Me pretending to be a writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
And finally tonight: College. We've
previously covered the monumental problem of student loan debt and
predatory for-profit colleges, oh and also collegiate athletics and
how they're bullshit, but we've still barely scratched the congealed
surface of the pile of bullshit that is college education.
We all know that a college education is
now very expensive, in fact over the last 30 years the price has
tripled. College is supposed to be an investment in your future,
which is perhaps why we don't look all that closely at where the
money goes. After all, it's probably going to your professors so that
they can buy Priuses and humus and corduroy pants.
But a study done last year found that
76% of instructors across all colleges and universities in America
are adjuncts and not professors. Unlike professors, adjuncts are
part-time employees with little to no benefits who are employed on a
per-course basis.
In the 1960s, about 4 out of 5 college
instructors were full-time professors, and only 1 in 5 was an
adjunct. Today, 3 out of 4 college instructors are adjuncts, and 40%
of adjuncts claim to work more than 40 hours per week despite their
part-time classification. You might be thinking, “get to your
thesis already John, this is a very muddled introduction lacking in
action verbs.”
So here's the point: these so-called
“part-time” adjunct professors are drastically under-paid. Just
how under-paid? 31% of adjunct faculty in the United States are near
or below the federal poverty level. 16% are paid less than the
federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, and 43% are paid less than
$15/hour, which is the minimum wage in Seattle.
The result of this low-pay is that many
adjuncts work multiple jobs, often at more than one college, with no
benefits, but it actually gets much worse than that, as one adjunct
professor explains:
Interview 1: “I have a Phd, I teach
four courses a semester, plus two in the summer, that's ten courses a
year. A full-time professor usually doesn't teach more than 7 or 8
courses a year. Yet last year I made $16,000 before taxes. At this
rate, I won't pay off my student loans until I'm 185 years old. The
worst part is that they can fire me at any moment, for any reason,
and I will get no benefits, I wouldn't even qualify for
unemployment.”
That's right, adjuncts are contract
employees, just like the seasonal workers at Wal-Mart. So when the
semester ends, so does their contract, therefore they aren't eligible
for unemployment benefits, and the university can terminate them for
any reason they please because they aren't firing them, merely
allowing their contract to expire. It's a lot like how John Travolta
doesn't date, instead he uses month long sex-contracts that he allows
to expire.
But in most cases, adjuncts aren't
short-term employees:
Interview 1: “I've been doing this
for eleven years, and I have no hope of ever being promoted to a
full-time position. This is my reward for getting a bachelors, a
masters, and a PhD, and then working full time as a college
professor: I make $10/hour.”
And the problems go further than just
the low wages. Because they are paid per course, there is no clock to
punch, which leads to something that many fast food workers will find
familiar: wage theft.
Interview 2: “Since the colleges want
to keep you technically part-time, they'll have 4 part-timers instead
of 2 full-timers, and that means that I work part-time at three
different universities. Not only do I have to commute to
multiple jobs and all the time that takes, but it also means I have
to go to three-times as many meetings and training sessions and
seminars, usually on Saturdays, that are mandatory, and un-paid. The
most insulting part is that these administrators stand up there and
mumble while standing in front of a poorly constructed power-point.
It just shows how little they appreciate teaching when they
incompetently do it at you.”
If you work at an office job
and you have to sit through a three-hour meeting, you at least are
getting paid your salary to be there. If you work at Wal-Mart and
they want to put you through training, they have to pay you minimum
wage. Adjuncts are just paid a flat fee per course, and anything else
like meetings or advising students is considered part of that fee.
Which makes perfect sense, because professors would go to meetings
anyway if they weren't paid, that's basically what they do for fun.
Adjunct pay has gotten so
bad, well, just listen to this:
Interview 2: “I honestly
don't know why I'm doing this anymore. The other day I was looking at
starting salaries at other jobs and I discovered that I would make
more money as a janitor at the high school just up the street. And I
would get benefits. About 100 students a year call me professor, and
yet none of them would suspect that the high school janitor down the
street makes more and gets more benefits than I do.”
Holy shit. I told you
college was bullshit, and now you see, it pays more, to literally
clean up shit than it does to teach at many universities. And this is
not an isolated incident. The average adjunct pay nationally is
$3,000 per course. An adjunct teaching 10 courses a year, more than
what's considered full-time, would make $30,000. The median salary
for garbage collectors in the U.S. is $32,000 a year.
If the average adjunct
college instructor with at least a master's degree is making less
than the average garbage collector, what's the value of a masters
degree? Why are students paying universities all that money for an
education in the first place if even the universities themselves
don't value that diploma?
At this point universities
are in the same business as Hallmark. They sell extremely over-priced
pieces of cardboard that you show to other people as proof that you
are willing to waste your money to impress them.
Maybe universities don't
have the money, after all there are frequent cuts to
education. In just the last decade, the cost of college has gone up
about 40%. However, during that same time, the cut of college
revenue that actually ended up in the pockets of teachers has dropped
24%. In other words, the money is there, they are just choosing to
give less of it to teachers.
Interview 3: “When I teach
a full course, there are 16 students each paying around $4000. So the
University is taking in about $64k. They turn around and pay me
$4k. That's less than 7% of the revenue. In other words, each
student is paying $4000, and only $250 goes to me. My students are
required spend more than $150 on books for my class.”
So when it's all said and
done, a student is paying almost as much to the textbook company as
they are to their actual teacher, meanwhile this university is
collecting 93% of the tuition to spend elsewhere. It's no wonder the
universities have shifted so much of the teaching load to adjuncts,
they are payed about as well as subway buskers.
Instead of picturing
teachers with an apple on their desk, we should replace the apple
with a fucking tip jar. If the adjunct we just showed had a tip jar
and each student gave on average a 6% tip, that would double her pay.
