Question for those of you who currently teach at the University level.
If you were to choose today would you choose to be a College Professor? My husband and I had this discussion last night, he is in his 18th year as a professor and we are both thinking he should have gone to a national lab or industry.
Sad thing is, he loves teaching, loves his students and interacting with them. However, the federal funding is drying up, no more research money for many people. We lost summer salary when his NSF grant ended and was not renewed. That took a third of his salary. He is teaching this summer, but they could only give him one class, a 4 week class and a payment of $2000 for teaching a class of 100. Not even close to what we lost with the grant.
No raises for the past few years and with no grant right now, (there are 6 in the pipeline to be reviewed), there won't be any. Everything is based on research, not teaching.
I don't think we would choose this path if we were coming out now with student loans. It is hard not to discourage young grad students who want to follow him to the classroom.
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My husband and I feel your pain. Higher education needs to relocate its soul. Students and their families need to realize that all the big tuition bucks are going to well-dressed edu-babble speaking administrators and giant money pits known formally as "athletic programs," or those things that apparently EVERY university MUST have for success in the US!!
I don't know what will turn things around. My husband was tenure-track faculty member and loved working with his students. In his later career, he was an administrator and enjoyed mentoring faculty. And actually that ended his career--the HIGH-UP administration did not want administrators who supported faculty. It was very sad.
I was an adjunct, one of that growing number of underpaid and overworked people expected to teach more and more classes to save money for more of those expensive administrators. The students were great, but the working conditions were hellish. Those working conditions had a direct impact on the quality of the class experience for students. Adjuncts do not have access to the programs and technology of a full-time faculty member does. At the end of my career, I worked on the academic side of student support services, which are also underfunded because they aren't cute and flashy.
For your husband--he is facing what so many faculty are facing. The same expensive administrators whine that faculty aren't teaching enough so course loads go through the roof, and at the same time, they whine that class sizes are too small, so class sizes also go nuts. Where I worked, it was determined that if an intro sociology class with 40 people was okay, why not one with 100 students? No one has the time to grade research papers for one section of 100 students, so good-bye writing.
I also think that people don't realize how much grant funding has dried up with the current crop of dummies occupying the halls of Congress. When you have uneducated bible thumpers in power, they can't see the importance of research and what that has meant for us as a country. Then you suffer when the grants dry up and the university squeezes summer incomes.
I think we all need to wake up and pay attention to higher education. You deserve a good life, and you and your spouse should be able to do the work that has meaning for you. 