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Surprise! Money happens again

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Yesterday while I was laboring through a client’s large project, in comes an e-mail from the dean of academic affairs at the college where I’m teaching adjunct for handsful of pennies and no benefits. She reminds me that I’m supposed to make an appointment for web development coaching with one of their online curriculum staff to discuss the feature writing course I’m supposed to teach online in the second eight weeks of fall semester (done that—great experience! This place has the most incredible staff!). In the boilerplate list she’s sent is a mention that I’m supposed to be paid for the course during the development phase, half upfront and half when development is done.

Huh?

Well, being a veteran of GDU, I figure that means they’re not going to pay the usual $2,400 for the three-credit course. This looks a great deal to me like a reason to cut the pay for teaching online: if you don’t have to show up in the classroom, why should you be paid the $50 an hour one gets for entertaining students on the campus?

I need that $2,400. This fall I’ll only be teaching two sections, and the full pay for both will not be enough for me to get by on comfortably. Any less, and I’ll be in deep trouble.

The main reason I dropped back from three to two sections next fall was that teaching six sections this year plus freelancing and blogging will put me over the Social Security earnings limit. The way I understand what two Social Security factotums have said is that to extract the 50% tax on income that exceeds the limit, the government withholds an entire SS check. From that, the amount they figure you owe is extracted. You get the rest back…but not until the following January!

Well, I can’t do without a Social Security check for a month, much less for several months. That’s a pretty stiff penalty for daring to earn a living.

However, what I’ll earn from teaching two sections will barely keep beans on the table. There’ll be no more frolics at J. Jill for the rest of the year…or even at Goodwill. And one unplanned expense, even a minor one, will dig into the emergency fund.

So, it’s going to be a difficult balancing act. I can’t do without full pay for one of the two three-credit courses I’m slated to teach. This news from the dean promised to knock me off the highwire.

Forthwith, I e-mailed to inquire: Soooo… How much less are they going to pay for the course?

They’re not going to pay less at all. What she was saying is that the community college district pays adjunct faculty for their time time to develop a course! And they pay the entire amount of the contract stipend for teaching the course—not instead of but on top of the pay for teaching. In other words, I will earn twice as much for teaching the online course as I would have for teaching an ordinary face-to-face course.

Holy mackerel! When we say “money happens,” we’re not kidding. This summer, instead of having no income except Social Security, I’ll have enough extra to carry me through the months when utility bills hover in the stratosphere. It’s far from what I’ve been earning teaching three sections, but it’s just about the amount extra that I figured I’d need to get through the summer without diving into the emergency fund.

And averaged out over the whole year, it in fact does provide annual pay equivalent to teaching six sections.

You realize how unheard-of this is. GDU would never in a million years pay anyone, especially not adjunct faculty, a stipend for “developing” a course. That’s course prep—it’s part of the job. It’s why I try to get each semester’s prep done before the previous semester ends. When I built the West campus’s first online course in “writing for the professions” (read: “freshman comp for juniors and seniors”), I spent the entire summer working for no pay. Three months of eight-hour days for zero dollah. And zero appreciation, too. Not so much as a f***-you-very-much. That was one of many events and conditions that led to my deep disaffection for My Beloved Former Employer.

I’d figured to spend two weeks slapping the course together and then table it. In fact, since the course doesn’t start until October—it’s an eight-week session—I planned to put off working on it until the fall and use this summer for building FaM and writing a book. This development changes that: if the district is really going to pay me (!) to prepare this course, I suppose I’m going to have to do a decent job of it. That means (gasp) actually work.

Of course, it also means I’m going to crash through the earnings limitation.

Upon reflection, I wonder why I’m worrying about that. Who cares if Social Security withholds a munificent $900? Over $16,000 is sitting in my emergency fund.

On the one hand, I don’t want to diddle away that money on living expenses. The budget is so tight that one good-sized house repair or car repair bill will gouge a hole out of that emergency fund. That stash is there to cover a major emergency that puts me in a position where I can’t work: a car accident, a heart attack, a stroke, cancer…all highly likely at this time and in this place. It is, in effect, a year’s worth of disability insurance.

On the other hand, the emergency fund has grown by almost $2000 since the first of the year, because I’m not spending all my income. I can afford to forego a month’s Social Security “benefit.” (Some of us would call that a “paycheck,” it being a payback of earned wages confiscated over a lifetime in the salt mines.) Most of the money will be returned in January, anyway. Even if it’s not returned, it won’t make much difference.

Money happens. And it’s happening at a good time—when I need it.

