University hiring just is not making the grade

By Murry Frymer
San Jose Mercury News

You can take that to mean our primary and secondary school students who, we've been hearing for years, trail counterparts in Western democracies in the breadth and depth of achievement.

Or you can take it to mean our graduate scholars who, conversely, much of the Western world in the quality of their education.

On the one hand, we've got a problem with our lower grades because too many schools are bad. On the other hand, we've got a problem with our most accomplished students, too, even though our universities are the best in the world.

The problem is jobs. We have either a glut of Ph.D.s loose in the land, or something has choked off the careers that those students, so eminently qualified, should be enjoying.

According to published reports, the number of advertised full-time jobs available in most fields has plummeted. In political science, colleges are looking for 37 percent fewer candidates for college jobs than they were less than a decade ago. Jobs in English and literature have shrunk by 50 percent.

Up and down the line, graduate students with newly minted doctorate degrees are finding themselves with only limited opportunities, from the humanities -- the worst situation -- to the sciences. And, sadly, the reason that Ph.D.s don't get jobs is because so many of them are being filled by graduate students who work for slim wages as teaching fellows.

Universities, claiming limited resources, have been avoiding hiring graduates for full-time tenure-track positions. Instead they have found a large, hungry pool of students in their own graduate departments who teach the same courses for as little as $2,000 a course. Or schools can hire new Ph.D.s as lecturers or "adjunct'' teachers to teach those courses on temporary lower-pay contracts.

As a result, the Ph.D.s, if they are able to find college employment at all, find themselves in the role of migrants, moving from college to college as temps while the permanent positions stay unfilled.

New fair-employment rules against mandatory retirement, meant to assist older workers, have also contributed to the younger teachers' distress. Many professors, who used to retire at 65, can now stay in their tenured posts for years thereafter, using teaching fellows to handle the discussion sections of lecture courses or determining grades.

At many universities, graduate students, feeling abused and deprived, have tried to fight for both their present and future interests by forming graduate student unions, seeking the sort of benefits that permanent teachers get, including better pay.

The universities have fought back, saying graduate students aren't really employees, but are in training. Students are miffed, seeing their role as a ruse. They have tried brief "strikes,'' withholding grades. University faculties have shown little sympathy and in some cases outright enmity. The National Labor Relations Board is now examining faculty penalties against Yale University students who "struck'' last year.

Well then, why are we training so many Ph.D.s if there are no jobs? And will current practice deflate both our nation's colleges and the young scholars whose extensive studies should earn them greater rewards than they now find?

Which brings me to another education story in the news. Chelsea Clinton, a bright, well-connected student, was offered admission to her choice of our best universities. She chose Stanford. Good for her.

But was she choosing among Stanford, Yale and Harvard, or cadres of graduate teaching assistants at those schools who would teach so many of her courses at cut rates?