The University of California business model is crumbling under the weight of the cost of living

The higher education workforce today is more and more made up of contingent faculty and workers who are considered by their universities to be students.

In the past 30 years, the number of tenured and tenure-track jobs has barely budged even as student enrollment has increased, while the number of doctoral students has continued to grow. Thanks to a combination of current professors sticking around longer (mandatory retirement is illegal) and declining enrollment as the millennial demographic bump passed, academic graduate school has never been less of a path to steady employment, especially in the humanities. “Tenured professors like having graduate students around. They teach the boring undergraduate sections for little or no pay and provide inexpensive research assistance. For many veteran scholars, training the next generation is one of the most rewarding parts of the job,” Kevin Carey wrote in the New York Times.

The old model where graduate students were essentially apprentices following a vocation — or calling — to research and teach seems bankrupt to this generation of non-faculty academic workers. They are being called upon to do more with only a glimmer of hope that they are headed in the direction of an academic job in the future.

Read the full article here