The Cat’s-claw That Ate Philadelphia

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Good grief! This winter’s El Niño rains have so over-excited the cat’s claw that it’s decided to take over the swimming pool.

The hanging garden that inhabits the back wall and adds about three feet to its height—quite spectacular at certain times of the year—has sent out a battalion of tendrils, which are marching steadily toward the pool. This one is especially bodacious. It’s grown about an inch a day, and today it made it into the water.

Amazingly, the chlorine doesn’t seem to be harming its growing end. It has a certain weird charm, but it can’t be allowed to keep that up. Besides not being very good for the pool’s chemical balance, cat’s claw is named for its sharp claw-like appendages with which it grips rock and masonry. It can do a fair amount of damage to masonry, and so one would not like to have it residing on the CoolDeck, which is porous, fragile, and prone to staining. As soon as I crawl out from under the avalanche of work that’s landed on my head, I’ll have to get out there with a pair of scissors and cut the plant back.

Meanwhile, it’s mildly entertaining just to let it grow and see what it’ll do.

Uh-oh…

Serendipitous Stock Market Fluke…i think…

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So the Dow is up over 400 points today, after last week’s bizarre drop. This worked out nicely: the rollover I made from GDU’s 403(b) to the big, professionally managed IRA arrived in Stellar’s precincts just as stocks were headed south. With any luck, the boys will have bought a lot of stuff on the cheap which is now worth a ton of money.

With any luck. But…

But I don’t like it. I don’t like volatility in general, and this particular spasm of volatility is hugely whim-whammish. Volatility tends to presage pullbacks, slowdowns, not-getting-rich periods. Yea, verily, losing pretend-money periods. Check out this interesting podcast, which pretty much reflects my sense. “Like he said.”

Yesh. A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out how to get around the state’s prohibition on moving my money (my money, goddammit) from the university’s 403(b) plan to my IRA, where a broad spectrum of wisely calculated investments in blue chips vastly outearns the staid mutual funds that have held 16 years of retirement contributions.

As you may recall, the bureaucrat who directs the state’s RASL program (whereby the state ponies up almost $20,000 worth of unused sick leave earnings over a three-year-period) announced that if I rolled my 403(b) savings she would declare me “not retired” and deny payment of this valuable benefit. Since my traditional IRA has been known to earn as much as $8,000 in a month—but more typically makes about $1,800 to $2,000—we’re talking about sacrificing a substantial increase in potential extra earnings, probably enough to wash the 20 grand of RASL. Intensely annoying.

Well. Duh! The trick is to leave enough cash in the 403(b) to cover the drawdown until February 2012, when the last of the three RASL payments will be issued. That, in the large scheme of things, isn’t very much: only about $11,000.

So I emptied TIAA-CREF, which still held a little in an annuity that I mistakenly thought could not be rolled into Vanguard (which the university swapped into Fidelity when it dropped the Vanguard option a year after offering it), and then I rolled all but 11 grand out of Fidelity to the big IRA. This moved about 155 grand into the better-performing instrument. The bulk of that arrived in the cash fund last week.

Naturally, I was not happy to see the market take an all-time record-breaking dive. Now I feel better, at least temporarily. But I remain wary.

Nor was I pleased when the latest factotum I reached at Fidelity remarked that a lot of university retirees use this strategy to rescue funds from underperforming 403(b)s. How many times did I discuss this with how many other corporate bureaucrats there? How many of them told me they’d never heard of the State of Arizona’s you-can’t-take-it-with-you rule? And how much would I have been helped if the first guy I reached there had suggested doing this, rather than my  having to figure it out on my own over three months of cogitation?

Oh, well.

We’re in the money, we’re in the money
We’ve got a lot of what it takes to get along.*

…for the nonce.

*The Gold Digger’s Song, by Harry Warren, 1933

Line-drying the Laundry

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What with the dryer overheating the other day and 87 gerjillion errands and chores to do yesterday and today—no way can I stay home and watch that thing for two hours while it thumps through two loads of clothes, a load of sheets, and a load of furry dog bedding—I decided to revert to my favorite clothes dryer: a rope line strung between a couple of hooks on the rafters.

Secretly, I much prefer to line-dry the laundry. Why? Because it’s quiet! A clothes line does not nag you by buzzing raucously at you every ten minutes. Nor does it bump, thump, overheat, or use electricity. I hate buzzers. I love silence.

And, truth to tell, I rather enjoy getting things to happen off the grid. 😉

It’s hot and breezy here today. The underwear that came out of the first washer load was dry by the time the second load was done. Even the bluejeans are now about dry, so there’ll be plenty of room on the makeshift clotheslines to hang the sheets that are running through the wash right this minute.

