6 ms·

California community colleges rely too much on part-time faculty; misspend funds

103 points by nowandlater 4y ago

jseliger 4y ago
I've taught a bit at Arizona community colleges, which also rely heavily on part-time faculty. There are many more people with grad degrees than demand for them from universities, resulting in the obvious when supply exceeds demand: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can/ https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... In the 1945 - 1975 period, demand for faculty exceeded supply: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/ https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l..., and many in or adjacent to academia yearn for a return to those days. But it's probably not happening. The administrators and Boards who control budgets are also keenly cognizant of the fact that birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 and haven't recovered since. Those of you who can add 18 to 2009 will know what's coming for an industry that depends heavily on 18 year olds for customers. Tenure is, in the absence of mandatory retirement ages, a 40+ year employment promise. And one dark truth is that academia insiders with tenure accrue far more power over their adjunct colleagues than they do over their tenured colleagues. Academia insiders rarely emphasize this, for obvious reasons.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  > But it's probably not happening. I really wish they’d allocate Covid-like money to R&D or prizes for solving various challenges like curing diseases, which would drive universities. However first remove the bloated administration and DEI/Woke Discrimination Industry.
  - xzel 4y ago
    > I really wish they’d allocate Covid-like money to R&D or prizes for solving various challenges like curing diseases, which would drive universities. They already do via DARPA, NIH and medical patents. Making a drug and selling it is the prize for solving a challenge like curing diseases.
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      Let’s add a zero to that (as a string). And add things like adversarial research to try to disprove findings, etc.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        Start a GoFundMe
- the_jeremy 4y ago
  > birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 US births per thousand fell from 13.8 to 13.5 from 2008 to 2009, less than a 2% decrease. There wasn't a sudden cliff; US birth rates have decreased every year but 9 (1979-1988) from 1950 to 2019, going from 24 in 1950 to 12 today. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birth-rate#:~:text=The%20birth%20rate%20for%20U.S.,a%200.09%25%20increase%20from%202019 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birt....
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    The birth rate seems less important to the universities than the raw number of births. Though as with the birth rate, nothing in particular happened in 2009: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      I would think even more important to universities should be the raw number of high schoolers and high schoolers’ parent that are questioning the ROI of universities, especially private universities.
      - peanuty1 4y ago
        The ROI of elite private universities like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are still very high. The private universities that should be worried are the ones that don't have an elite reputation but still charge the same tuition (or higher tuition, if you account for financial aid) as the elite universities.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      For the field as a whole I guess, the rate must matter, right? Like, if the birth rate increases, then a higher percentage of the population will be employed in teaching related jobs, because there are more kids per adult.
    - twelvechairs 4y ago
- xmddmx 4y ago
  Background: the California Master Plan for Higher Eduction (1960) essentially set up a system of free college education to all residents. It was slowly chipped away until "free" became "not free". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig... The Adjunct job title makes sense in certain situations, but when a college system is relying on Adjuncts for the majority of credit hours taught, simply to save money, this becomes a problem.
  - ta988 4y ago
    It is not just about money it is about "flexibility" or else said, ability to kick people out to update curriculum and take younger ones more up to date with recent research.
    - beej71 4y ago
      If it were just that, they'd hire full time contractors with benefits for one year terms.
    - dhosek 4y ago
      No, it’s totally about the money. You can get the classroom coverage of a TT faculty member for a tiny fraction of the cost if you use adjuncts.
      - eigenman 4y ago
        For reference, a typical adjunct (non tenure track instructor) will make $5000 per course per semester with no benefits. Tenured and tenure track faculty in STEM are typically paid around $60-120k per year with benefits and will teach, at most, six courses a year.
        robotresearcher 4y ago
        The job of a tenured STEM faculty member is not the same as contract lecturer. Tenured faculty do research and run the university as well as teach. At a major research school a STEM faculty member will often raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in outside research funds, which will pay upwards of ten graduate students and the other running costs of a research lab. They will do and publish new research, usually while training graduate students, review the work of others, run conferences, sit on hiring committees,, take turns being Director of this or that (ie. management positions). Many STEM professors raise more external money than their salary costs. They are dollar positive to the school before they teach anything. And they teach too. Yes, it has a salary better than contract teaching.
- robotresearcher 4y ago
