Tenure IS Weird

[308Mike]

And once they get tenure'd for a few years, they start taking LONG sabbaticals (some of them might even be paid as part of their employment contract).

[skb12172]

Been there, done that. Taught at several different colleges full time. Also, typical sabbaticals are one semester at full pay or one year at half pay.

[PawPaw]

Been there, done that. Taught at several different colleges full time. Also, typical sabbaticals are one semester at full pay or one year at half pay.

Why would anybody give up a gig like that? I've been in several college towns and it seemed to me like the best job in the world would be a tenured college professor. I even adjuncted for a while, and that was a good gig, while it lasted.

[skb12172]

Depends on the department. In the Humanities, you generally make less than a HS teacher. We also went 6 years without even a cost of living raise, while the administration voted themselves 12%. In 2004, I had 3 kids to raise, a spouse who wouldn't work and I was making $38K a year. The only Profs making less were in English and Theater.

[skb12172]

This was at a major University, btw. A big 12 school.

[Bullspit]

I always say that it beats working for a living.

[PawPaw]

Depends on the department. In the Humanities, you generally make less than a HS teacher. We also went 6 years without even a cost of living raise, while the administration voted themselves 12%. In 2004, I had 3 kids to raise, a spouse who wouldn't work and I was making $38K a year. The only Profs making less were in English and Theater.

Glenn Reynolds talks about this a lot at Instapundit. He teaches law in Knoxville, and writes a lot about the Higher Education Bubble, where administration has exploded in the nations universities. All those people need to be paid, to the detriment of the classroom teachers. A lot of the overpopulation of administrators is to blame for rising tuition. And it's making a lot of schools less cost effective than they were in the past. For example, my alma mater. When I went to school, simple tuition was about $400.00 per semester for a full load of 15 hours. Books and supplies, assorted fees, jumped that another $400.00 (I graduated spring '75). Now, the average cost of tuition, fees, books and related supplies is about $7300 per semester. That's a hell of a lot of money, and a bachelor's degree might cost $60,000. That's a lot of student loans to repay.

[Aesop]

You'd be amazed how reasonable college costs would become if we removed federal loans from the equation.

Or, alternatively, forced colleges to accept federal payment of 2 cents on the dollar, like we do with Medicare and hospitals.
I'd love the sight of Harvard or Stanford being told that they'd have to take $400/yr as payment in full from every student with a federal loan guarantee.

The quickest way to make college as affordable as boob jobs is to ban any government funding for it.

[skb12172]

Aesop, FTW.

[PawPaw]

The quickest way to make college as affordable as boob jobs... snip

When's the last time you bought a boob job? I bought a set in 1989, when my first wife graduated from college. Paid almost $6,000 for them. She went from a trim, lithe A cup to a really nice C cup in about two hours. They were lots of fun, too. Till I learned in the late '90s that just about every man in town had been playing with them.

I tried to have them declared community property during the divorce. I told the judge that I wanted my half, and that I'd hang it on the mailbox and let all her boyfriends come by and play with it. The judge had to call a recess. Evidently, the law considers a boob job as a gift, not subject to the normal community regime.

I just did some Googling, and evidently the cost of a boob job hasn't gone up much in the past 24 years. That is cool.