PPACA, academia and economic reality

[Brainfade]

Academic institutions are the bastions of liberalism. Almost every one of my colleagues - from the adjuncts to the full-time tenureds - are starry-eyed fans of President Obama and PPACA. Say a word against his policies, and they look at you like you landed from Mars ... or Mississippi. But now, Harvard Professor and Chairman of Economics writes: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2013/08/obamacare-versus-faculty.html

Obamacare versus the Faculty I don't know how widespread this phenomenon is, but I thought I would share an email I received this morning: I have been teaching multiple sections of economics for four years now at several Colleges and Universities in the State of Indiana. I have also been a frequent user of your texts in the classes that I teach. With the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) these institutions are giving notification to their part-time faulty that their individual teaching schedules will now be limited to three sections. At the college this will likely result in the cancellation of 20-25% of the class sections in economics, and I would assume other areas will have a similar result. The students are not fully aware of the situation and many will be surprised that their desire to get a college education is now being impacted by the need to avoid the full implementation of the ACA. Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat I would hope full-time faculty would voice their concern regarding the impact the implementation of the ACA could have on the attainment of higher education for the current student population and upon the lives of the dedicated part-time faculty that have been devoted to serving this student population. My hope is that if faculty across the nation brought this to the public attention that we as a nation could have a more open and complete dialogue regarding the course we wish to set as a nation.

Should've thought of this before you voted for it, but then again, it was pitched by an eloquent guy with a kind smile. How could you pass up on that ... even if means students get screwed?

[punjabi_khota]

Well when Walmart hires part-timers they are evil, when academia does it, ..... % of adjuncts teaching important courses is academia's real problem, not Obama's health care plan.

[The Outsider]

Adjunct faculties are there in principle to fill in for professors on sabbaticals, offer specialized courses for which there is no expertise in the department, or to cover for sections added at the last minute due to greater demand for some courses. Universities and colleges have been misusing the concept to regularly have adjunct faculty teach 3-4 classes per semester on pitiful pay(even by academia standards) and little and no benefits, in order to avoid hiring full time faculty. How they can get away with branding someone teaching 3 classes a semester as adjunct when full time faculty teaches 1 or at the most 2 classes in a semester is the root of the problem, not the affordable care act.

[Brainfade]

Adjunct faculties are there in principle to fill in for professors on sabbaticals, offer specialized courses for which there is no expertise in the department, or to cover for sections added at the last minute due to greater demand for some courses. Universities and colleges have been misusing the concept to regularly have adjunct faculty teach 3-4 classes per semester on pitiful pay(even by academia standards) and little and no benefits, in order to avoid hiring full time faculty. How they can get away with branding someone teaching 3 classes a semester as adjunct when full time faculty teaches 1 or at the most 2 classes in a semester is the root of the problem, not the affordable care act.

It is simple economics in depts like Art, Music and English. These depts simply do not generate enough revenue (very few kids majoring in them) to justify full-time tenure-track or tenured faculty lines. So, their adjuncts have to teach heavy loads with no benefits, especially to fulfill the freshmen survey course needs. Many of the adjuncts prefer it this way because they are not trapped by the other responsibilities of a full-time faculty job (see below). They put in their 35 or 40 hours, make a decent income (at least in NC), and do other things. Now, thanks to PPACA, they get to put in their 29 hours, take a paycut and pay more for individual health insurance. As such, PPACA is accelerating the part-time economy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2013/07/08/the-insiders-obamacare-and-the-growth-of-part-time-jobs/), and the ripples are being felt in academia now. As for full-timers teaching only 1 or 2 classes, they have other responsibilities. In the big schools, it is research - tenured faculty are usually 90:10 or 95:5 research/teaching ratio. Their time is spent writing grants and papers and taking BP pills. At my school, we teach 3 - 4 courses, do undergraduate research, advise, mentor, write papers, try to get grants, serve in college governance etc. And goof off on ICF with 10 letters of recommendation due this week ;-)!

[The Outsider]

^ Yeah I am aware of the extra responsibilities of full time faculty, though once you have tenure in a research university you are not obligated to do any research, which is a nice little paradox of the academic world, but perhaps a different discussion. My gripe is with the fact that in nearly all places I have come across outside academia, a 35-40 hour work week is considered full time. I also agree that some of this trend of hiring so many adjuncts in lieu of full time faculty has its origin in the lack of interest and funding in certain departments. But a large part of it is also driven by having an expeditious and cheap solution instead of searching and working on more robust alternatives. For example, there are certain undergraduate courses in which there is little in class interaction and still universities keep the class sizes low, so that they can get that extra point on USA today rankings, while providing no tangible benefit to the students. I find the concept of a 35-40 hour work week to be classified as "adjunct" patently unfair.

[Brainfade]

^ Yeah I am aware of the extra responsibilities of full time faculty' date= though once you have tenure in a research university you are not obligated to do any research, which is a nice little paradox of the academic world, but perhaps a different discussion.

BTW, I did not mean to patronize ... I realized you would be aware of these situations, but just thought I'd provide some context to all readers. No offense meant. As for the other thought regarding tenure ... OMG, that could take a whole day to discuss :-). On a related note, NC abolished life-time tenure for school teachers. Now, they go on 4-yr contracts and will be evaluated at the end of every contract. What they did not do, but should have done concomitantly, is to increase teacher pay to compensate for removing the security-blanket provided by tenure.

