What's the deal with adjuncts suffering
Irrationality in academic job markets
Inspired by Scott’s post
which didn’t explicitly touch on the questions I want to talk about.
I. Is there a problem [with adjunct suffering] ?
Oversimplifying, the situation seems as follows: a bunch of folks are banging their heads against the wall, bleeding, visibly hurting, incessantly, for years. The Left shouts: see all the suffering! something needs to be done! shame on wall owners! And the Right shouts: well those are well-educated upper-middle class adults shouldn’t they know better? blaming wall-owners for not doing enough to discourage folks from head-banging and hurting themselves sounds like chasing the wrong horse?
That’s the central conflict: people are doing something (taking on adjunct positions) that looks very much like self-harm and certainly seems to often involve a good dose of suffering. And yet those are well-educated generally upper-middle class adults, who certainly have outside options, it’s not some poor black working single moms on a minimum wage where one would be much more concerned about abuse and employer having too much power over employee. It just doesn’t seem to me that “exploitation” is appropriate lens here (except maybe in the immigrant case). When it comes to upper-middle class adults knowingly entering into a deal like adjunctship it should take more then just “it seems bad for them” to prove harm not to mention to understand the situation.
So, why are those people doing it to themselves? One model that is useful to have in mind is that of a general “superstar labor market”: think pro athletes, actors, writers etc (can think also of somewhat similar situations like unpaid internships). These are generally characterized by pretty unpleasant working conditions of the aspirants, as the participants derive a lot of value for themselves from the exposure to the (often low probability) optionality aka “chance of making it”. This “chasing the chance” dynamics thus can be help us understand the situation where a lot of people seem to be okay with worse job conditions than they can get elsewhere, and many eventually giving up and thus appearing to have had a worse job than they could have had for no good reason, as something that can exist even though the participants are behaving rationally and choosing what’s in their self-interest.
The story doesn’t end here though. The “superstar market” still might be “bad” if say people are mislead, or simply have unrealistic expectations. Ofc one could argue that humans generally are overconfident and so all superstar markets are a bit “bad” on average in terms of reality not quite living up to people’s (overconfident) expectations. But let’s say we’re generally okay with superstar markets: if folks wanna chase the dream of becoming an actor while signing up for some misery on the way there, and mostly seem to know what they getting into, we’ll let them.
Does that mean who should be okay with adjuncts, for the same reasons? Well, maybe not if we think people are mislead/have overly unrealistic expectations? At this point this is actually an experimental social science question: what is the degree of overoptimism across various labor markets with superstar features? Are adjuncts actually worse than aspiring actors?
II. We have a problem, Houston: it’s zombies in your head
Pending that research I wish we had, let me posit that there is a problem, that expectations are badly miscalibrated (there is actly more to the bad mental states causing the phenomenon than just expectations), that there are reasons why they are.
I’m not much familiar with adjunct scene directly, but I’ve seen plenty of PhDs, both when I was doing mine and through my years of career-advising PhDs and dropouts largely thru reddit. A lot of them did seem very hang-up on academic path, weren’t open-minded about alternatives, tied their whole identity and self-worth to succeeding on academic path, and otherwise seemed to be as much of an opposite of a rational economic agent as one can imagine. I’ve seen an acquaintance or two fail through the cracks and end up in adjunct roles (seemed like few years of misery as expected before I lost touch with the rumors), and a few more end up in postdocs which seemed bad enough to be unlikely to ever lead to a research tenure-track role. I totally imagine earlier version of myself or my PhD friends willing to go through a lot of postdoc and adjunct misery until we’d be willing to give up on the academic career. For me at least it was never even remotely a rational calculation, chances of getting there vs costs in misery. No, it was destiny, it was what I was meant to do, spent “my whole life” preparing to. It wasn’t about chances of getting there, or even whatever perks or decent pay or advantages of a tenured job. It was a lifestyle that I had to live, and I’d have probably continued for some time even if tenure wasn’t at all an option and if 25K/year gradstudent life was meant to go on forever. I guess it wouldn’t have even been that surprising to me, as I’ve been quite familiar with the post-Soviet scientific scene where people very much did get paid close to nothing for years or decades and worked a side job to fund their scientific lifestyle (or, in a well-publicized case of Perelman, lived with their mom).
See also this comment outlining the kind of attitudes that are prevalent in academia. I might discuss issues with academia beliefs at more length another time, but for the purposes of this note the above should be enough to make it believable that the kinds of attitudes that are prevalent among young people in modern academia are not conducive to making what to outsiders would seem like rational choices. Instead they are very conducive to having one bang their head against the wall, if the wall happens to be around.
