Where? Not anywhere I can find.
I know nothing about Ansley, Nebraska, but most college towns have all or most of that. College towns are filled with diversity in shopping, food, arts, etc., though probably not political views. There are lots of places to live that have culture that are away from high COL coastal CA or coastal New England.
I can understand family and friends and general inertia, to a degree. But living out of your car because you can’t afford rent? Move somewhere with more affordable rent. Or get a roommate.
Expensive to move? Yes, if they had a house. But these people literally have everything they own in their cars already. Just fill the tank with gas and go.
Job searching is online now. Interviews can be done thru video.
Need temporary housing? Their are places that specialize in month to month leasing. Here is one with 1 bedroom apartments going for $675. I’ve seen AirBNB going for as little as $39 a night.
Need a temporary Kansas address? Thats what connections are for. Ask around. Someone has to know someone in Kansas or in any other area.
Finally being nervous about moving someplace? Good grief it isnt like moving to Thailand. I’ve visited all over the US and places arent that different. We all speak english. Money is the same. Your cellphone will work everywhere. Stores are about the same. Food, libraries, parks, driving laws, etc… how different could anyplace be?
All that is fine but it can be expensive. Restaurants arent cheap. Either are museums, bars, art houses, concerts, festivals, and going on wine crawls.
Now good food. Yeah, I can see that. I miss good KC barbecue when I travel.
In the university system I am working at the title Adjunct indicates “unpaid”.
I doubt anyone is going to live in their car because they like the food offerings of that town.
There are a large number of people who would rather live out of their cars than live in Kansas. I understand their feelings completely.
Sure, but isn’t that just being prideful? I mean, at some point you bite the bullet and find something higher-paying, even if it’s not exactly what you want to be doing, if only to afford an apartment, etc… Doing what you like is all good, but being able to pay the bills goes a lot further for your overall well being I suspect.
I’d go so far as to say that if you are having to live out of your car as an adjunct professor, you’ve chosen the wrong field and career.
I have always felt that the “just move, idiot!” mentality itself comes from a place of privilege and elitism. “Just moving” is not that easy. It easily costs $2000 to move yourself any meaningful distance (i.e. more than 3 hours away, with furniture). Lining up a job ahead of time? Basically impossible. They want the interview to be in-person, so good luck shipping yourself over there and back on a hope and a prayer (oh, while taking a day off from your current job, which only has PTO if you’re lucky, so that might be an unpaid day of work, this also assumes you have money to get to the interview, or somehow convince these people that a skype or phone interview is enough, which it NEVER is). Ah, but they’re only interested in people who can start immediately. Waiting even just two weeks for you to quit your old job and take the new job is simply too much time for these folks these days. I’ve had recruiters tell me directly they can’t get me any spots until I moved and I was already in the area, because their employers do not want to wait. Alright, so now you’re moving without any hope of a job on the other side. Good luck vetting apartments ahead of time too, you’re basically guaranteed nasty surprises if you can’t get yourself over to the new area and look at apartments yourself. And you’d be locked into a year lease on whatever you took, sight unseen. Great. Now you’re in a strange new town, in a potentially shitty apartment, hoping that a job comes up, but you’re not sure. No friends or family nearby to help out if it all turns upside down. And you had to have money to get yourself there to begin with, even if it was just gas or bus money, which you don’t have, or you wouldn’t be looking to move to get out of your hell situation. It just amazes me how people will often come back at this like, “in the 60s I hitchhiked to california with a buck in my pocket and only the clothes on my back and I made it work by cleaning dishes at restaurants on the way, so anybody can!!” Just, no. It doesn’t work like that anymore, or for everybody. There’s always the “but my bootstraps!” story and honestly we should be doing better for our citizens than their bootstraps.
Ahem. Post #2.
There are no English faculty jobs at any of those colleges. Academic positions tend to be very competitive, and if you look at the English faculty at the two universities you listed, they tend to come from quite prestigious PhD programs.
I did a word search in both of your links. “Tenure” does not appear.