  Tenure does not disallow being let go for redundancy or financial reasons. Full time permanent employees have more power than limited term contractors. Isn't that kinda normal in every workplace?
gedy 4y ago
In this case, I'd say I very much liked that the community colleges I attended in California had part-time faculty that were working in the industry. I feel the quality of education for some classes was better than what I received in university. (Thanks Mrs. Wong (Math) and Mr. Vedrin (EE)!)
- epage 4y ago
  I really appreciated by CA community college experience with part-time faculty. My math, physics, and chemistry teachers were literally rocket scientists at their day jobs (military R&D).
- sosodev 4y ago
  Same experience for me
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  The sad thing is that major universities are filled with researchers who are distracted by pushing on the frontiers. They often do a very basic job with teaching.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    > The sad thing is that major universities are filled with researchers who are distracted by pushing on the frontiers. Or simply writing enough grant proposals to cover their salary and lab expenses for another year
  - jltsiren 4y ago
    The sad thing is that the job market favors graduates from major universities. Research universities are doing what they are supposed to do, but their reputation attracts talented and ambitious students in general. When those students end up being successful in their careers, they maintain the reputation. Some countries have tried establishing two parallel higher education systems. Universities provide research-based education, while the other system focuses more on skills that are relevant in the job market. And the job market still favors academic education over the more practical alternative.
paulusthe 4y ago
This is true of big name research institutions too. Since 2000, spending on administration in US colleges nationwide has increased faster than the combined increase of scholarships, grants, and professorships. (Source: Graeber, 2018ish). This requires cost savings, and that comes at the cost of the things a college should be doing: teaching, and educating. After all, the bureaucrats who make the budgets aren't going to reduce their own salaries. Savings must be found, and it can't possibly be found in cutting the fifth community outreach residential assistant wellness officer.
themodelplumber 4y ago
I used to be a PT teacher at my local California community college, in the art department (graphic design, illustration, Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, etc.). I definitely heard from other teachers that some things were off (that seem like they could be related), but who knows if they were really related to the use of funds described here. I taught for just a couple of years and I was told that my classes were appreciated to some degree because I was a working professional in my field at the same time. Still, it was kind of annoying that some students only wanted that. When you have massively-high-achievers and middle-age homeless students with obvious struggles in the same class, the UMC people angling for their particular needs and also trying to min/max every class start to seem kind of off-putting. Not to blame anybody really, but it had a real feeling of inequity-upon-inequity to it. One couple really grilled me before a digital photography class, asking trivia questions about the topics we'd be covering and _how much I could teach them_, because they were trying to figure out _how much_ of a waste of time it would be. For a simple weekend class! They had nearly five figures worth of gear and a lot of expectations from a community college. I believe this is about when boot camps started to really pick up speed, and I could feel that tension building around traditional educational institutions. I do feel like there are pros/cons of "working professional teacher" vs. traditional FT college faculty for sure, which I didn't really understand before working there. Unfortunately it was also kind of a slow-motion "that's like a dollar an hour" [1] experience, and after reviewing the whole situation, with its variety of little pros and cons, decided to move all my energies back into my normal business. One thing I really miss though is how much I learned! My students thought _they_ were learning but holy smokes did I learn a lot from creating lessons, lesson plans, and websites for the courses. BTW tech-wise it was a lot of fun too. I gave extra credit points for trying non-Photoshop software, including some FOSS titles like GIMP, Bluefish, Inkscape, etc. Some of my students also got a bonus intro to web development with PHP, Python, and one was I believe a Rebol programmer who showed me his homebrew back-door VNC client with a one-click button palette to control any of his IT-company clients' computers. I also believe I came close to mastering the art of carrying my teacher's life on a USB disk. I had so many Portable-Apps downloads on there, even some servers I believe. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv440W1xS44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv440W1xS44
- tsumnia 4y ago
wrp 4y ago
In Oregon, already in the 1990s community colleges were replacing retiring full-timers with part-timers as a cost-cutting measure. This is something administration will always do when they can get away with it. We need a formal policy on what ratio of part-timers is allowable.
zpzapper 4y ago
The best professors I had at CCC's were part time and actually worked outside of the Academia bubble. Gave a lot of very relevant advice and information. Some were full time researchers at UC's or nearby schools on research as well instead of Tenured faculty paid to not care.
batman-farts 4y ago
