Tumbler: with apologies to gymnasts, my personal term for skilled, educated workers primarily in or near the baby boom generation who have fallen, i.e., tumbled, out of the middle-class into the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed, now mired in inescapable poverty, no health insurance with years/decades to go before Social Security or Medicare can help, and likely soon to be homeless and/or dead in the gutter.
You’d think a Ph.D would offer some insulation against poverty. Think again, many doctored experts are tumbling out of the middle class, others cannot even get hired at a living wage even in academia teaching or researching their topics of expertise.
But fear not! University Presidents and Coaches at the nation’s top schools are doing great. Maybe the others are coming soon to a devastated social safety net near you. Scary graphic below.
It’s a great graphic about a real problem, but I wonder where their 120k average salary for a “Tenure track professor” comes from. Here are average salaries by rank and discipline from two years ago, and not even the full professor rank gets close to that number. Possibly if by sheer number there are more business and engineering faculty than anything else then the full professor avg. might be near that, but calling it an average for “tenure-track” is misleading.
That said, the adjunct average of 20k is also high relative to what the adjuncts I know generally make in a year.
It could be that highest cost of living markets near large population centers are over represented in academia. Just guessing though. Thing is, I don’t think anyone begrudges a professor making a living, if you fall for that and feel resentment against those who are gainfully employed, you have fallen for the divide and conquer strategy, where a super rich guy takes nine out of ten cookies on a plate and then tells the Teaparty guy, “watch out for that other fellow, I think he wants to steal your cookie.”
This country is not broke, we are not penniless, there is plenty of money and prosperity, it’s just been concentrated in the hands of a very few who are high as a kite on the prospect of getting even more of it. I don’t know where that stops, but people like me who have tumbled out of the middle class and straight into poverty with no end in sight have little to lose, we have no skin in the game. I hope the solution is political, because other solutions do not generally, on average, turn out well for anyone.
Most definitely. That’s part of what I see a lot, which is “professors make a lot of money (especially the most evil unionized ones) and that’s why college costs so much”, rather than “college costs so much because the state stopped funding colleges so now they have to pass the whole cost onto the student”. I tend to be on a hair trigger reaction about it.
The part that really bothers me is that coaches and their staff are being paid huge salaries, huge stadiums and gyms are being built and mediocre students are being given huge scholarships simply because they can catch and throw a ball.
In the meantime, professors and students in those fields that could actually be helping to turn our economy around (as in STEM fields) are getting the shaft.