[Brainfade]

A very timely article for our discussions Old profs never quit!! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/old-professors-never-quit-they-just-hang-around.html

Millions of 18-year-olds are excited about heading to college this month -- leaving home, making friends and taking courses that meet only a few hours a week. On the first day of classes, however, they may be startled to find that the professor who enters Calculus I or Intro to Philosophy is more than a half-century older than they are. The phenomenon of the teacher who sticks around well past age 70 has been widely noted, yet colleges have had little success in mitigating its impact. A survey commissioned by Fidelity Investments and reported at Inside Higher Ed in June found that “some 74 percent of professors aged 49-67 plan to delay retirement past age 65 or never retire at all.” Never retire at all? Another study cited in the article, this one using National Science Foundation data, calculated that since the 1970s only 28 percent of higher education faculty had retired by age 65. Think of this from an employer’s point of view. In today’s economy, is there any worse policy than guaranteeing an employee the same job for 40-plus years, even if he or she meets few of the organization’s needs and costs a lot in the bargain? That’s what tenure ensures. An assistant professor comes up for promotion at about age 35, and if the candidate qualifies, the school maintains him or her until the professor (or death) decides otherwise. Granting tenure in 2010 commits the school to that employee until 2050 or beyond. No Flexibility If a major was popular in the 1980s, and a school hired and tenured professors in response, the school keeps them regardless of how many majors the field has in 2010. The college not only has no flexibility to shift the workforce when demand goes down -- a professor of sociology can’t shift to chemistry -- but also has to pay a higher cost for the employee every year (because of ordinary salary adjustments, pension contributions and medical coverage). Take the case of French professors. According to the Modern Language Association, the discipline recorded 248,000 course enrollments in 1980 in accredited, not-for-profit institutions (including two-year schools). In 1990, the number rose to 272,000, and in those heady years a certain number of faculty members hired to teach those courses won tenure. Since then, enrollments have dipped more than 20 percent, averaging about 207,000 for the last 10 years. For German, the drop is worse: 133,000 in 1990 to 95,000 today. Obviously, some of these professors aren’t needed now. But ever since 1994, when mandatory retirement rules were ended, administrators can’t make them leave. As Columbia professor Mark Taylor put it in 2010, “Tenure decisions render illiquid a significant percentage of endowments at the precise moment when more flexibility is required.” The only way to force a tenured professor out is to close an entire department, a step a few schools have taken. But no ambitious dean likes to face the fracas that ensues. When the State University of New York at Albany, for example, cut five low-enrollment humanities programs, an NPR story on it highlighted the “outcry” that followed which “resonated with the public and the press.” Most professors in slipping fields don’t notice the effects much. Tenure frees them from worrying about student interest. They love having smaller classes and fewer papers to grade. The standard course universities have taken is to offer buyout packages to accelerate retirements. But that old tactic may no longer work. It’s not just the bad job market. In the Fidelity survey, professors ranked personal reasons more often than financial concerns for continuing to work. Only 55 percent declared that uncertainty over having enough money to retire comfortably was their main reason for staying, while 89 percent said they “want to stay busy and productive” and 64 percent said they “love the work too much to give it up.” Hiring Changes What’s a manager to do when an expensive and not-so-productive 73-year-old worker can’t be released or reassigned? The obvious answer is to stop the process before it starts, and use more nontenured instructors. In 1969, tenured and tenure-track faculty amounted to 78 percent of the higher education workforce. By 2009, that rate had slipped to 33 percent, even as the number of professors over 65 doubled from 2000 to 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Faculty leaders complain about the trend, citing the bad wages and benefits in nontenured employment. But the Fidelity survey explains why administrators have no choice. Tenure started 100 years ago as a way to preserve academic freedom, not to keep employees in place 10 years past customary retirement age. The continued resistance to reform shows arrogant disregard for rising college costs for students, for meritocratic decision-making and for academic innovation. The current method of converting tenured slots to nontenured ones is too slow. We need another incentive, and there is none more powerful among selective institutions than the U.S. News rankings, which scare administrators every year. What if the rankings included another variable, “Percentage of professors over age 65”? No university wants to top that list, and we can be sure that once it appears, a whole new set of creative solutions to the never-retiring professor will be found.

[The Outsider]

BTW, I did not mean to patronize ... I realized you would be aware of these situations, but just thought I'd provide some context to all readers. No offense meant. As for the other thought regarding tenure ... OMG, that could take a whole day to discuss :-). On a related note, NC abolished life-time tenure for school teachers. Now, they go on 4-yr contracts and will be evaluated at the end of every contract. What they did not do, but should have done concomitantly, is to increase teacher pay to compensate for removing the security-blanket provided by tenure.

No, no, not offended at all.

A very timely article for our discussions Old profs never quit!! http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-05/old-professors-never-quit-they-just-hang-around.html

That is a good view, but presents just one side of the coin. The main motivation behind granting tenure(at least in the context of research universities) is that professors should be able to carry out path breaking research without the pressures associated with publication when they are an assistant/associate professor. Think of it, something like Fermat's last theorem would possibly never have been proved if Andrew Wiles was expected to publish a certain amount to retain his job. However, I do feel that there should not be tenure in jobs which are mainly teaching rather than research. Even for research, maybe there is a happy middle ground which gives the necessary academic freedom and yet prevents people from drawing $100k+ for teaching one course a semester for decades on end. I just can't think of any off the top of my head.

[punjabi_khota]

Well, ending tenure at 62 or 65 would be a start.

[Brainfade]

Well' date=' ending tenure at 62 or 65 would be a start.[/quote'] Yep. My college is talking about it. Right now, they are offering it like a VRS scheme. Where you can give up tenure for a multi-year contract. That way, they have the flexibility of hiring younger contingent faculty, and not be stuck with a tenured old person. It must be said, however, that the older folks in my dept are among the most productive ... Lot to learn from them!