Why do these teachers take on such a life? You could say that the long-timers were fooled, they are now in too deep, and can't start a new career, but those deciding whether to do a PhD must know what they are facing, no? This sort of article has been going around for many years.
This kind of thing is arguably the real injustice in higher education - or "structural oppression" if you prefer. At least half the other college diversity initiatives are at best smokescreens to hide any discussion of how non-tenured faculty are treated.
I had discussions with my children about this issue before they even went to college. The one that went on to an advanced degree decided she'd rather be an MD than a PhD. It's much more rewarding, and even if you want to do medical research (she didn't) a dual degree is better than just a PhD.
That's the flip side of academic freedom. Once you trust a group of people with self-governance, they would invariably use it to enrich the insiders at the expense of outsiders. Just look up how a Greek democratic poleis worked.<p>That's probably a compromise you would willing to make for a many centuries out, internationally ranked universities. But petty colleges should be ran more like service sector.<p>Having said that, it's quite possible that a single mother of two, working in service sector, is simply untenable without extra help coming from the outside.
Community colleges do a great job. I went to one before the 4 year university for electrical engineering and gave me a much better foundation than those that went straight to the 4 year uni.
The elephant in the room is the modern collectivist initiative of college/higher education for the common man. I don't how people don't see it, especially the HN crowd..<p>This article is shows only one of the smaller downstream consequences, it gets much worse. We are talking an entire generation indebted by trillions, entire areas of the economy with staff shortages, "highly credentialed" people working unrelated jobs etc etc<p>Colleges we always meant to a niche entity. Huge inequalities were not just optional downsides, rather they were structurally essential. Most people shouldn't go to college, most phds and professorhips shouldn't exist and most colleges shouldnt..<p>This is not a luddite take, i think these things actually should 100x but not like the way it is right now. The issue is socialism.<p>Government/non-profit funded high education should only be afforded to a very small subset of the population. The gifted.<p>Everything else should be private and amongst them most should be treated like trades/apprenticeship.<p>These ideas seem radical/ridiculous but most of what we think of high education these days are a consequences of extremely silly post WWII socialist policies.<p>I don't even have a massive problem with government funding either, this can be effective but not socalism, nothing like what we have now. More like military research during the WWWII and the early period of the cold war.