Academia is exploitative. The financial incentives are a symptom of the bigger problem. Is university career training for industry or for an academic track? It is not made clear to people entering the system, and is often murky to everyone years into a degree. There is encouragement for education for its own sake, there’s encouragement for education for a high paying career, and there’s encouragement to merge these two and enter academia in a professional capacity. There’s often a mountain of undischargeable personal debt behind it.

What people are typically not told is that financially stable academic positions are either political or hard to come by. It’s like professional sports: you can be a pro and just short of top notch and you’ll be playing in the minors for your career, making pennies. This could take the form of endless low-paying postdoctoral gigs, or the crown prize, an associate professorship with little or no benefits and a salary that just lets you scrape by.

In the meantime you are expected to pour your heart and soul into the endeavor. There is some reward in that but it is fleeting, and once you have committed to a career path the momentum to change tracks can be a real obstacle. Academia will suck you dry and demand more. Unless you end up with a tenured position at the end of that, it’s not sustainable unless you have another source of financial backing, like a spouse with a “real job.”

The US doesn’t really value education. Those who do are idealistic or exploitative, sometimes both. You’re buying into a deeply dysfunctional system and should at least go into it with eyes open.

This is a physicist who could likely make much more in the private sector. That's a compromise I've had to make too. I spend my weekdays doing work that I have little interest in and has less chance of improving the human condition, but it let me buy a house and pay the taxes and fees. If I instead choose to do what I'm interested in I'd be lucky to afford renting a room in someone else's house.

I admire the guy for choosing to do more important work and making sacrifices to do it. But I'm not owed a decent salary in return for following my own dreams rather than my employer's dreams. Nobody is.

McKeown should be paid more, without question, but he is a lecturer, not a faculty member. His title and appointment is not as a "Professor". [0]

This is due to the hierarchical ranking system of academic institutions. McKeown's qualifications may be the same as his more highly ranked colleagues, but the tiered system which rewards research does not pay as much for lecturers whose primary assignment is to teach.

[0] https://www.pa.ucla.edu/lecturers.html#:~:text=physics.ucla....

“Technically, I am homeless. I do not have a place of my own. I’m not on any lease,” he says.

That is not 'technically' homeless, or any other kind of homeless. If it was, millions of adults who move back home with their parents would be 'homeless.' Millions of spouses who aren't on the lease or deed would be 'homeless.' Millions of roommates, too -- which is, in fact, what this guy actually is.

I sympathize that the guy is in a tough spot, $70k a year is not a lot to live on in LA. But this kind of self-victimization is not helpful, Professor.

(Brit here). I'm not saying it's a huge salary at all but $70k is around $4500/mo after tax. If his rent was $2500, that leaves $2000 for everything else, which doesn't seem to equal homeless? Paycheck to paycheck probably I guess. What am I missing?

Maybe universities should provide housing for the lower paid teaching staff. In the case of UCLA they have on-campus housing and nearby UCLA-owned apartments for about 13000 people. Let's say they expanded that by 5%. That would be housing for 650 people.

They have around 5500 faculty members and 31000 staff members (although both of these numbers vary quite a bit from source to source), but many of the faculty are in research positions not teaching positions.

UCLA is usually reports to have a student to teacher ration of around 19:1 and around 45000 students, which would suggest about 2400 teachers, so my proposed 5% housing expansion would let them offer housing to about 1/4 of the teachers.

It would probably have be high density housing, much like typical undergraduate housing, but that should be fine. All the people in it would be doing very similar jobs, likely on very similar schedules, and with similar requirements for their home environment. The more similar you are to your neighbors the higher density can go before people want to start killing each other.

It says he is a lecturer. Unfortunately lecturers are not well payed. My understanding is lecturers only teach and don’t bring in research grants. Tenured professors are a different story.

For some reason his videos keep showing up when I watch Youtube Shorts even after I've clicked the various buttons which should suppress them. At some point, people started pointing out the problems in his argument, and he'd... post trolling videos with him responding. And the videos are just static snapshots of twitter exchanges.

Any sympathy I had for him disappeared when he started attacking folks making good points.

Per smartasset.com:

70K salary in Los Angeles - Gross $5,833/mo, filing single, including federal, state, fica, state disability gives a monthly take home of $4,447

So find it hard to believe he is "homeless", seems to be more by choice. And if the take home after paying rent is still too high, do like most others do - get a roommate to share expenses.

All ideas of fair pay aside (which I agree that he should get a raise!)

I don’t understand how he couldn’t afford $2,500 per month on $70,000 per year. Wouldn’t his take home per month be around $4,000-4,500?

Not that it would be easy to live on the remainder necessarily …. But I know I have at one point lived on $2,800 per month while paying $1,200. (In a lower cost of living area ).

There are different ways to be homeless (some not very good, and some worse). I don't know how many people have run the simulation in their heads before, but being a university professor is just about the most favorable set of conditions that you could have for a person who is forced into being (or chooses to be) homeless.

