HMO logic increasingly governs higher education. Management tightly rations the teacher’s time. Thirty-five years ago, almost 75% of all university professors were tenured. Only a quarter worked as an adjunct, part-time or non-permanent.
Today, those proportions are reversed.
If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, there’s a good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a Ph.D. and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession have come under intense scrutiny by their peers. peers. related to the tenure system. In your other three classes, you’ll likely be taught by someone who started a career but didn’t finish it, was hired by a manager who isn’t a fellow professional, may never post in the field you’re teaching, and who entered the people pool. considered for work because they were willing to work for wages close to the official poverty line.
In almost every course in most disciplines using non-tenured or adjunct professors, a person with a recently obtained Ph.D. was available and would gladly have taught their other three courses. But they could not afford to pay their loans and housing with the salary that was offered to them.
This is a topic explored in depth in my new book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation.
Higher education employers can only pay those salaries knowing that their employees are subsidized in various ways. In the case of student employees, the huge debt burden subsidizes the salary. For low-paid contingent teachers, who are overwhelmingly women, strategies vary, but include consumer debt, dependence on another job, or income from a domestic partner.
Like Walmart employees, the majority of the female contingent academic workforce depends on a patchwork of other sources of income, including forms of public assistance like food stamps and unemployment compensation.
It is perfectly common for contingent college professors to work as grocery store clerks and restaurant servers, earning higher salaries in those positions, or to have retired from earlier occupations such as bus driving, steel mills, and automobile assembly, enjoying those better-paid professions. a pension sufficient to allow them to fulfill a “second career” as university professors. The cheap education system does not work for the best teachers. Mandates people who are in a financial position to accept compensation below living wage. As a result of management’s irresponsible hiring practices, more students are dropping out, taking longer to graduate, and failing to acquire basic skills, often spending tens of thousands of dollars on a credential that has little merit in the eyes of employers.
The real “Profscam” is not the imaginary depicted in Charles Sykes’ fanciful 1988 book, which concocted the image of a lazy tenured faculty taking voluntary absence from teaching.
Instead, the “teacher scam” turns out to be a deceptive game run by management, which maintains a permanent layer for marketing purposes and to generate funded research, but is so scattered with respect to undergraduate teaching that even the More privileged undergraduate students spend most of their education with paraprofessors working in less and less professional circumstances.
As non-tenured union activists will tell you, the problem is not with the intellectual quality, talent or commitment of the individual people working without a professorship; it is the degraded circumstances in which the leadership of higher education forces them to work, teaching too many students in too many classes too quickly, without security, status or office; work from standardized study plans; it outsourced tutoring, remedial, and even grading services, leaving no time for research and professional development. Working in the “kitchen” of McDonald’s, even the talent of Wolfgang Puck is put at the service of the QuarterPounder. Despite the tens of billions “saved” in teacher salaries by replacing a disposable workforce with tenure-vetted professionals, managed higher education is becoming increasingly expensive.
Enrollment skyrocketed 38% between 2000 and 2005, outperforming nearly all other economic indicators.
Where does the money from skyrocketing tuition and reduced teacher salaries go? In for-profit institutions, the answer is obvious: it goes into the pockets of shareholders. Lacking even the veneer of a permanent stratum, the dollars squeezed from a 100% informal college joined the tax and tuition money of the country’s poorest families to enrich the shareholders of education providers. But in non-profit education, which only “pretends” to “act like” a corporation, where have the billions gone?
At first glance, there are no shareholders and no dividends.
However, the uses to which the university has been put benefit corporate shareholders. These include bearing the cost of job training, generating patentable intellectual property, providing sporting events, selling goods and services to captive student markets, and converting student aid into cheap or even free labor. . One considerable path forward, then, is the relationship between the financial transactions of non-profit organizations and the increasing dividends enjoyed by the shareholder class.
Shareholders of private corporations are not the only beneficiaries of the proletarianization of college and the tuition gold rush.
Because public nonprofit organizations have been receiving ever-lower direct subsidies from federal and state sources, there is a general belief that insightful and combative managers with at least one version of the public good in mind, if only be within the narrow framework of “reduced spending”. But that belief is questionable, since managers have been spending quite freely in several areas.
One area where nonprofit educational management has been spending freely is on themselves.
Over three decades, the number of managers has skyrocketed in close correspondence with the growing population of the undercompensated. Especially at the upper levels, administrative pay has also skyrocketed, also closely related to the reduction in compensation of other campus workers. In a couple of decades, administrative work has gone from being an occasional service component in a teaching life to a “desirable career path” in its own right (Lazerson et al, A72).
Nonprofit organizations support deans, presidents, associate deans, and directors of arts and sciences programs in comfortably six figures. Salaries soar in the mid-six figures for many medical, engineering, business and legal administrators. College presidents have begun earning seven figures, hot on the heels of their basketball coaches, who can earn $3 million a year and are often the highest-paid public employees in their state. In thirty years of administered higher education, the typical faculty member has become a non-tenured part-time woman making a few thousand dollars a year with no health benefits. The typical manager is male, enjoys tenure, a six figure income, little to no tuition, generous vacations, and excellent medical care.
There are many other areas where nonprofit administrators have spent even more. With the support of activist legislatures, they have particularly enjoyed playing venture capital with campus resources and tax dollars by participating in “corporate partnerships” that typically generate financial benefits for the corporate partner but not for the campus (Washburn) .
More prosaically, they have engaged in what most observers call an “arms race” of spending on expanding physical facilities and plants. And as Murray Sperber and others have documented, they have spent recklessly on sports activities that, despite some billion-dollar broadcast revenue, often lose vast amounts of money. The commercialization of college sports has raised the level of participation so high that students who would like to play cannot afford the time to practice. The students they would like to see cannot afford the ticket prices.
Traditionally, the phenomenon known as “cross-subsidy,” the support of one program by revenue generated by another program, meant primarily a modest surplus provided by the higher tuition and lower wages associated with undergraduate education, which was used to support the research activity it was unlikely to find an external funding agent. In managed higher education, cross-subsidizing has eroded undergraduate learning across the curriculum and has become a gold mine for all sorts of activities that cater to the entrepreneurial impulses, vanity, and workhorses of students. administrators:
Digitizing the curriculum! Building the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bringing more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship! Why have those who control non-profit colleges and universities so easily fallen for the idea that the institution should act like a for-profit corporation? At least part of our answer must be that it offers people in that position some compelling rewards, both material and emotional.
This is an era of executive licenses. In addition to a living wage and lavish benefits, George Bush enjoys the privilege of declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq. University administrators often enjoy higher salaries and comparable benefits, and have the privilege of declaring war on their sports rivals, or on illiteracy, teen pregnancy, or industrial pollution.
It feels good to be president.
As a “decision maker”, one can often arrange to strike on behalf of at least some of one’s own values.
What needs to be swept under the rug is that the ability to do these things is based on their willingness to continually squeeze compensation out of just about every other worker on campus. The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine. If nonprofits accumulate in some form other than dividends, there is more surplus for administrators, trustees, local politicians and a handful of influential professors to spend discretionarily.