I feel your pain, Mel. The only luck Dr. Yidg (also a blogger--we should just come out as partnered) and I have had is to be able to buy a small house in a now-booming older (1920s) neighborhood right before the regentrification kicked into high gear. A little house was build right next to ours and sold for almost twice what we paid. Otherwise, oddly, the big cutback is that I now buy less books. I'm hoping to be debt free in 5 years. Then I hope to take my first-ever vacation.
Have I mentioned the part about how I'm bitter. About how I was the only member of my department not to get a bonus and a raise in the Fall. Because I'm the only one not tenure-track, and I make far less salary anyway, so I guess I didn't need it.
I hear you...I pay way too much in rent, but I'm happy and comfortable where I live, and that is really important to me. As a graduate student in English, I actually receive a pretty generous stipend relative to the cost of living here, but every summer I go deeper into debt because I can't find a decent job for three months (might as well work and get a real job faster) and it's impossible to secure summer funding pre-exams. I suppose I could shave more money off during the year, but I share your feeling of already living pretty frugally.
And I buy a lot of books and don't really want to stop. Bleh.
Been there, done that, couldn't afford the t-shirt.
We were on the edge of debt at the end of my year being an itinerant (i.e., visiting) faculty member right out of grad school, then went into it to move at the end of an unpaid summer, then slowly eked our way out of it during a three-year postdoc, then saved enough in one year as a tenure-track faculty member living in cheapo rented housing to buy a house, which then made us eke things out until Elizabeth finished her masters program and started work, and ... well, you get the picture. Right now, we're on solid ground financially, but that's never guaranteed.
Looking back on it, we could have avoided a few more take-out meals when I was in grad school, but we were pretty frugal. So take pride in what you have been able to do, okay?
Sing it, sister.
I remember a phone interview for a one-year visiting prof position where I was told upfront what the salary would be. It was more than $10,000 less than what I was making as an adjunct. gulp. they asked if I wanted to continue the interview? I said sure.
But when the question time came, and they asked if I had any questions about the department, I (and my subconcious was obviously doing the math the whole time, putting the kids into a one bedroom apt?) heard them ask about apartments? So the whole conversation took a weird turn for the housing issues.
We're on a pretty even keel these days; starting to shift to having more savings than debt. But we're hardly having those lattes or buying lunches.
We were very lucky that we bought a house with the last student loan. prices here have gone up so much higher in the last 5 years.
good post.
I'm going to add my self-indulgent 2 cents, so forgive me here. Universities in New York know that they can't attract people unless there are reasonable housing options, so almost all of them have faculty housing. As a consequence, I end up renting a decent apartment in an excellent neighborhood for much less than it would cost on the market. Many people end up renting these places for their whole lives.
I'm glad we have a reasonably-priced option, but it does really bother me that I could potentially be renting for much of the rest of my life if I stay here. The whole tax structure in this country is set up to reward you if you own. But in New York, I could only own something that's a 45-minute train or subway ride from my office. And even then I can't upgrade from what I have now--it's at best going to be a 1-bedroom or a small 2-bedroom apartment. Is it worth it to downgrade the quality and location of the apt in order to buy? I guess you're struggling with that too.
I have often wished I had (insert expensive vice here) so I could quit it and suddenly find myself with another 100$ a week.
There's belt-tightening, which is good, or there is living without anything nice, which is not so good.
Can I ask something possibly inappropriate? (Well, I'm going to, so just ignore it if you want to. It's hard to know what to ask about money, what is on which side of appropriate.) If you're at a public school, how can there be significantly different pay for people in the same department? How can salary raises depend on what happened in the last year (instead of since the last raise)? Or are you not in a union?
Boy howdy, in my last (state school) job, there was PLENTY of variation in pay. There was no union (I think unionized colleges are still the exception rather than the rule in the US, except perhaps among community colleges), and starting pay was determined by what money was available as well as your qualifications (if you were hired before you got your PhD, you got less than if you were done, and if you had a book you'd probably get more than if you didn't etc.). And then raises were determined by what you'd done in the last year (assuming that there was money for a raise), but were also a percentage of your base salary, so if you started lower... My state institution did, I think, administer some cost-of-living raises, but I'm still not sure how it worked.
Anyway, I completely agree with everyone else's agreement with this post...though I have to confess that I *do* buy lunch, most days; but that's through the dining hall at the college, which is all you can eat for $3-4 dol
dollars, which is a pretty good deal. I HATE packing/carrying a lunch, I guess just b/c I'm lazy (I also rarely have leftovers to bring). I figure since I never buy booze, go out clubbing or to live entertainment, and don't even make it to the movies that often, it kind of evens out.
Wow. I find it hard to understand how a school can okay that sort of "well it depends on this and that plus a magic number" and not have major problems with discrimination etc. I also find it hard to understand how so many public schools aren't unionised, but, well, look where I live. NK, are you saying that private schools have less of this kind of discrepancy, then?
Adding to the chorus of amens. You know you're living close to the edge when buying yourself a nice soap or a bar of chocolate at the store counts as a special treat. D. and I do manage to eat out a few times a month, but we go to cheap ethnic restaurants and live off the leftovers, so it's not like cutting out these meals would save us all that much -- maybe $30 a month, tops.