III. The criminal was found still holding a smoking mind-gun
The above allows us to solve the paradox: why are people who you’d think should know better banging their heads against the wall? Well, if you look closer, they all have brain worms! They might be acting rationally to the extent the brain with the worms can be called such (eg if you believe only life worth living is within academia it makes sense to do whatever it takes to pursue it, no matter apparent misery), but realistically, by the standards of the healthy outsiders, or their own future recovered selves, they are mentally ill.
How did they become ill? It takes a village and a lot of patience to grow brain worms, but it’s possible. Ancient societies could’ve had ceremonial sacrifices convinced this is an amazing opportunity and proud of being part of the ritual. We have our own civic religion. “Cult of science” might make it sound like much more that just a job. Professors might encourage bright kids to do the same thing they did as clearly that’s the most amazing life one can live, and might have their own brain wormy view on the cost/benefit analysis of pursuing academic career. Once you’ve already prematurely abandoned exploration, focused on a single subject from early on, did research instead of internships, went to gradschool right after college instead of taking a gap year to explore oneself or trying a “real job” to see how that is.. it might not take that much more than a friendly department full of people just like you with exact same views for your worm to become a fully fledged adult completely controlling your mind.
In this model, the source of harm is pretty clear: it’s the worms, or rather, the culture that grows them.
IV. Solutions
If it’s all in your mind, good news is, minds can be changed. What we need, that seems easy enough to achieve, is more data collection, dissemination, to make the long odds and dubious prospects more well known. But maybe more importantly, we need advocacy, outreach, cultural changes in academic departments, the former to help some people throw away their worm babies, the latter to get the worm growers to curb their enthusiasm.
Anecdotally, those kinds of approaches seem to be working: socialization into communities with more nuanced understanding of the value prop of PhD opens people’s minds and leads them to make more well-considered decisions. I’m involved in various rat-adjacent circles with quite a few PhD dropouts, and played some role in helping some of those make their big decisions1 . Honestly it didn’t seem so much that those brain worms are necessarily that strong and hard to fight, and more that academia is a cult-like environment with not much viewpoint diversity on this topic, doing its best to keep the worm alive and shielded from alternative points of view.
My dream solution is for professors who currently shepherd those young impressionable bright kids towards academia to adopt better standards of care: they are trusted advisers and role models, if they are currently “gung-ho science pure awesome” and that leads a lot of kids to adjunct misery few years down the road arguably they bear some responsibility. The situation isn’t the same as just a boss at a job: in that case rational agent model is usually applicable. College professors and especially gradschool advisors are arguably as much cult leaders as they are simply bosses, and imo it’s reasonable to hold cult leaders accountable for their followers’ beliefs causing harm (to themselves).
Think my attitude towards a PhD, outlined next, is not a bad starting point for the discussion of what reasonable guidance can look like, and I believe quite a few points are widely shared by rat and ea communities.
V. What would I tell a baby worm
Approach is roughly: PhD might be right for you (talking to a bright academically inclined person whose career/character assessment seem to indicate a research career), but the costs of a mistake are huge so you better be sure you properly explored yourself as well as alternative options and can convince me you know exactly what you’re doing.
Not specializing too early in college and not skimping on exploration options it affords, doing internships, trying working a normal job after graduation and not proceeding to PhD directly are some common ways of ensuring one hasn’t underexplored/isn’t being too narrow-minded. If research is your true passion that’s not gonna disappear from spending a year at google! And having a bit of extra money and maturity will actually set you up for grad school success if you decide to go for it after all.
In some subjects pre-docs or research assistantships or similar roles are available allowing one to test what real research is like and the lifestyle before actually committing to a PhD. In others maybe we should create those, or maybe normalize research masters degrees.
Really, the above should be viewed as very minimal precautions when it comes to a decision that can easily cost one 5+ wasted years and a broken identity, so you’d think they would be quite wide-spread and uncontroversial. And yet they aren’t, and the typical head-banger probably hasn’t followed a single one of those safety tips.
Note to self: I should write about typical issues and concerns those people have
I think the sunk cost fallacy can be pretty powerful when it comes to people’s careers. After spending so much time and effort on a phd I can see it being hard for people to give that up and go into a private sector job that didn’t necessarily need that degree.
In the old nobility, "going into trade" was not to be thought of, and going into the army or navy was a poor second choice to "being on the Land" (yes, they capitalized it).
Money was the means by which you could be on the Land, not the what the Land got you. You ended up spending money on the Land in many cases, which you got from elsewhere. If you got lots more money, you bought more Land. You never sold any Land, unless you had to. If you had spare money, you spent it on hobbies (such as raising horses for hunting) which usually lost money, but required lots of Land.
There were only certain acceptable means of getting the money - inheriting it being the favorite and marrying it being a close second.
Does this sound familiar? Being on the path to a tenure-track research position at a top university is the only acceptable life, and if you get off that track, you tried to stay as close as possible to it.