I recently posted a news story from Grand Rapids, about teachers who say their pay qualifies them for food stamps.
Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune writes that college adjuncts are not likely to qualify for health care. At their current low wages, they already qualify for food stamps.
The New York Times wrote recently that the college degree is akin to a high school degree. Just to get a job as a file clerk or a receptionist, it reported, requires a four-year degree.
When college graduates receive neither compensation nor respect, how can we encourage more young people to sacrifice to get a college diploma? What message are we sending them?
Why should we aspire to be first in the world in college graduates when their prospects for employment and a livable income are so meager?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yup, we definitely new more good jobs. Fortunately many Democrats are challenging business to take some of its profits, expand and create more good jobs in the US.
The best public schools also are helping youngsters identify areas where there are good job opportunities.
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Well, those are pretty words, but what laws are the actually enacting to encourage/enforce such action on the part of business? Personally, I’m tired of the pretty words. Until we re-instate something approaching Glass-Steagall, increase top marginal tax rates to about what they were under Reagan (if not Eisenhower), get rid of the capital gains tax rate, restore the estate tax to a reasonable level, tax financial transactions, penalize off-shoring/reward job creation, increase union protections, restore worker benefits that have been chipped away, and many other things, nothing is going to change, so all these Democrats are just so many clanging bells.
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please don’t forget slashing the BILLION dollar yearly expenditure on “National Defense” i.e…..imperialist empire building.
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I assume you meant trillion, CT.
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This also gives the lie to so-called reformer propaganda that education is the only way out of poverty, thus placing the onus for student’s financial future on teachers.
The reality, as Bureau of Labor Statistics data clearly show, is that most jobs require little or no training, pay poverty-level wages, and that there is a huge surplus of overqualified people for the jobs that exist, even among people with STEM degrees.
As a teacher, I’d never argue that education is not essential for advancement in life, but it is not the only factor. As long as the Overclass is skimming a greater percentage of society’s wealth – income inequality has risen faster under Obama than under Bush – more and more people will be living on the financial precipice.
The horrible conditions faced by college adjuncts, as temporary, contingent labor, should be proof enough that education alone cannot take up the slack.
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Great point. Although I believe a good education enables one to think more clearly and to behave in ways that are more enlightened although not always so. I just had a conversation with my 8th gr daughter about just this very thing. Education is not only to get a job but also to expand your horizons to hopefully live a less confused and more satisfying life. And as an aside, greed and avarice are responsible for there being less and less jobs here that pay a livable wage. Unfortunately, this essentially anti-social behavior is perpetrated by many of our most educated people. So, what does it all mean?
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I fully agree with you, and had no intention of implying otherwise. Careers aside, college is a place to learn how to think and how to learn throughout one’s life. I was just trying to refer to the economics of the matter.
My youngest daughter is currently in 14th grade – sadly and all too often, that’s what higher education is becoming – at a state college. She’s mentioned an interest in hair styling, and I’ve told her that after she gets her degree, I’d help her with that. At the moment, it seems
the job can’t be digitized or outsourced, and having a trade may provide an alternative to being over-educated for the high stress, low pay McJobs the Overclass is creating.
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No one cares that we, 70% of college professors, with all our degrees and experience, the very people who are supposed to be leading America out of poverty and into prosperity, are in poverty ourselves. At this point, I am so tired of the daily struggle to survive that I avoid the college to career conversations with my students, because I can’t lie to them.
They also won’t ever hear me say that, “America is the best country on the earth.” Yeah, right, if you’re the 1%. I’ve totally lost faith in our government’s capacity to care about what happens to the rest of us, because politicians are too busy lining their own pockets and serving the United Selfish of America, Inc.
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If you are alluding to the proposition that higher education is somewhat of a con game, I agree.
Consider “law school.” There are nowhere near the legal jobs available for the numbers of lawyers graduated each year.
Consider “teachers.” There is a huge surplus of teachers relative to the demand regardless of school’s claiming that there is a need for new teachers.
Consider “STEM” jobs. The privateers claim that America is not graduating sufficient numbers to fill waiting “STEM” jobs.
Cow-pucky.
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If anyone is interested, here is a link to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s faculty salary report.
http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-table-2012/131433
Of course there are large differences in salaries between disciplines.
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That’s what the 30% earn, not the remaining 70% of us.
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Other Spaces, having spent about half of my career in the k-12 world, and about half in the “higher ed” world, I am fascinating by the differences. I worked more than 20 years at a large public university and for a couple of years at a private college. I’ve also talked with faculty at 2 year institutions.
The range of salaries in higher ed is incredible. There are faculty earning $150-200K at four year research institutions. And there are faculty at two year institutions earning $40-50K. Ironically, some of the faculty earning the most at 4 year institutions are doing the least teaching.
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There is not only differences across institutions, but also within institutions and departments. The difference between the highest and lowest paid full time faculty members of my department is around $180,000.
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I agree with Other Spaces. And while I agree with brutus2011 about education being about more than a job, I cannot in good conscience encourage anyone to incur the kind of debt they will incur getting a four year degree with no real income reward to pay that debt off.
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One of the most pervasive challenges in organizational effectiveness is the problem of effectively dealing with scaling up.
The most essential problem in this is in developing middle management, an incredibly difficult and time consuming function, but one which is absolutely essential, as was discovered by former global auto leader Toyota, once the leader in quality and in low cost production.
When Toyota made the corporate decision that it would become the world’s largest automaker in terms of units sold, it failed to adequately develop its middle management.
While it earlier been the consensus quality leader for production auto making, the push for growth or scaling up production resulted in many vowing to never again buy a Toyota product after the litany of product recalls and safety violations.
Education is probably one of the most difficult areas to effectively scale up.
