.g. There's plenty of evidence and reason to believe the strongest person that ever lived in the world is male, but there's not a lot of evidence to believe the smartest person that ever lived in the world, or even in any one field, is male (even if it may by likely to currently be one sec or the other based on ratios of interest).

I get that women and men have different physical capabilities but why split it on gender? Why not split it on race? There isn't much racial equity in some sports, apparently some races can't compete as well as others and the demographics speak for themselves. Better yet, why not split sports by work ethic? I'd be more inclined to do sports if I could play with people who are similarly disinterested and the status quo isn't very accessible to me: a person who over eats, sleeps in, and forgets rules. I'm sure we can map that to a disparate impact somewhere.

Or ignore the discussion entirely and say "we'll let colleges decide how to handle their sports programs".

I'm confused, I wasn't making any case for that. I'm not sure where we got to Federal funding tied to specific program attributes.

> I get that women and men have different physical capabilities but why split it on gender? Why not split it on race? There isn't much racial equity in some sports, apparently some races can't compete as well as others and the demographics speak for themselves.

Do they, or is that primarily a matter of socioeconomics and class providing less traditional opportunities for certain ethnic groups, leading them to funnel effort in alternate areas, such as sports? It could also be a cyclical system, where many role models for a race are currently in specific areas (such as entertainment and sports) influencing newer generations. I wouldn't be comfortable attributing it to genetic variance of physical capability without a bit more info.

Federal funding coerces schools into offering women's sports programs.

> I wouldn't be comfortable attributing it to genetic variance of physical capability without a bit more info.

Why do we have to attribute the difference to genetics or physical capability to make sports programs accessible? What about mental capability? Mentally impaired, physically okay individuals compete in the special Olympics. Why not create a class for people who are using performance enhancement drugs?

No, leaving aside whether funding they aren't forced to take can coerce anything, it mandates equal sports programs. They don't have to offer women's sports programs, if they don't offer men's sports programs.

It used to be that masses of factory workers were required, so those people were carefully set up for wealth extraction until they unionized and did an organized rebellion.

America's knowledge workers are where America's value is, so economic yokes have been installed at the most profitable point: where people receive higher education.

Honestly I'm not sure the EU is THAT different, I think you just do it at a different time.

I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right.

It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in higher education but it is also pretty crushing and you've got to be a soldier to deal with it. The worst part is I've almost never met anything but great people who willingly put themselves through it.

It's why as an overeducated graduate student, I'm against expanding education more and more (like free community college for all). The incentives are way off currently, not sure what the solution is, but it has to change.

Sure, I wouldn't start a family on that, but it far surpasses what I lived off of right after college.

EDIT: It looks like the article was about people late in their careers. I was assuming that adjunct faculty positions were only entry level or for grad students.

They do currently include decent health insurance, at least. No dental/vision, obviously.

Nope, still gotta pay rent. Attended Columbia for grad school, had to compete in the Manhattan real estate market on < 30k a year for an apartment.

> They do currently include decent health insurance, at least.

Ehhhh, it was of the 'if I get hit by a car and I am in the hospital for two months, I won't go bankrupt' variety. Better than nothing, at least.

Probably school-dependent -- I'm aware of one that does have dental at least (I forget about vision but I think it has that too).

> It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in higher education but it is also pretty crushing and you've got to be a soldier to deal with it. The worst part is I've almost never met anything but great people who willingly put themselves through it.

Isn't that selecting for exactly the kind of people they want in academia though? Great people who would willingly put themselves through pain just for the sake of advancing knowledge? I'm not actually convinced that if they paid a better salary it would necessarily end up selecting for people better suited for academia -- not saying this because of lack of skills, but because if you're worried about making money the moment you start, it seems pretty plausible that you (or far people in your shoes than would feel so otherwise) would be distracted by it the whole time and not working purely for the sake of advancing your science.

Surely there's some middle ground between incentives that attract too many people and underpaying dedicated talent? Even if you were to get paid more, the work is so intense and extended (grinding for years), those just attracted by money would have more attractive alternatives.

That being said, with the nature of being a graduate student and being on campus always, if it was "20 hours" a week it was really 30+. I do have a separate university related job now and the hours are anything but consistent. But you may be correct.

The truth is, the brilliant professors are surrounded by mediocre professors, who in turn are dwarfed by the numbers of administrators and staff. At the vast majority of universities you are unlikely to get taught by anyone especially brilliant.

A university education was a bit of an expensive luxury in the past, now with the internet it's far more true.

Adjuncts are a different story.

I taught as an adjunct part time at a state school where professor made $150k. I made $5000 per course. I did it more of less for fun because I like teaching. Which is not bad for extra pay on the side but terrible if it is your only pay.

Edit: as a side note, the department head told me she fought to have adjunct Comp Sci professors make more because the field is in such high demand. I am sure English adjunts at the same school make far less.

That's for adjuncts though. I think for full-time professors they have PhD requirements per the accreditation boards that they need to maintain. But once the quota is met they can hire anyone.

The article gives a median income of under $50K for non-adjuncts. Of course, that includes assistant/associate professors.

I doubt it is because of associate professors. More likely it is because of the size of the school, location, and type. I bet there are a lot of community college students in there.

A quick look in my area (New England) shows associates starting at about $60k and going up from there. But New England has a high cost of living so it is all relative.

Tenured professor at some small liberal arts college usually isn't doing as well.

No they're not. STEM professors get paid quite well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html