A. Students shouldn't have
to tip, because they're already paying triple for tuition as students
a few decades ago, and B. Fuck you universities, what the fuck are
you doing with that money?
Well, a lot of it is going
to administrators, presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans, and
chancellors and whatever other bullshit job titles they can pull out
of a thesaurus. You can call yourself a chancellor, but we all know
you're just an over-paid principal that gives handjobs to donors.
Administrative bloat is a
huge source of the increased expenses at universities. Twenty-five
years ago, professors outnumbered administrators two-to-one. Now
that's completely flipped. From 1975 to 2005, college administration
staff grew by 135%, and spending on administrators has tripled. Yet during the same period
the faculty-to-student ratio has remained constant. In fact, US
schools have added more than 500,000 administration jobs in the last
25 years. Administrators constantly talk about improving efficiency
and keeping down costs. But economist Richard Vedder is calling
bullshit:
Interview: “It's a lie.
It's a lie. It's a lie. . . They'll say we're making moves to cut
costs, and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and
ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice
provost they just hired.”
At Rennselaer Polytechnic
Institute, the president, Shirley Jackson, made over $7 million in
2012. And because it's so difficult to live on 7 million, the
university also provides her with a mansion in the Adirondacks, a
support staff of housekeepers and body guards, and a chauffered
luxury car.
Well the free-market has
spoken, she must be doing a great job if she earns that much. Under
Jackson's leadership, RPI has seen its debt go up by more than 600%,
and they have seen their credit rating downgraded twice. Meanwhile,
an adjunct at RPI, Elizabeth Gordon, was making $4000 per course,
which she calculated to be equal to $10/hour. In order for Gordon to
make as much money as President Jackson makes in one year, she would
have to teach 1,750 courses, which would take more than 200 years. In
other words, RPI pays the president as though she is worth as much as 200 teachers. They only have 440 teachers. If
you cut just Jackson's pay from 7 million to poverty wages of only 1
million per year, you could give every teacher at a RPI a
$13,000-per-year raise. And that's without considering any other
administrators and their bloated salaries.
So why does the board think
Jackson is worth such a high salary? What has she done to make RPI a
great university? Well, in 2006 the faculty senate nearly passed a
vote of no-confidence in her. So she responded by dissolving the
faculty senate, taking a page directly from Grand Moff Tarkin's
textbook on business management. She has also been accused of using
union-busting intimidation tactics, for example, firing a janitor who
joined a union organizing committee.
But it gets worse. President
Jackson has a set of rules, and these are all true:
-She is always to be
introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.” - because
nothing says honorable like dictating to others that they call you
honorable.
-Cabinet members must rise
when she enters the room.
-Only she is allowed to set
the temperature in conference rooms. - presumably because she's a
cold-blooded velociraptor that's very sensitive to temperature.
-If food is served at a
meeting, vice presidents must clear her plate.
Wow. That's some Saddam
Hussein level shit. I bet George W. Bush is wishing he'd thought of
that while he was president. Imagine Dick Cheney being forced to
scrape half-eaten tuna salad off W's plate, or wiping off the desk in
the oval office. It will warm your heart a little bit, if it doesn't,
you're a robot and a jaded one at that.
While
Darth Jackson is an extreme example, universities all over have seen
both the size of the administration increase as well as administrator
pay increase drastically, while teacher pay has stagnated or even fallen.
You've got to pay administrators a massive salary otherwise they'd go elsewhere, I mean who would be willing to do all the hard work of being chauffered to meetings where you get to piss on people for only a few hundred thousand dollars?
At
the University of Alberta, four professors combined themselves
Captain-Planet style into a single entity and applied for a
single job as Vice-Chancellor that paid $400,000 per year. The four
professors offered to each take a quarter of the pay and a quarter of
the duties. You'd think that four professors could do the job better
than one person, but the administration disagrees, and would rather
pay one person all that money. That's because these four professors
put together aren't qualified to do the job because they clearly
don't understand the purpose of being an administrator is to make
lots of money while shitting on teachers. Teachers shitting on
themselves would be a clear conflict of interest.
And
this brings us to an important point: college professors are smart
people. So why do they work for such low wages? Well, adjunct
positions are often seen as stepping stones to jobs as full-fledged
professors. Most adjuncts are qualified to be professors and so they
take these jobs in the hope that it will allow them to make
connections, add to their resumes, and soon lead to a full-time job.
But remember that now 3 out of 4 college teachers are adjuncts, and
that trend is only getting worse. Basically adjuncts are full-time
professors but university Grand Moffs are pretending they aren't
really professors and they pay them like they're garbage collectors.
But
college professors are smart, and so they are realizing that they are
being exploited and that the adjunct job is a stepping
stone that just ends at a cliff where there used to a bridge that
took you to a now mythical professor-land.
Basically we can go one of two ways: the smart, talented, passionate
teachers that are professors in all-but-title will quit and find work
in other fields, leaving the universities to hire less and less
skilled people to fill their McJobs, and like McDonald's food, it
will cause higher-education itself to urgently need a toilet. OR, adjuncts
can band together, unionize, and demand fair wages, which has been
happening at some universities recently, so there's some hope.
But
in the mean-time, I have a solution. (Pull out a tip-jar and put it
on the desk). Tip your teachers. They work way harder for you little
shits than that barista did on your iced mochaspressachino vanilla
bullshit you needed so you could stay up late to write that non-sense about how Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an example of formalism, and you tipped for that, remember? Meanwhile, that teacher has
to read your bullshit paper for $7/hour and no tips.
(Enter
an announcer): Presenting the Honorable Shirley Jackson.
(John
stands at attention as a velociraptor enters)
That's
our show for this week, thanks so much for watching.
(John
feeds the velociraptor by hand, and wipes its mouth).
