California community colleges rely too much on part-time faculty; misspend funds (opens in new tab)

In the 1945 - 1975 period, demand for faculty exceeded supply: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).