Really? I only know one architect, he’s married to a doctor, and when they had children she took seven years off and they seemed to live VERY comfortably on his income. Part of the logic was that his career might not recover, while a pediatrician can always find a job. I’m sure if he was pulling down 100k and she 250k that equation wouldn’t work.
He was a solo practitioner with a tiny office in a suburban strip mall. But he was always crazy busy.
I’m going to go in a slightly different direction, thoug I think it’s relevant.
In Cary, NC, there is a certain privately-owned software company. EVERBODY wants to work there and it is considered to be a very prestigious employer. It is also regularly listed as one of the “best places to work” by national magazines. (It’s almost always #1 or #2.)
I freely admit that they place a great deal of emphasis on employee well-being, with on-campus medical and pharmaceutical service, well-stocked break rooms (with fresh bread or pastries one morning each week), and many efforts to build a sense of community. I worked there for a short period and every time I mentioned that I did, the other person would ask, “Is there anything you can do to get me/my sibling/my cousin hired there?”
But…
They knew they wanted to hire me specifically, so they wrote the job description to match me very closely. This included requirements for a BA or BS, ten years experience, a state professional license, three professional certifications in my field (comparable to MCSE), and a bunch of other things. In my first of six interviews, I pointed out that they were offering less than 2/3 of what a company would usually pay somebody with those qualifications. (It would be a $30K cut for me.) Their reply, “But we’re such a great place to work!”
While I had to admit that their medical plan and pension plans were above-average, they were privately-owned and did not offer stock options or other similar industry incentives. You could (and did) get bonuses from time to time, but they were decided upon privately by the owners and were unpredictable. They never made up the difference to bring compensation into line with what one COULD have made elsewhere.
My response to people who were always asking about this “great job” was, “Yeah, fresh pastries every Thursday, M&M dispensers in the break rooms, child-care for my non-existent kids, and my salary sucks.”
I quit after just six months. One bad thing about privately-owned companies is how decisions are made…or not made. I probably need to start a separate thread about my experiences in that area.
I thought the standard example was clergy. Many clergy are paid a pittance but they have very high prestige, especially within their flock.
My question isn’t necessarily about a high-paying job, just a better paying job. I don’t see where the choice is to teach French 101 or starve. Sure, at some point your choice might be teach French 101 or starve - because it’s time to make a decision for next semester. But there was time before that point to make a change - Margaret Mary Vojtko was an adjunct for 25 years. At the beginning ,she could have tried to find employment as a high school teacher or outside the field of teaching altogether - especially since in my understanding, she had no chance of getting tenure as she lacked a Ph.D. That’s the part I don’t understand - the part where someone decides to stay in an adjunct position for years after it has become clear they are not going to get a tenured position.
I do not understand it either—before killing 25 years as an adjunct instructor seems like it would have been her best chance at obtaining whatever teaching certifications she needed, or a Ph.D degree. I take it she liked teaching, so perhaps she initially thought the adjunct job was not so bad in principle, even though it was a low-prestige, low-paying job. But once she was there for a while the path to becoming a high-school teacher (or professional translator, or whatever) became much more difficult, as she had zero time or money, or subsidized faculty housing or other benefits.
Being a radio DJ or reporter might garner you prestige in your community, but the salaries are pretty low.
The current median for DJs is about $39K, so if you’re in a small market you’re likely skating by on quite a bit less.
It still looks pretty good from my perspective - when I started in radio many moons ago, it was for the magnificent starting salary of $550 a month. I got a $50 a month raise three months later so I was living high.
Naw. My husband was an adjunct for a couple of years. People do it because they invested a lot in getting a PhD and generally in trying to get into academia, and it’s hard to give up on that and turn to lower-prestige occupations. Adjunct is low-prestige, but professor is high prestige, and there’s a hope of getting back on track.
My husband spent several years being a stay-at-home dad, and then moved into web development when the kids no longer needed a full-time parent. He’s making good money, and was never in any risk of starving if he didn’t work as an adjunct.
Yes, that’s just one example, but his choices weren’t uncommon.
If you remain an adjunct for 25 years, you may lack initiative, or you may love teaching. But it’s unlikely you can’t find some other job that pays as well.
But isn’t it also true that if you’re not tenure-track in some relatively low amount of time, like say your first five years, you’re NEVER going to be tenure track? That basically being chosen for tenure track is THE primary weed-out for academic careers, and if you don’t get it pretty early, it’s never going to happen.
The whole scraping as an adjunct thing past about 35 has always struck me as being a situation of people who can’t or won’t admit to themselves the reality of their situation, and just hang on as adjuncts when they’re never going to be “real” professors. Lots of places would happily hire a PhD for more than 40k in a lot of disciplines, but they’re not going to be professors or academics if they do that.
I’ve considered an academic career more than once, but my friends’ experiences sort of turned me off to it; the whole getting of tenure thing seemed rather horrifyingly arbitrary, considering the level of effort and dedication it takes just to get to that point, only to have some jerks torpedo your career permanently.
I mean, most other careers either let you try again (passing the bar exam, making partner at a different firm, etc…) or there aren’t those sorts of “gates” to permanently thwart you. For example in IT, there’s no real equivalent of getting tenure. The closest thing is jumping from being staff to management, but that’s something most people choose to do, and there’s nothing that says you can’t have a long, fulfilling and lucrative career as a staff IT worker.
Wouldn’t getting tenure at a different institution be the equivalent of “making partner at a different firm”?
