Teaching in Poverty

 

Just a couple of article quotes:

May 6, 2012

The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps

By Stacey Patton

Of the 22 million Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010, about 360,000 were receiving some kind of public assistance, according to the latest Current Population Survey released by the U.S. Census Bureau in March 2011. In 2010, a total of 44 million people nationally received food stamps or some other form of public aid, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. […]

During that three-year period, the number of people with master's degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

Higher Education’s Darkest Secret

In this op-ed, the president of New Faculty Majority reveals just how poorly adjunct professors are paid—and treated—across the country.

By Maria Maisto

January 22, 2013

Professor Staff is actually the majority of the faculty known as adjuncts, lecturers, part-time profs and other confusing titles. In the U.S., they number roughly one million. These teachers work on temporary, low-wage contracts, largely ineligible for basic job protections that support academic quality in the classroom.

At the community college where I teach, the percentage of "part-time" professors has gone from 14.1 percent in 1995 to 77.7 percent in 2009, according to a database maintained by the Modern Language Association.