Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars . . . is frequently serfdom, and prostitution. People who think like this are forming our children into to citizens and adults. Do we want people of such low quality and moral fiber involved with our children in any manner? I don't. More below. "There is nothing she would rather do than teach. But after supplementing her career with tutoring and proofreading, the university lecturer decided to go to remarkable lengths to make her career financially viable.
She first opted for her side gig during a particularly rough patch, several years ago, when her course load was suddenly cut in half and her income plunged, putting her on the brink of eviction. “In my mind I was like, I’ve had one-night stands, how bad can it be?” she said. “And it wasn’t that bad.” The wry but weary-sounding middle-aged woman, who lives in a large US city and asked to remain anonymous to protect her reputation, is an adjunct instructor, meaning she is not a full-time faculty member at any one institution and strings together a living by teaching individual courses, in her case at multiple colleges." What wasn't that bad was prostituting her self-working as an illegal sex worker. Why not just steal your bread? “I feel committed to being the person who’s there to help millennials, the next generation, go on to become critical thinkers,” she said. “And I’m good at it, and I like it. And it’s heartbreaking to me it doesn’t pay what I feel it should.” Piss off, no one who makes decisions as poorly as you has any serious critical thinking skills, and if you do not, you cannot pass any along to others. But then postmodernists have no moral center and do not believe that any value hierarchy is acceptable. So, all you are teaching is dreck, not critical thinking because for critical thinking to happen the thinker needs to have a well-structured value system and understand that value system. "Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid. They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts’ cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a “shack” north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley." There are other places to teach outside of the ludicrously expensive Silicone Valley. In most of middle America, the cost of living is very low. The Real Value of $100 in Each State - middle America, the cost of living It would also behoove these people to get a real job to pay for their hobby of instructing college kids. I can tell them that UPS is hiring and many of the positions work hours are between roughly 2 am and 8 am. Check with your local UPS. "Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance." Funding does not mean what you likely think it means. The Universities have not been starving to death since 1990. Funding only means that public funding of Universities is declining (which is not true see, The Real Cost of College,) but the University budgets have been recklessly expanding as have tuition, student fees, books, and other student costs. Report: Cost Of College Degree Has Increased By 1,120 Percent In Three Decades The Real Cost of College "Claims that college tuition in the U.S. has risen because of reductions in legislative subsidies for higher education are at best gross oversimplifications—an argument I made in a New York Times piece published last month. I noted that, although tuition at public colleges and universities has nearly quadrupled since 1980 in real terms (and tripled at private ones), total state appropriations have also risen dramatically." Opinion | The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much "In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000." So, where is all of this money going? "Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970. By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions." Into the University administration where it pays the exorbitant salaries of people who do nothing to teach our children or even make the Universities run properly. After all, Universities ran properly before the huge expansion of Administration. Back to the original article, there is a litany of stories of people who are too hidebound to realize that they cannot make a living as an adjunct professor especially if they are working in a place like Silicone Valley. These people could get a higher paying job outside of University but do not. Or they could find a different University in a location with a low cost of living and housing but they do not do this either. So much for critical thinking skills. "For Rebecca Snow, 51, another adjunct who quit teaching after a succession of appalling living situations, there is a sense of having been freed, even though finances continue to be stressful." There is also a bit on the unionization of teaching positions. The reality is that public unions in the US are in serious difficulty but don't seem to know it yet. The pension implosion will clean them out in a single fell swoop. The adjunct instructors in these dire straits need to reevaluate their life choices. They might be better off teaching at a community college in Mississippi where the value of a dollar is north of $1.15 as opposed to Silicone Valley where the value of a dollar is south of $0.85 and probably closer to 0.80. The real changes will come after the University suffers it internal collapse which seems to be moving apace now. I am finding more stories of colleges having more and more trouble filling open seats resulting in financial stress. All of this is happening even before the advent of serious, accredited multiplatform/online Universities with high-quality distance learning. Today parents want their children to attend University just like mom and dad did back at the dawn of time. These parents are flummoxed when they realize that a degree now costs between $100,000 and $200,000 at the good old University mom and dad attended. The problem here is economics. There are too many people, mostly women, who want to teach at University and too few who are willing to walk away if the money is poor. So, they follow their dream and impoverish themselves.
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