You Make Money Doing What?: Musing on the $1B Facebook IPO and Wage Labor
via Huff Post article “Majoring in Debt“
I know that the US graduates more law students than there are lawyer jobs, and I would imagine that there are more undergraduate students graduated than their are entry-level jobs. The fact that there are more trained people than their are jobs allows for employers to pick the employee who is willing to accept the lowest pay. How is this humane?
Inside Higher Ed had an interesting article up earlier this week titled “Among the Majority” by Michael Bérubé about the state of academia and how 70% of jobs are taught by people who have part-time contracts.
The article has several nuggets.
The first is that,
Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities.
40 years ago, 80 percent of America’s college teachers enjoyed the protection of tenure, whereas now only 54 percent do.
colleges promote themselves, especially to first-generation students, as a pathway to the middle class — but, increasingly, colleges do not pay middle-class wages to their own faculty members. The contradiction is deepest at the lowest tiers of the academic hierarchy, where, Rhoades said, underpaid adjunct faculty members are effectively “modeling what is acceptable as an employment practice.”