It's not always people with industry jobs taking these part-time positions; there's a whole subculture of "freeway flyers" who are teaching at multiple community colleges, and sometimes lower-division classes at private universities, while trying to break into a full-time position. A few years after I was in his class, one chemistry professor I really enjoyed burned out from doing this and disappeared from all his classes in the middle of the semester. The replacement professor apparently wasn't at all prepared to step in, and the students had to petition the dean to have their grades thrown out and retake the class. That's obviously the worst-case scenario I encountered, but I heard other tales of people like a math professor shuttling back and forth between Merced and Contra Costa counties every week. A biology professor I had was making a go of it doing half the week at Contra Costa campuses and half the week at USF, and told me her situation was not at all uncommon, even in the Bay Area. There's definitely a precariat associated with keeping the community college system going, which is a damned shame because it's the most accessible rung on the ladder. Perhaps the state will be able to do something about this, but it's understandably wise to be skeptical of statewide education initiatives in California.
- dhosek 4y ago
  I was one of those. California has a law that was intended to protect against exploitation of adjuncts that makes things worth where an adjunct is limited to 10 LHE (lecture hour equivalent) per district. In Orange County, it’s not too bad because there are a lot of districts in a smallish geographic area, but LACCD covers a huge geographic area which makes L.A. County much more challenging. Add in all the competition and the low wages (although, as I recall, the L.A. County districts paid more than the O.C. districts) and life is pretty painful for an adjunct.
- labster 4y ago
  I had a chemistry prof with the same story: a PhD who had to work in two different counties to scrape together a living while avoiding limits on hours. And the department chair was younger and only had a master’s degree in education. The situation with adjuncts is terrible everywhere in the US, though. The situation at Hamline University could only have happened because the professor lacked tenure, otherwise academic freedom protections would have kicked in.
x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
As someone in the profession for over a decade, what is the best way to offer yourself out as a guest lecturer for community college courses focused on software development?
- hdctambien 4y ago
  It's a job like any other, so go to the school's careers page and find the listing for a job you're qualified for, and apply.
  - x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
    I'm not looking for a full-time, or even part-time, position. I want to be able to teach when it's convenient and fits into my schedule.
- grog454 4y ago
  I'll give you my approach as someone in the profession for over a decade who started teaching part time at a private university last year. I enrolled (as a student) in a couple of classes at a local CC for fields that were just passive interests of mine. One lecturer was great and served as a model for in-class instruction. After a semester of that I applied to various local community colleges and private universities (one my alma mater). Many of these universities didn't even have an official "adjunct lecturer" position posted, but I selected whatever sounded most appropriate and spent a lot of time on cover letters tailored to each university explaining what I had to offer to them and why I ought to be a good fit for whatever they valued in instructors. It took over a month to hear back from the first which was pretty disappointing. 3 months later I heard back from the second, and I never heard back from a third private university or either of two local CCs. By the time I heard back from the second I had already been informally offered a position at the first.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  There are two kinds of job. * Adjunct lecturer/temporary faculty: These are people hired for just one semester for a specific course, for fairly minimal salary. Ads for these are posted usually 3 to 6 months before the semester starts, and you can just apply to them. * Visiting faculty: If you are actually really good, sometimes Universities will hire you as a visiting faculty. There is a case-by-case negotiated contract (usually 1 or 2 courses per year, with whatever other constraints you have). The difference from the first choice is that you have some choice in the course you get to teach, and how you teach it. I would recommend starting from the first choice, and teaching a large standard course where other faculty are around to help you. Teaching well is very difficult (and teaching badly is relatively easy), and people's future is at stake, so its best to start slow and learn the ropes before attempting something difficult.
plaguepilled 4y ago
Possibly controversial and happy to be swayed, but to me the fundamental problem at the core of grad student oversupply is a lack of investment training. Degrees like the sciences and mathematics (and certainly arts too) are appealing to some because they are not tied to capital (or at least, less tied to capital than say business degrees). This means there are less chances to make money, sure, but also less chances for corruption. The problem is, that isn't a complete career plan. There needs to be an "and then" that reflects the current market. I don't have a lot of hope for universities hiring enough people to satisfy the number of current t grads. But, we definitely need innovation. Universities should be teaching students how to intelligently take risks, while not sticking their neck out too far. Governments can help here by offering cheaper loans to young investors, or offering partial protection to investors who do. Again, happy to be swayed here. IMO, one thing that absolutely needs to be retired is the current academic reward pattern of "better = more papers at more high impact journals with more cool positions held". It's too easy to game and too hard to be creative under. Something where the financial risk is not held ENTIRELY by the post doc is a good start.
