mysterious-prophetess:

dorothea-rising:

No one ever mentions in discussions and arguments about anti-intellectualism/”out of touch elitism” etc. etc. that colleges and universities operate on the back of one of the lowest, most exploited, most underpaid, and most insecure labor pools in the U.S. Just as an example after graduate school I was offered & turned down a job at a state university for 18k dollars a year and no benefits, which is pretty typical. This is just slightly more than I made teaching a 2/3 course load as a graduate student. Yes, I was  lucky that I got funding etc. etc. but its also true that I was working a full time job for like $7.00 an hour. I know a lot of adjunct professors & PhD and other students who are basically living in poverty. There’s this weird cultural assumption that people should just be grateful/the work is not real? This particular labor crisis is absolutely invisible to most people and completely absent from infuriating conversations on both the left and right about how universities are “bubbles” or intellectualism is somehow classist or w/e when a significant portion of people standing in front of the classroom are living below the poverty line.

There was a story about a career adjunct for a high profile university who died in her car.

Here it is (x)

The Highlights from this article:

Her name was Margaret Mary. 

She worked for Dusquene University.

They treated her like shit, even when she was dying from cancer. They booted her out because she couldn’t pay her electricity and her house was too cold to live in during winter so she slept in her office.

She worked for them for TWENTY FIVE YEARS and got bupkis on the way out.

At most she ever made from them was $25,000 a year.

The University President makes $700,000.

And this long careered professional was nearly turned over to Orphan Court, her case was so bad. She died first before anything could happen.

Now for something the article didn’t put in.

Yearly tuition per student:

$33,778

Number of Students:

9,506

The ratio is little less than half are graduate students whose cost per credit ranges from $554 to $1,618 per credit. -_- (and I thought $430 per credit hour was highway robbery) 

I’m going to guess the $554 is the MA level stuff. Though, looking at their actual breakdown page I’m not seeing it so it must be their discount rate they brag about.

So, let’s do some math using Duquense’s own publicly available figures. X and X

I’m not given what their semester or yearly course load is BUT if 8-13 credits is considered part-time, I’m going to go with a base 15 and move on

Also this isn’t 100% gospel truth but this is a rough estimate because I have a ax to grind.

I averaged out all the credit rates to get  $1,241 per grad student. so, let’s find the yearly from that. Turns out, it’s only slightly higher than the undergrad rate 

$37, 230

Grad/Law Students bring in about $121,742,100

Undergrad: $204,255,566

Total from students: $325,997,666.

Just. From. Student. Tuition.

Now, I can’t find the actual faculty numbers but I can find the student to professor ratio. 14:1

That gives me a number of 609. From the article about Margaret Mary, the person wrote that said most universities these days employ half their professorial force being adjuncts so, around 305 of that number would be adjuncts. If most adjuncts were paid as pitifully as Margaret Mary (who was said to not even clear $25,000 yearly) I can use that number to calculate that all the adjuncts getting screwed (with no benefits) took up only $7,625,000 of the school’s budget. Out of JUST tuition they collected from students, it cost around 2.3% of that to pay the adjuncts. Let’s assume that the remaining 304 professors get paid nice big salaries. Quick google search says private institution Tenure track profs make around 131,000 a year but that religious schools like Duquesne tend to pay 95k a year. $28,880,000 total. or 8.9% of that tuition takings number I have up there. Meaning, in total, Duquesne pays only a little over 12.2% of what they take in from tuition alone to take care of paying all their instructors. Let’s be a little more generous and assume that that number is closer to 15-18% when the benefits of the tenured faculty is taken into account. See why I’m grinding this ax so hard now? Because Student tuition is but one area of revenue. Donors are a big thing. A HUGE thing for Private universities. So….yeah. 

Academia has made a class of highly educated working poor. Let’s not forget about them, ok?