andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-740 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Xian points me to an article by retired college professor David Rubinstein who argues that college professors are underworked and overpaid: After 34 years of teaching sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I [Rubinstein] recently retired at age 64 at 80 percent of my pay for life. . . . But that’s not all: There’s a generous health insurance plan, a guaranteed 3 percent annual cost of living increase, and a few other perquisites. . . . I was also offered the opportunity to teach as an emeritus for three years, receiving $8,000 per course . . . which works out to over $200 an hour. . . . You will perhaps not be surprised to hear that I had two immediate and opposite reactions to this: 1. Hey–somebody wants to cut professors’ salaries. Stop him! 2. Hey–this guy’s making big bucks and doesn’t do any work–that’s not fair! (I went online to find David Rubinstein’s salary but it didn’t appear in the database. So I did the next best thing and looked up the sala
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1 So I did the next best thing and looked up the salaries of full professors in the UIC sociology department. [sent-22, score-0.448]
2 That really is higher than I expected, given that (a) sociology does not have a reputation as being a high-paying field, and (b) UIC is OK but it’s not generally considered a top university. [sent-24, score-0.297]
3 Rubinstein’s planning to spend only 40 hours teaching a course? [sent-28, score-0.346]
4 I’m assuming it’s a 1-semester course, if it’s 13 weeks at 3 classroom hours per week, that’s 39 hours already. [sent-29, score-0.557]
5 So he’s planning to spend 1 hour during the entire semester for class preparation, meetings with students, grading papers, and everything else. [sent-30, score-0.422]
6 The only really arduous part of teaching was grading exams and papers. [sent-34, score-0.282]
7 He says he still spent less than 40 hours total per semester, so this means he spent less than 1 hour per week on class preparation, office hours, and all other work required for the course. [sent-40, score-0.795]
8 Too cushy and too well-paid Rubinstein’s fundamental criticism of the system, though, is not that he’s a slacker but that the college-professor job is too good. [sent-42, score-0.303]
9 Some jobs are easy and some jobs are well-paid but it seems wrong for a job to be both. [sent-43, score-0.273]
10 And a bit of evidence in favor of the “prof jobs are too cushy” argument is that nobody ever seems to quit: In my 34 years, just one professor in the sociology department resigned to take a nonacademic job. [sent-44, score-0.282]
11 The rarity of quits and the abundance of applications is good evidence that the life of the college professor is indeed enviable. [sent-46, score-0.296]
12 Rubinstein writes as if it’s surprising and wrong that high pay, good benefits, generous retirement, job security, and an easy workload go together. [sent-48, score-0.321]
13 Princeton and Stanford aside, college towns tend to be not too expensive to life in, and you’re implicitly comparing your living standards to students. [sent-52, score-0.344]
14 The life of the college processor is indeed enviable (even though I don’t really envy Rubinstein’s own work life, as he seems to have focused too much on reducing his workload rather than on actually enjoying his job). [sent-55, score-0.305]
15 Profs traditionally got summers off and flexible hours but low salaries, then when money flowed into the system, salaries went up. [sent-57, score-0.369]
16 The system has a lot of inertia: except in exceptional economic times, you never seem to hear of professors getting salary cuts, even if they’ve been sitting around doing nothing for 20 years. [sent-58, score-0.321]
17 ) His basic argument, I think, is that it would be ok for universities to save some money and pay their faculty less (either in salary or in reduced benefits). [sent-69, score-0.455]
18 university system is decentralized, so if one university decides to cut back and not compete for the best faculty, it will lose in reputation, have more difficulty getting top students, etc. [sent-72, score-0.48]
19 It’s certainly possible: we all know how tenure-track faculty are being replaced with adjuncts, and in Europe even many tenured faculty at top universities have salaries and working conditions that are much worse than even low-ranked universities in the United States. [sent-74, score-0.685]
20 at a time where they were giving out tenure-track slots like candy canes at Christmas, he (by his own admission) spends a total of less than one hour per week on class preparation, grading, and advising combined, and he got a contract in an era with generous retirement benefits. [sent-80, score-0.611]
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