- fjeifisjf 4y ago
  [dead]
duxup 4y ago
I always enjoy my classes with part time teachers who also have a day job related to the class.
lr4444lr 4y ago
So this begs the question: where did the money from the cost savings of hiring part timers go?
- NSMutableSet 4y ago
  To administration.
- bodhiandphysics 4y ago
  While it’s easy to say to administration… it’s more complicated than that. Salary for professors didn’t increase much, but benefits increased massively (because of the increased cost of health care and pensions). administrators also get paid more. Higher ed is a labor intensive business, and labor intensive businesses are expensive.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
It sounds like they can afford to screw around and hoard the money. I'm interested in a theoretical optimization problem where education becomes expensive without bound and as it grows over time how that affects both admissions and birth rates, eventually killing itself or reducing its own influence over society. You know, because modern society has just become a min-max living simulation for people in power and leaders across all industries operate without moral values, substituting them with nietzscheistic organizational values instead.
than3 4y ago
Unfortunately, this article misses the mark and distracts from the overall problem. If you poll that vast number of college dropouts regarding the issues for why they dropped out, you will find a common picture. Its finances or its unfairly structured or misrepresented classes. Some professors structure their courses in an optimized to fail way. These are often called Weed-out classes, Engineering has the most, Economics has a decent amount, and the degrees with no real business applications have the least. Structure aside, students need two things to succeed. The classes must be taught and tested in a determinable way, that means you either teach the methodology or heuristics to come to a single answer for questions involved, or you test the material which has one right answer. You don't have an open-ended question that has 3 correct answers, where you have to guess which one is correct because there's no single unique answer that is correct. Or vocabulary used with multiple meanings depending on how you read it, or lecture material that mismatches what's actually on the exams. Also, you set expectations of how much time spent per class is needed must be accurate up front. If either of those two core things are not enforced (and I can tell you neither of those are enforced in any legitimate way now or for the past 20 years), then students will consistently fail or withdraw. The general rule of thumb is a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week. That is not always the case, some classes are structured in a way where no matter how much time you spend, you won't be able to prepare for the material being tested. If you are a full time student with 4 classes and you have one class like this, then its possible the class will cause you to fail the other 3, or you could potential have financial aid clawed back unless you self-fund at which case its a simple loss. You cannot succeed in school without being able to control basic academic outcomes. Courses structured with 24 mostly equal assignments and a final exam have to get at least a 70% on each assignment on average. The results that fall in that range (above 70%, are 30% with slight deviations depending on weightings of the total points). So you end up with a .3 probability raised to the 24th or 25th power. That's somewhere around ~8.4 * 10^-14. Not taking into account factors like difficulty of the individual questions or other factors. Most classes that are generally labelled Weed-out courses have such a low probability of success that they should never have been sold to the student, but the student couldn't identify the issues until after its too late. Put another way, this is fraud on the colleges part, and while there are pathways to appeal issues with specific professors; it rarely works out because there is an informal structure that punishes people for going this route, with no real enforcement or accountability. I've gone to a chair person and Dean before and had them say they don't have the seniority to challenge a tenured professor that's been teaching for 25 years (who structured their class so the only way to pass was academic dishonesty, where a blind eye was turned to the passing around of answer keys in class from student's that previously failed)... In other words, you only pass/get a degree if you are on the take. You know what happened with each successive exam after that, they were all fails, and the professor stopped covering the material or providing any help during office hours. Over the past two decades, I've attempted 53 units where I had to withdraw. Slightly more than half are from courses like what I describe. I started on the engineering route, then failing that business, and now its just any degree to supplement a decade of professional experience. There's no accountability, and the people capable of making changes have no incentive, there's a reason graduation rates hover between 5% and 30% a year. Its optimized to fail people for captive repeat customers. If as a student, the course is structured so you cannot control basic academic outcomes, you shouldn't have to pay, but that will never happen; and an entire industry of exploitative behavior has adapted to this over the past 20 years. Its sad because its completely unnecessary and serves only one purpose to profit off people in a way that they can't seek bankruptcy protection, which causes debt slavery, where they cannot succeed/have opportunities without a qualifier (such as a degree).
AnnikaL 4y ago
As a community college student in California, one of my biggest complaints about the system (which I like overall!) is that some of the professors don't care or are too overworked to help students. Hopefully the results of this audit spur some change.