Of course, I can't really speak directly to the issue of faculty salaries (except as someone involved with a person subsisting on a part-time adjunct's salary, and both of us living in a high-cost-of-living city). What I do note is that, for all those people talking about the financial superiority of non-academic employment, I have yet to see it. I'm paid a bit less than I was making as a visiting prof., but the debt load hasn't gone away; if anything, it increased -- I'm still paying off the debts incurred when I was underemployed during the transition (especially COBRA - oh, god, what a money hol
(cont.)...
I'm still paying off the debts incurred when I was underemployed during the transition (especially COBRA - oh, god, what a money hole that is! -- yet it was still cheaper than anything I could muster on my own). And the psychic costs of that time... I still feel anxious and trapped when it looks like buying something as little as a single paperback might mean not being able to pay the rent, which was always the case then.
Short version: the big expenses are, and will remain, rent, food, and debt. Denying myself a candy bar every few weeks would do nothing to change that, and would make me feel pinched and deprived again, to no purpose. Not good.
Wolfangel, I'm in a unionized cc so adjuncting is pretty well-paid. Salaries scale kicks in at 4 credit hours, and for the most part, we are getting full-time course loads. Benefits are excellent, covering my whole family.
I understand that this is pretty out of the ordinary.
Just to follow up -- there are no faculty unions in my state. There are tremendous disparities in salary among members of my department, and then also among departments in our college, and among colleges in the university. Our dept chair raises this with the dean and higher administration every few years, depending on the political climate. But we are not the premier system in the state, so our funding is always lower than the system whose alums make up most of the state legislature...
Things at FU aren't a whole lot better. Everything here is also done on merit raises. While our salary pool for raises has run between 2 and 4 percent while I've been here, a good portion of that is always reserved for retention. In fact, only once in the last 6 years did I receive a raise that was at or above the rate of the pool—and I'm still one of the lowest paid faculty in the department. Every person that has been hired in my subfield and those in the subfield closest to mine since I've come has been hired at a significantly higher salary than I have.
As with Mel's situation, we too are at the mercy of the merit pool in terms of publications. If a major article, book, or tenure come in a year when the merit pool is small, well you are just out of luck. I had a colleague who suffered that inequity a couple of years ago. He got tenure, but the budget was frozen so he only got the fixed tenure bump, which is quite small, rather than the augmented bump, which is more ty
cont.
typical. The department is still working to rectify the situation three years later—we've had too many retentions to deal with in the meantime...
jwb
Wow. I had no idea quite how terrible it was (my grad school was unionised), and -- why don't faculty try to start unions? (I'm asking this quite seriously.)
WA, I don't think private schools are necessarily better (I think they're less likely to be unionized, for instance), but it varies according to the size of the school's endowment and general financial situation. The benefit of a private school is that it's not dependent on the state legislature, so raises etc. aren't contingent on a good legislature year. If you're at a rich school, this is good, if you're at a poor school, it's not much better, if not worse.
As for why not unions - well, I'm making this all up, but based on my experience with a failed union drive among the grad students at my program, and the way faculty reaction, I think there are a number of things going on: one is that there's a strong association between unions and blue-collar/working class jobs here, which doesn't help encourage faculty to form unions since faculty see themselves as professionals.
Unions are just for blue collar workers? Seriously? Aren't teachers unionised? Nurses? (Blue collar workers too, of course. But not only.)
I'm just -- no *wonder* I had such culture shock. (I have other arguments with the "we're too special to be like the blue-collar workers" idea, but I'll just let that go. I realise you were describing something you've seen, not how you yourself feel about unions or blue collar workers.)
Sing it, sister.
With a separate M.A and Ph.D., I was in grad school for eight years. I was aware that whole time that I wasn't making much money, but it didn't really hit me until I was finishing up that I wasn't saving any money, either. The debt, of course, I knew about as I was incurring it--but I didn't really understand it (how big it would get, how hard it would be to get out from under) until I was getting close to graduating. Where was Suze Orman when I needed her?
When my mother found out how little I was contributing to my 403B (I'm throwing everything I can at the debt), she said, "You can save money by giving up little things. Maybe you can stop getting lattes at Starbucks." I said, "Mother, if I stop going to Starbucks, I will save roughly $3.50 a month." Sheesh! I hardly live an extravagant life. The academic road is a financially difficult one to travel if you don't come from money.
Oh--and I don't know why private schools don't unionize. I teach at a private university, where faculty salaries are an issue. (They're pretty evenly distributed, but there's a lot of compression. And, of course, they're not that high to begin with.) Some of my senior colleagues have told me that, every few years or so, there's talk of unionizing, but they decide that that won't solve their problems. I'd like to see our support staff unionize. I've offered to help (I have some union experience and connections). They get paid jack shit and work so hard!
Wolfangel, my public univ faculty is unionized. But being unionized doesn't equal getting good raises every year. I'm on the collective bargaining team. This year, we got what we consider to be a better salary package than ever before. Four percent of the salary pool goes to raises, and that is broken down into 2% across the board, 1% merit, 1% market equity. ALL of those categories hinge on our most recent annual evaluation, even those called "across the board" and "market equity." For the past couple of years, we've gotten no raise, in part because there's just not a lot of money in public education generally. (And that because it's a Republican right-to-work state.)
And don't get me started on the fact that the vast MAJORITY of my colleagues refuse to pay union dues. They would rather freeload off the rest of us. So I have one colleague on a 12-mo visiting instructor line who pays her 1% dues out of her $22k annual salary, and countless colleagues earning six
figures who refuse to join because the 1% dues are "too expensive." But they l-o-o-o-v-e the academic freedom, tenure, and intellectual property rights that are guaranteed only by the collective bargaining agreement.
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