It doesn't look like low pay is the dispositive cause. This looks like it's cost of housing.

I have a simple solution to address housing costs: tax the hell out of rentseeking. We should be shooting for a scenario where, five years out starting from right now, a Schedule E filer who owns additional residential properties where they are not an occupant should only be able to net 10% in 2028 for the same gross in 2023.

Technically he’s a lecturer not a professor. Generally lecturers are treated like trash.

Low pay isn't the problem. There's nowhere $70k shouldn't enable you to afford rent. Setback requirements, and single use & single family zoning are the problem.

Here is another perspective, for balance:

https://x.com/DrBrianKeating/status/1845528361013231808

He should get the message that they don't need him there. He should quit and get a real job in industry that pays 100-200k. It may require him to move, but not be homeless.

This comic has sat in my head for a long time: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/college-level-mathematics

It’s now outdated, and the numbers are worse

What a bogus piece. He's not a Professor --- he's an entry-level Lecturer (started career there a year ago).

Homeless due to not having roommates like college students.. Too bad that he though he was in a higher caste of profession...

How is he homeless? Can someone break down where that 70k goes? It's about $5.8k/month gross.

Wonder how much UCLA administrators get paid compared to faculty?

I am no astrophysicist, but he notes:

    “Hi everyone, my name is Daniel, and I’m an astrophysics professor at UCLA. I’m only being paid $70,000 for this academic year,” McKeown says in the video.
 
    McKeown, listed as a lecturer on UCLA’s website, says he had to move out of his apartment because he could no longer afford the rent.

    McKeown says his rent was $2,500 a month. According to RentCafe, the average rent is $3,700 in Westwood.

(70000-(70000*0.36))/12.0=3733.33

Ok he is left with 3733.33-2500=1233.33 a month, that is BRUTAL, but I know people that live on less than that after a home mortgage and car note.

Again, I have no idea of his situation. Maybe student loans, maybe a car note, medical expenses, etc, but to state out loud that you have probably 1.2k a month after rent and can not possibly live without _a hundred grand_ extra (what he is trying to raise... which is EIGHT THOUSAND A MONTH EXTRA) seems a bit, I am not sure, overreacting? I am just conflicted about this story. I have really good friends that would do a hulluva lot for a 70k job with a 2.5k rent, but at the same time, it is true we are paying professors (and educators in general) far too little.

Is this just to make a statement maybe?

As someone who recently left an industry job to teach full-time at a community college, I have mixed feelings about the situation of this physics lecturer. I don’t want to dismiss the difficulties that many people, including academics, face in the housing market. In places like Los Angeles and Silicon Valley it’s rough for those having to pay market rates for housing unless they have extremely high incomes.

However, I feel that the lecturer, who started his position at UCLA last year, didn’t do enough homework regarding academic salaries. $70,000 for a non-tenured lecturer is normal, maybe above average, and in fact there are many tenure-track assistant professors who make about the same. To add, UCLA is in a very expensive area. He will have to compete against well-heeled people who want to live within close proximity to some of the nation’s wealthiest areas, such as Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. A physics lecturer simply can’t compete against Hollywood.

In addition, a $70,000 annual salary means that he could qualify for a rental no more than $1944 per month due to the standard 3x the rent requirement a lot of California landlords have. A cursory search on Craigslist shows plenty of one-bedroom apartments in Los Angeles County that are within this budget. Granted, they may not be the nicest complexes in the nicest neighborhoods, and they may require a commute, but the Los Angeles metro area does have extensive public transportation, and nobody goes into academia expecting a luxurious lifestyle on an academic salary. An academic who wants to make serious money needs to take advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities outside the institution.

In addition, there are plenty of grad students and postdocs making less than $70,000 who attend schools like UCLA that are in very expensive areas. Once again, I don’t want to dismiss the challenges they have. I myself lived in Santa Cruz County for over a decade and I know firsthand the challenge of being a grad student at UC Santa Cruz dealing with the area’s notoriously difficult housing market.

But I have a feeling we’re being withheld useful information about his finances. Does he have massive student loans impacting his budget? Does he have other obligations such as taking care of family members? Why wasn’t he able to take advantage of UCLA’s faculty housing?

I just feel that this guy didn’t do enough homework about the realities of being an academic, especially one living in a very expensive area. I’m an academic in Silicon Valley and I’m fully aware of the tradeoffs of choosing this lifestyle over industry. Yes, I’d like a bigger home closer to work, and I have no idea how I’d raise a family (though I’m single now so I don’t need to worry). But at the same time I enjoy the freedom I have in academia; I have far more research freedom as a community college instructor than I did as an industry researcher. I also love teaching and guiding students.

He can get another job most scientists need to stock shelves or something puts their phd in perspective

Man with highly educated background ignores basic economic situation that also affects millions of other people.

Slow news day.