103 points by nowandlater 4y ago

I've taught a bit at Arizona community colleges, which also rely heavily on part-time faculty. There are many more people with grad degrees than demand for them from universities, resulting in the obvious when supply exceeds demand: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can/ https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... In the 1945 - 1975 period, demand for faculty exceeded supply: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/ https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-l..., and many in or adjacent to academia yearn for a return to those days. But it's probably not happening. The administrators and Boards who control budgets are also keenly cognizant of the fact that birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 and haven't recovered since. Those of you who can add 18 to 2009 will know what's coming for an industry that depends heavily on 18 year olds for customers. Tenure is, in the absence of mandatory retirement ages, a 40+ year employment promise. And one dark truth is that academia insiders with tenure accrue far more power over their adjunct colleagues than they do over their tenured colleagues. Academia insiders rarely emphasize this, for obvious reasons.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
epicureanideal 4y ago
> But it's probably not happening. I really wish they’d allocate Covid-like money to R&D or prizes for solving various challenges like curing diseases, which would drive universities. However first remove the bloated administration and DEI/Woke Discrimination Industry.
- xzel 4y ago
  > I really wish they’d allocate Covid-like money to R&D or prizes for solving various challenges like curing diseases, which would drive universities. They already do via DARPA, NIH and medical patents. Making a drug and selling it is the prize for solving a challenge like curing diseases.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    Let’s add a zero to that (as a string). And add things like adversarial research to try to disprove findings, etc.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Start a GoFundMe
the_jeremy 4y ago
> birthrates fell off a cliff in 2009 US births per thousand fell from 13.8 to 13.5 from 2008 to 2009, less than a 2% decrease. There wasn't a sudden cliff; US birth rates have decreased every year but 9 (1979-1988) from 1950 to 2019, going from 24 in 1950 to 12 today. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birth-rate#:~:text=The%20birth%20rate%20for%20U.S.,a%200.09%25%20increase%20from%202019 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/birt....
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  The birth rate seems less important to the universities than the raw number of births. Though as with the birth rate, nothing in particular happened in 2009: https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-in-the-united-states-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/195908/number-of-births-...
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    I would think even more important to universities should be the raw number of high schoolers and high schoolers’ parent that are questioning the ROI of universities, especially private universities.
    - peanuty1 4y ago
      The ROI of elite private universities like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are still very high. The private universities that should be worried are the ones that don't have an elite reputation but still charge the same tuition (or higher tuition, if you account for financial aid) as the elite universities.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    For the field as a whole I guess, the rate must matter, right? Like, if the birth rate increases, then a higher percentage of the population will be employed in teaching related jobs, because there are more kids per adult.
  - twelvechairs 4y ago
xmddmx 4y ago
Background: the California Master Plan for Higher Eduction (1960) essentially set up a system of free college education to all residents. It was slowly chipped away until "free" became "not free". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig... The Adjunct job title makes sense in certain situations, but when a college system is relying on Adjuncts for the majority of credit hours taught, simply to save money, this becomes a problem.
- ta988 4y ago
  It is not just about money it is about "flexibility" or else said, ability to kick people out to update curriculum and take younger ones more up to date with recent research.
  - beej71 4y ago
    If it were just that, they'd hire full time contractors with benefits for one year terms.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    No, it’s totally about the money. You can get the classroom coverage of a TT faculty member for a tiny fraction of the cost if you use adjuncts.
    - eigenman 4y ago
      For reference, a typical adjunct (non tenure track instructor) will make $5000 per course per semester with no benefits. Tenured and tenure track faculty in STEM are typically paid around $60-120k per year with benefits and will teach, at most, six courses a year.
      - robotresearcher 4y ago
        The job of a tenured STEM faculty member is not the same as contract lecturer. Tenured faculty do research and run the university as well as teach. At a major research school a STEM faculty member will often raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in outside research funds, which will pay upwards of ten graduate students and the other running costs of a research lab. They will do and publish new research, usually while training graduate students, review the work of others, run conferences, sit on hiring committees,, take turns being Director of this or that (ie. management positions). Many STEM professors raise more external money than their salary costs. They are dollar positive to the school before they teach anything. And they teach too. Yes, it has a salary better than contract teaching.
robotresearcher 4y ago
Tenure does not disallow being let go for redundancy or financial reasons. Full time permanent employees have more power than limited term contractors. Isn't that kinda normal in every workplace?

