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Comment by cgeier | Hacker News Reader

I agree with where you end up ("Now try buying a house with that average job. You can't, not even with years of work.") but I can't follow the complete reasoning?

Why would getting tenure be harder nowadays? If it really is, probably because there are more people getting a PhD in the first place (because more people are going to university in the first place).

But perhaps this is also somewhat of a tangent to your main point.

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> Why would getting tenure be harder nowadays?

It seems to be partly volume but also that universities are very reluctant to give tenure. If you're a younger academic you're probably working at multiple universities on short term contract. My wife is taking some university courses and one of her professors works at 4 different schools to make ends meet.

Yet universities are at an all time high for administrator cost and bloat. You have to ask where the money is going.

Tenure is just one of many forms of dependable income that is harder to get now that it was a few decades ago. I suppose it's because there is more competition: more people at university in the first place, more students per professor, and people who are profs started as students. Universities have also figured out that they've got you by the balls once you decide you want to try the tenure track, so you end up doing a lot of postdoc before you get that prize.

I sound like Karl Marx himself when I say it, but it's the capitalists extracting as much work as possible from the helpless workers. (I don't think I'm normally even on the left, but here we are.)

I'm as far from a marxist as you can get. But we right now have this unholy union of capitalism and weird cultural norms, together enforced by the state. Example: instead of people having generational households and wealth, we're forced to ship kids out at 18 and force them to start from 0$. It's the cultural norm for people to save just enough for retirement so that there is nothing left for kids. People buy a house that's huge, instead of a smaller one and then buy one for the kids when they leave house. And other countless such examples. Cumulatively it means that "something" was extracted away from humans and transformed into fungible monetary things that the "evil" capitalists can insert themselves into.

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