Sure, you can say that if you’re not doing well in your job, you chose the wrong career, which can be said of many professions, from coal miner to English professor. This sort of advice is easy to give, but people don’t tend to receive it well – just like, you need to lose 30 pounds. You need to stop smoking. You need to raise your child differently. You need to stop pursuing your career. In many cases, it is the correct advice, but good luck getting people to do it just because you think it’s the right thing to do.
Further, the OP didn’t ask whether people OUGHT to live in their cars rather than doing something else. The question of WHY they do it is a different question, of course.
That’s a 27 hour commute, and managing 54 hours of driving plus X hours of teaching in a 24 hour day is a bit difficult 
And there’s the obvious answer of ‘if everyone followed your advice, all of the housing in the area would fill up and prices would skyrocket’. People don’t decide where to live based purely on housing prices; they have to worry about things like social life, civil rights, job availability
How many adjunct professorships are there at UoK in her field, and will they lead to the career that she wants? Are there social and cultural events in Lawrence Kansas that she wants to participate in? Is she worried about civil rights - I personally wouldn’t want to live in Kansas, even though I’m male and can pass as boring straight WASP really easily. Is it really surprising that a woman doesn’t want to move to a state with the strictest abortion laws in the country, or that a gay person doesn’t want to move from a state with anti-disctimination laws to one without and that has passed laws protecting people who discriminate against LGBT individuals or couples?
Wow, looks like an artist I follow literally just ended up in a situation like this, with posts like:
Looks like that “just move!” treated them real well. Now they went from a stable but costly living situation to one where they are now living out of their car with no way to make money the way they normally would. Living out of your car provides its own challenges, the primary one being a way to shower so you can show up to job interviews not smelling like shit. Or having enough money to do laundry so your clothes don’t smell like shit. Getting down to living out of your car level makes it really hard to scrape your way back up. And they have an actual online following to ask for help from. Say it’s so easy to move to the person who has 6 friends and no online support web.
Yeah, in thirty years knocking around academia I have never seen a situation where an adjunct professor was tenured, and in fact I don’t understand how that would even work. To be granted tenure means to be senior faculty, usually at least at the associate-professor level, with an official position in an academic department or program and job security. To be an adjunct professor means to be essentially a temporary part-time lecturer, employed on a per-course basis to teach courses for a few thousand bucks per term, not part of regular faculty and with no official status within the institution.
According to Rent Cafe, studios are now ~2k, 3 bedroom homes are ~3.4k.
Thanks! Looks like renting a 3 bedroom home with 2 or 3 roomates is the way to go.
I have known plenty of people who do just that in the Bay Area, including decently paid professionals like engineers( albeit junior ones ).
No it doesn’t. If you watch the video in your link, the story opens by making the point that she is NOT tenured.
Years ago before the big raises in housing allowances, I knew a lot of junior enlisted AF personnel that did the same thing here in the DC area.
I once knew someone teaching as an adjunct. He said that folks like him were called freeway flyers, because they’d pick up one or two classes at two or three colleges and spend a lot of time driving. He’d also teach short writing skills classes at PG&E.
Do you think someone from another state can just walk in and scoop up one of these positions with a snap of a finger? Even if there were positions in her field, those kinds of positions tend to go to people who have already taught there, or who are in the area already and have a local reputation. There would be so much local competition that to just move to Kansas on the hope of getting one of those jobs is very high risk.
Cal State adjuncts are not very well paid compared to other universities. About half of the system’s professors are adjuncts. However, probably a much higher percentage of the total classes are taught by adjuncts (it’s hard to find that figure).
On the other hand, the largest system of higher education in the United States is the California Community College system, so it does make sense for her to apply to community colleges within driving distance of San Jose. There is a great need for quality English professors in the community colleges, where people can get short-term job training and two-year degrees for the mid-tier skills jobs that are not being filled now. The problem here is not the simple-minded claim that “she’s in the wrong job field,” but that public policy on education funding is still out of line with what the economy needs.