gedy 4y ago

In this case, I'd say I very much liked that the community colleges I attended in California had part-time faculty that were working in the industry. I feel the quality of education for some classes was better than what I received in university. (Thanks Mrs. Wong (Math) and Mr. Vedrin (EE)!)

epage 4y ago
I really appreciated by CA community college experience with part-time faculty. My math, physics, and chemistry teachers were literally rocket scientists at their day jobs (military R&D).
sosodev 4y ago
Same experience for me
xhkkffbf 4y ago
The sad thing is that major universities are filled with researchers who are distracted by pushing on the frontiers. They often do a very basic job with teaching.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > The sad thing is that major universities are filled with researchers who are distracted by pushing on the frontiers. Or simply writing enough grant proposals to cover their salary and lab expenses for another year
- jltsiren 4y ago
  The sad thing is that the job market favors graduates from major universities. Research universities are doing what they are supposed to do, but their reputation attracts talented and ambitious students in general. When those students end up being successful in their careers, they maintain the reputation. Some countries have tried establishing two parallel higher education systems. Universities provide research-based education, while the other system focuses more on skills that are relevant in the job market. And the job market still favors academic education over the more practical alternative.

paulusthe 4y ago

This is true of big name research institutions too. Since 2000, spending on administration in US colleges nationwide has increased faster than the combined increase of scholarships, grants, and professorships. (Source: Graeber, 2018ish). This requires cost savings, and that comes at the cost of the things a college should be doing: teaching, and educating. After all, the bureaucrats who make the budgets aren't going to reduce their own salaries. Savings must be found, and it can't possibly be found in cutting the fifth community outreach residential assistant wellness officer.

themodelplumber 4y ago

I used to be a PT teacher at my local California community college, in the art department (graphic design, illustration, Photoshop, Illustrator, web design, etc.). I definitely heard from other teachers that some things were off (that seem like they could be related), but who knows if they were really related to the use of funds described here. I taught for just a couple of years and I was told that my classes were appreciated to some degree because I was a working professional in my field at the same time. Still, it was kind of annoying that some students only wanted that. When you have massively-high-achievers and middle-age homeless students with obvious struggles in the same class, the UMC people angling for their particular needs and also trying to min/max every class start to seem kind of off-putting. Not to blame anybody really, but it had a real feeling of inequity-upon-inequity to it. One couple really grilled me before a digital photography class, asking trivia questions about the topics we'd be covering and _how much I could teach them_, because they were trying to figure out _how much_ of a waste of time it would be. For a simple weekend class! They had nearly five figures worth of gear and a lot of expectations from a community college. I believe this is about when boot camps started to really pick up speed, and I could feel that tension building around traditional educational institutions. I do feel like there are pros/cons of "working professional teacher" vs. traditional FT college faculty for sure, which I didn't really understand before working there. Unfortunately it was also kind of a slow-motion "that's like a dollar an hour" [1] experience, and after reviewing the whole situation, with its variety of little pros and cons, decided to move all my energies back into my normal business. One thing I really miss though is how much I learned! My students thought _they_ were learning but holy smokes did I learn a lot from creating lessons, lesson plans, and websites for the courses. BTW tech-wise it was a lot of fun too. I gave extra credit points for trying non-Photoshop software, including some FOSS titles like GIMP, Bluefish, Inkscape, etc. Some of my students also got a bonus intro to web development with PHP, Python, and one was I believe a Rebol programmer who showed me his homebrew back-door VNC client with a one-click button palette to control any of his IT-company clients' computers. I also believe I came close to mastering the art of carrying my teacher's life on a USB disk. I had so many Portable-Apps downloads on there, even some servers I believe. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv440W1xS44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv440W1xS44

tsumnia 4y ago

wrp 4y ago

In Oregon, already in the 1990s community colleges were replacing retiring full-timers with part-timers as a cost-cutting measure. This is something administration will always do when they can get away with it. We need a formal policy on what ratio of part-timers is allowable.

zpzapper 4y ago

The best professors I had at CCC's were part time and actually worked outside of the Academia bubble. Gave a lot of very relevant advice and information. Some were full time researchers at UC's or nearby schools on research as well instead of Tenured faculty paid to not care.