It is a bit of a digression to get into what games one might have to play in order to “get” tenure, say at least at an associate professor level— I already mentioned having a firm offer of tenure from a competing institution as one possibility—the point is that having taught French 101 for 25 years is not going to be the thing that does it. That is low-paying and low-prestige. A lot of brilliant research publications certainly can’t hurt, though, that is high prestige even though it’s not money in your pocket.
I have to agree with this totally. Tenured professors aren’t badly paid. I imagine they must average $100K, but fewer and fewer tenured or tenure-track professors are hired. I never made that much, but I retired over 20 years ago and was pushing that amount.
But the offloading of the teaching to adjuncts has been a disaster. As mentioned they are paid pitifully; they certainly can’t do research on those teaching loads and their lives are generally hell. The students also suffer. Now it used to be that a lot of the teaching of the elementary courses was done by graduate students (and, very rarely, by undergraduates), who were inexperienced by trying hard.
There are two reasons for this. One is that the big state schools are being starved by the legislatures. Easy to balance the budget over the university. Second, grossly overpaid college administrators have to justify their salaries and this is one way they do it.
The adjunct professors I knew at community college and real college were just doing part time gigs, and made their real living with a good day job. (An engineering prof who owned an engineering testing lab, a psychology prof who had a private practice, etc)
They stayed with the professorship either because they liked teaching, or because it was a boost to their reputation in the private sector, bringing in more clients and money…
I had a couple of classes taught by adjuncts with day jobs and I thought it helped for them to be able to talk about how things worked in the real world.
Yeah, “adjuncts” include those who only want to teach a class or two at a time, because they have day jobs, or are retired, or want something to do while their kids are in school, as well as those who want full-time jobs but are taking what they can get.
What I’m getting at is that if you’re not tenure track at one institution, and you leave after a non-trivial amount of time, it seems to be unlikely that you’re going to end up tenure track somewhere else.
AFAIK, not getting into the tenure track at one place seems to follow you around like a curse, which isn’t necessarily the case in other professions. I mean, there aren’t really make-or-break points in most other careers; it’s not like if you don’t make management in 5 years, you’re unlikely to ever break into it. But that seems to be the case for academia. You’re either tenure track, or you’re not, and not much changes that once it’s been decided. That’s what it looks like to me anyway. The big divide seems to be between assistant professor (tenure track), and Lecturer/adjunct professor/etc… And from what I can tell, not getting tenure at one place doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t get it elsewhere; I personally know an associate professor at one school (tenured), who was denied tenure at another.
But I have yet to hear of someone who worked say… 10 years as a lecturer or adjunct and then moved into the tenure track positions. Law firms don’t quite work that way, and nor do consulting firms. There’s not the equivalent of “tenure track”- you’re an associate or manager (consulting firms), or you’re a partner, and if you don’t make partner at Deloitte, there’s nothing that says you can’t switch to E&Y or a smaller firm as an associate and make partner there, depending on how you do. Which is equivalent more or less to an assistant or associate professor changing universities.
Guitarist Jake E. Lee talks about his time with Ozzy Osbourne in this interview:
During a recent conversation with The Metal Voice, Ozzy Osbourne’s former guitarist Jake E. Lee shared a few details regarding the financial side of his Ozzy tenure.
Focusing on his 1983 hiring and the “Bark at the Moon” album,
"I was young [26 years old], and back in those days there was little information about how the music business works, and I trusted people.
"I was told from the beginning I would get my fair share of the writing credits and publishing, and I took them at their word, which was a mistake - but it was never about the money.
"I’m pretty sure I got paid about $100 a week [when I joined the band] [around $260 in 2018 money], but it would incrementally go up because they weren’t sure about me.
"Then it doubled and it would keep doubling and so on until I proved myself, and I didn’t care. I went from having no money and no band to being in Ozzy.
“I was going to get $5,000 [around $13,000 in 2018 money] to record ‘Bark at the Moon,’ and get writing credit and publishing. But when I finally got the contract, they threw in another $10,000 [around $26,000 in 2018 money] to make up for the not having writing and publishing.”
Describing the move as “low-balling,” Jake added:
“My portion would have been $250,000 [around $650,000 in 2018 money] just for [the title track], not having publishing on it. Which means there was about $250,000 that Ozzy got instead of me. It’s a lot of money - but I’m not bitter about it.”
I might not have been clear - I know plenty of that sort of adjunct as that seems to be the part-time job of choice at my day job. But the people who are teaching a course or two in addition to a day job aren’t people who have chosen to be a part-time adjunct instead of getting a better paying job - they’ve chosen it in addition to a better-paying job, which is a different situation entirely.
Not precisely the same thing, but I know someone who was refused tenure at one university, so she left for another (admittedly, less prestigious) which did give her tenure immediately.
According to her, the second university said something like: “That other university didn’t give you tenure? They’re crazy. Come to us and we’ll give you tenure on day one.”
That’s actually what happened to my friend as well. But what I’m saying is that if he (or your friend) hadn’t already been tenure track, switching universities wouldn’t have changed that- it seems to be a more or less permanent sort of thing if you end up shunted into the adjunct career path.
Aren’t a fair number of community college/commuter school adjuncts that way? I mean, several of my academic friends did exactly that between getting their masters and PhD degrees- they were adjuncts at community colleges while holding down various day jobs.
Similarly, most of my non tenured professors in graduate school had some sort of fairly serious alternate gigs, usually in some sort of consulting related to their academic study area. I never did know which was the side gig and which was primary for them.