The “discovery” at the most recent turn of the century that the schools performing at the
bottom ten percent were delivering deplorable and dysfunctional educations to their students resulted in one of those cases in which the cure is worse than the disease.
The highly scalable standardized testing with its data flows and its following of easily quantifiable “accountability” imposed not on the bottom ten percent of schools, but on
100% of public schools, including the many with previously outstanding student outcomes, probably will go down in history as one of the worst public policy decisions.
Incredibly dedicated teachers who responded to the call to develop the young wanting to inspire creativity, learning to write and speak persuasively, and to develop interpersonal skills found themselves forced into a nightmare of threats of termination if their students failed to do well in the rote memorization driven standardized tests.
Instead of inspiring critical thinking and effective writing, teachers found themselves forced into the nightmare of “teaching to the test”, resulting in an entire decade of human capital development lost due to fatally flawed public policy.
As a result, many world class organizations are finding that they are unable to recruit the talent that they must to replace baby boomers nearing retirement, particularly in the sciences and technology.
Without the creative talent essential to innovate, many US manufacturers find that they are losing market share to foreign manufacturers having access to far better trained talent. This has been particularly of significance in the consumer durables industry.
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“The highly scalable standardized testing with its data flows and its following of easily quantifiable “accountability” imposed not on the bottom ten percent of schools, but on
100% of public schools, including the many with previously outstanding student outcomes, probably will go down in history as one of the worst public policy decisions.”
Why should standardized testing be imposed on *any* percentage of schools? It’s a terrible indicator of learning whether we’re talking about “good” schools or “bad” schools. Furthermore, “good” or “bad” schools are either good or bad largely as a function of the types of kids in them – levels of parental involvement, effects of poverty and neighborhood violence, etc. How is it fair to hold “bad” schools “accountable” for those factors? Maybe if we actually addressed those factors, we wouldn’t have such “bad” schools?
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Thank you!
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My daughter has a Master’s Degree, and because she is passionate about working with disadvantaged youth to promote their creativity and sense of power to act in the world, she worked for a non-profit organization. After several years, this non-profit had no choice but to lay her off permanently, because of a fiscal crisis, despite the fact that she had been doing an outstanding job, even being named a Woman of the Year by a local YWCA when she was in her early 30’s. She also had a position as an adjunct professor at the local public college, teaching one or two courses a semester. Not only was she denied any benefits or job security because of her limited hours, she was also denied unemployment benefits during the summers because, according to the interpretation of state law, she had a “contract” to be called back as an adjunct. She now scrambles with several part-time jobs in order to afford a 3rd floor walkup apt. in the poorest city in the state, and is on food stamps. My heart bleeds for her and for the countless number of highly qualified and effective young people who are denied stable jobs with good benefits basically because corporations are hoarding all of the money.
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The nonprofit world suffers first and recovers last whenever there is an economic downturn. Face it, service without financial gain as part of the package means that you are likely to spend a significant amount of time on an unemployment line. And, you are tainted by that experience that will make it next to impossible to switch to a for profit enterprise if you have transferable skills. For some reason, performing a service without thought of financial gain taints you for life. Your daughter would do well to find a way to market herself to the for profit world and do her service either through corporate do-good projects or on a volunteer basis. Will she? Probably not. We need people like her; too bad our society doesn’t see the value in feeding her, too.
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There was just a new TED talk released arguing that the way we think about the non-profit sector is a problem. Here is the link
What do folks here think of his argument?
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First of all, the first time I watched this clip, it was sponsored by Goldman Sachs, and the second time it was sponsored by IBM. I think that the main problem facing non-profits is not an antipathy to overhead in pursuit of scaled-up fundraising, but that our society esteems self-aggrandizement and arrogance and demeans empathy, compassion, and socially beneficial engagement. The forces that are pushing standardization of education from pre-K through teacher preparation via the Common Core are pursuing this fatally flawed stance with a vengeance, to the utter disregard of the human needs of children, teachers, families, schools, and communities.
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So here’s the latest update from Michigan. Now that we’re a “right to work” state, state universities are dragging their heels on adopting union contracts that they had negotiated until after RTW goes into effect in a few months. Why? Lawmakers who passed the controversial RTW legislation are threatening institutions with reduced funding if they go ahead with contracts that could circumvent RTW. Michigan is becoming a no-win state, at least if you’re an educator!
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Since 70% of college faculty are not earning livable wages, if you want to know why tuition is high and where the money is going, take a look at the pay of college presidents and senior administrators: http://chronicle.com/article/Almanac-2012-The-Profession/133761/
BTW, other campus workers also typically earn unlivable wages, but there’s plenty of funds for constructing new buildings, athletics and all those administrators: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Living-Wage-for-Campus/134232/
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I am an SLP, an in-demand positioning in my area of the country. I choose to work in an urban public school system, and my salary is the sole source of income for my family. With a master’s degree, my family of five (3 children) still qualifies for reduced lunch prices, and I just found out that we are at the 90% level for Indiana’s school voucher program. We do qualify for food stamps based on income, but since we do have more than $2000 in savings accounts, retirement funds, and mutual funds, we wouldn’t actually receive them.
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This would be satirical if it were not so horrific.
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Right to work, I too live in a right to work state, Nevada. Does that mean right to work for less? I think I get the Chamber of Commerce meaning. They should remember, serfs can eventually revolt.
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As an adjunct, I can attest to the fact that I could not survive solely on an adjunct salary. I also work full-time as an administrator in public education. I would love to move to a full-time position at the university despite the fact that even my full-time salary would be much lower. I’m still waiting. I have an Master’s and Doctorate in Education and all the student loans that go along with it. I could’ve accepted several positions with “corporate reform” companies, but choose to stay true to what I believe. It’s easier for me to be poor with a good conscience!
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