batman-farts 4y ago

It's not always people with industry jobs taking these part-time positions; there's a whole subculture of "freeway flyers" who are teaching at multiple community colleges, and sometimes lower-division classes at private universities, while trying to break into a full-time position. A few years after I was in his class, one chemistry professor I really enjoyed burned out from doing this and disappeared from all his classes in the middle of the semester. The replacement professor apparently wasn't at all prepared to step in, and the students had to petition the dean to have their grades thrown out and retake the class. That's obviously the worst-case scenario I encountered, but I heard other tales of people like a math professor shuttling back and forth between Merced and Contra Costa counties every week. A biology professor I had was making a go of it doing half the week at Contra Costa campuses and half the week at USF, and told me her situation was not at all uncommon, even in the Bay Area. There's definitely a precariat associated with keeping the community college system going, which is a damned shame because it's the most accessible rung on the ladder. Perhaps the state will be able to do something about this, but it's understandably wise to be skeptical of statewide education initiatives in California.

dhosek 4y ago
I was one of those. California has a law that was intended to protect against exploitation of adjuncts that makes things worth where an adjunct is limited to 10 LHE (lecture hour equivalent) per district. In Orange County, it’s not too bad because there are a lot of districts in a smallish geographic area, but LACCD covers a huge geographic area which makes L.A. County much more challenging. Add in all the competition and the low wages (although, as I recall, the L.A. County districts paid more than the O.C. districts) and life is pretty painful for an adjunct.
labster 4y ago
I had a chemistry prof with the same story: a PhD who had to work in two different counties to scrape together a living while avoiding limits on hours. And the department chair was younger and only had a master’s degree in education. The situation with adjuncts is terrible everywhere in the US, though. The situation at Hamline University could only have happened because the professor lacked tenure, otherwise academic freedom protections would have kicked in.

x3n0ph3n3 4y ago

As someone in the profession for over a decade, what is the best way to offer yourself out as a guest lecturer for community college courses focused on software development?

hdctambien 4y ago
It's a job like any other, so go to the school's careers page and find the listing for a job you're qualified for, and apply.
- x3n0ph3n3 4y ago
  I'm not looking for a full-time, or even part-time, position. I want to be able to teach when it's convenient and fits into my schedule.
grog454 4y ago
I'll give you my approach as someone in the profession for over a decade who started teaching part time at a private university last year. I enrolled (as a student) in a couple of classes at a local CC for fields that were just passive interests of mine. One lecturer was great and served as a model for in-class instruction. After a semester of that I applied to various local community colleges and private universities (one my alma mater). Many of these universities didn't even have an official "adjunct lecturer" position posted, but I selected whatever sounded most appropriate and spent a lot of time on cover letters tailored to each university explaining what I had to offer to them and why I ought to be a good fit for whatever they valued in instructors. It took over a month to hear back from the first which was pretty disappointing. 3 months later I heard back from the second, and I never heard back from a third private university or either of two local CCs. By the time I heard back from the second I had already been informally offered a position at the first.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
There are two kinds of job. * Adjunct lecturer/temporary faculty: These are people hired for just one semester for a specific course, for fairly minimal salary. Ads for these are posted usually 3 to 6 months before the semester starts, and you can just apply to them. * Visiting faculty: If you are actually really good, sometimes Universities will hire you as a visiting faculty. There is a case-by-case negotiated contract (usually 1 or 2 courses per year, with whatever other constraints you have). The difference from the first choice is that you have some choice in the course you get to teach, and how you teach it. I would recommend starting from the first choice, and teaching a large standard course where other faculty are around to help you. Teaching well is very difficult (and teaching badly is relatively easy), and people's future is at stake, so its best to start slow and learn the ropes before attempting something difficult.

plaguepilled 4y ago

Possibly controversial and happy to be swayed, but to me the fundamental problem at the core of grad student oversupply is a lack of investment training. Degrees like the sciences and mathematics (and certainly arts too) are appealing to some because they are not tied to capital (or at least, less tied to capital than say business degrees). This means there are less chances to make money, sure, but also less chances for corruption. The problem is, that isn't a complete career plan. There needs to be an "and then" that reflects the current market. I don't have a lot of hope for universities hiring enough people to satisfy the number of current t grads. But, we definitely need innovation. Universities should be teaching students how to intelligently take risks, while not sticking their neck out too far. Governments can help here by offering cheaper loans to young investors, or offering partial protection to investors who do. Again, happy to be swayed here. IMO, one thing that absolutely needs to be retired is the current academic reward pattern of "better = more papers at more high impact journals with more cool positions held". It's too easy to game and too hard to be creative under. Something where the financial risk is not held ENTIRELY by the post doc is a good start.

fjeifisjf 4y ago
[dead]

duxup 4y ago

I always enjoy my classes with part time teachers who also have a day job related to the class.

lr4444lr 4y ago

So this begs the question: where did the money from the cost savings of hiring part timers go?

