We never set up college savings accounts for our children. In part, this was because we didn’t have money for dinner fourteen years ago, never mind a college savings account. Even if we had the money, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. I didn’t think that college was going to exist in its present form when my kids were finished with high school. Yeah, Steve and I were recent PhD graduates, teaching in various capacities across Manhattan. We invested ten years in graduate school. But I was widely pessemistic about the future of my chosen career.

Well, I was somewhat wrong. I’m sure that my oldest will attend a college in four years, but I have no regrets about the college savings. There is no way that we could have ever saved enough for a private college. He better work his ass off and get some scholarships. At the same time, I was not entirely wrong. Higher ed is in big trouble.

There’s always been much debate about the benefits of tenure. Critics have said that tenure protects the mediocre and even the incompetent and prevents the infusion of new ideas into academia. At some point, everybody was prepared for a big fight, but it’s not happening. Tenure is slowly eroding. Its demise hastened by administrators who want to save a buck. Tenure positions are being refilled by adjuncts.

In four years, Jonah will mostly likely be taught by a part-time instructor who makes less per hour than a McDonald’s worker. Forget tenure, this instructor won’t have health insurance. From the New York Times:

In the United States, the number of full-time tenured or tenure-track positions increased just 26 percent, to 308,400, in the 36 years from 1975 to 2011, according to the 2012-13 annual report of the American Association of University Professors. Part-time appointments rose more than 300 percent in the period, to 762,000, it said.

I wish that tenure could have died in a more straight-forward manner with intellectual debate and analysis of the pros and cons, but it’s not happening that way.