NSMutableSet 4y ago
To administration.
bodhiandphysics 4y ago
While it’s easy to say to administration… it’s more complicated than that. Salary for professors didn’t increase much, but benefits increased massively (because of the increased cost of health care and pensions). administrators also get paid more. Higher ed is a labor intensive business, and labor intensive businesses are expensive.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

It sounds like they can afford to screw around and hoard the money. I'm interested in a theoretical optimization problem where education becomes expensive without bound and as it grows over time how that affects both admissions and birth rates, eventually killing itself or reducing its own influence over society. You know, because modern society has just become a min-max living simulation for people in power and leaders across all industries operate without moral values, substituting them with nietzscheistic organizational values instead.

than3 4y ago

Unfortunately, this article misses the mark and distracts from the overall problem. If you poll that vast number of college dropouts regarding the issues for why they dropped out, you will find a common picture. Its finances or its unfairly structured or misrepresented classes. Some professors structure their courses in an optimized to fail way. These are often called Weed-out classes, Engineering has the most, Economics has a decent amount, and the degrees with no real business applications have the least. Structure aside, students need two things to succeed. The classes must be taught and tested in a determinable way, that means you either teach the methodology or heuristics to come to a single answer for questions involved, or you test the material which has one right answer. You don't have an open-ended question that has 3 correct answers, where you have to guess which one is correct because there's no single unique answer that is correct. Or vocabulary used with multiple meanings depending on how you read it, or lecture material that mismatches what's actually on the exams. Also, you set expectations of how much time spent per class is needed must be accurate up front. If either of those two core things are not enforced (and I can tell you neither of those are enforced in any legitimate way now or for the past 20 years), then students will consistently fail or withdraw. The general rule of thumb is a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week. That is not always the case, some classes are structured in a way where no matter how much time you spend, you won't be able to prepare for the material being tested. If you are a full time student with 4 classes and you have one class like this, then its possible the class will cause you to fail the other 3, or you could potential have financial aid clawed back unless you self-fund at which case its a simple loss. You cannot succeed in school without being able to control basic academic outcomes. Courses structured with 24 mostly equal assignments and a final exam have to get at least a 70% on each assignment on average. The results that fall in that range (above 70%, are 30% with slight deviations depending on weightings of the total points). So you end up with a .3 probability raised to the 24th or 25th power. That's somewhere around ~8.4 * 10^-14. Not taking into account factors like difficulty of the individual questions or other factors. Most classes that are generally labelled Weed-out courses have such a low probability of success that they should never have been sold to the student, but the student couldn't identify the issues until after its too late. Put another way, this is fraud on the colleges part, and while there are pathways to appeal issues with specific professors; it rarely works out because there is an informal structure that punishes people for going this route, with no real enforcement or accountability. I've gone to a chair person and Dean before and had them say they don't have the seniority to challenge a tenured professor that's been teaching for 25 years (who structured their class so the only way to pass was academic dishonesty, where a blind eye was turned to the passing around of answer keys in class from student's that previously failed)... In other words, you only pass/get a degree if you are on the take. You know what happened with each successive exam after that, they were all fails, and the professor stopped covering the material or providing any help during office hours. Over the past two decades, I've attempted 53 units where I had to withdraw. Slightly more than half are from courses like what I describe. I started on the engineering route, then failing that business, and now its just any degree to supplement a decade of professional experience. There's no accountability, and the people capable of making changes have no incentive, there's a reason graduation rates hover between 5% and 30% a year. Its optimized to fail people for captive repeat customers. If as a student, the course is structured so you cannot control basic academic outcomes, you shouldn't have to pay, but that will never happen; and an entire industry of exploitative behavior has adapted to this over the past 20 years. Its sad because its completely unnecessary and serves only one purpose to profit off people in a way that they can't seek bankruptcy protection, which causes debt slavery, where they cannot succeed/have opportunities without a qualifier (such as a degree).

AnnikaL 4y ago

As a community college student in California, one of my biggest complaints about the system (which I like overall!) is that some of the professors don't care or are too overworked to help students. Hopefully the results of this audit spur some change.