In the duh! department, today I happened to notice the score upon score of cuphooks Satan and Proserpine drove into the rafters—evidently they were seriously into Christmas decorations. Finally, after—what? five years?—in this house, it dawned on me that those little gems were made to hang clothes on.

I use plastic coathangers, because they don’t tangle up the way wire ones do, nor do they seem to breed in the dark of a closet. At least, not as fast. Because plastic doesn’t rust, there’s no reason you can’t shake the wrinkles out of a shirt, fresh out of the washer, and hang it right up to dry. If you arrange the shoulder seam along the top of the hanger, you avoid getting those hanger bumps. And clothes hangers can dangle from the rafter’s Christmas-light cuphooks, obviating the need for clotheslines or clearing your makeshift line for sheets.

Pants can be folded neatly and either hung on one hanger if the day is hot and dry, or put up on two hangers, each pant leg over a separate hanger. They dry much faster the second way. Alternatively, you can use one of those hangers with two clips, and just clip them up by the waistband. Knit shirts can be laid out flat on the floor to dry, which is better for them than running them through a dryer.

I expected to have to run the new linens that came from J. Jill through the dryer briefly, with the heat off, to shake out the wrinkles. But no! To my amazement, the little orange shirt and the beige Capris (which I did clip up by the waistband) hung dry beautifully. They look better than they did in the store! They don’t even need to be ironed.

Towels, as we know, can line-dry up like cardboard. I personally am not fond of stiff towels. However, either of two strategies will solve that problem.

• After the towels are dry, toss them in the clothes dryer for about five to eight minutes.
or
• Get all the detergent out. And we do mean ALL the detergent.

It’s amazing how much detergent remains in clothes after the rinse cycle. One reason for that, as we’ve seen, is that most of us dump way too much detergent into the washer. Using about half the recommended amount will get your clothes just as clean and give you a chance of getting the stuff out. Another reason, I suspect, is that washers are really not very efficient at rinsing out soap.

Determined that my favorite bath towel would come off the line soft and fluffy, this afternoon I ran that load through the rinse cycle a second time. Great flows of suds came out, just as much as the first time around. (My dryer hose empties into a work sink, which Satan installed over the former washer drainpipe. Don’t ask!) Then I ran it through the entire wash cycle with no detergent. More great flows of suds. Only after a third go-through in plain water did the water start to run out of the washer with relatively few suds. At that point I gave up. We’ll see how it turns out when it’s dry!

If you iron your cotton outfits, line-drying clothes that were washed in hard water produces an effect roughly like a light starch job. Pressing line-dried clothes gives you a crisp, sharp finish. I love the effect!

Does line-drying your clothes save much on utility bills? Apparently not. One source suggests the cost of drying a typical load of laundry in an electric dryer is 30 to 40 cents; 15 to 20 cents in a gas dryer. Today I washed four loads, saving at most $1.60. Since I don’t wash the sheets every weekend (just don’t have that many hours in the day!), usually I’d be doing two loads a week: 80 cents worth of drying.

Hmm…  Let’s say I washed the sheets and dog bedding every two weeks. That would be 26 weeks at $1.60 and 26 weeks at 80 cents, for a total cost of $62.40 a year.

Well, saving $62.40 over the course of a year is very nice. But in the large scheme of things, pretty negligible.

The real benefits of line-drying your laundry are worth a great deal more than a few pennies here, a few pennies there: the pleasure of watching clean, fresh sheets billow in the breeze, the stress relief that comes from excusing yourself from mechanical harassment and allowing yourself to tend to the dry clothes at your convenience, the wonderful all-of-outdoors scent of clothes and bedding dried in the open air. What luxuries!

Come to think of it, though, this strategy could let me put off having to buy a new dryer for a year or so. That is something, spending-wise. I about fainted dead away when I saw the prices at Lowe’s and Home Depot yesterday. The appliance manufacturers have, as expected, edged the price of dryers up to match the extravagant cost of the new, outrageously overpriced front-loading washers. Only a couple of models were still in the $350 range (add sales tax and we’re talking $400). Most of them ranged from $500 to $1,000.

Give me a break! A dryer is a perforated drum with air blowing through it. It isn’t even worth $350! What can you possibly do to a perforated drum with air blowing through it to drive its price up to five hundred bucks?

Okay, so if we add the cost of a new dryer, now we’re talking savings: $350 + 9.3% tax + $50 delivery + $62.40 savings on the electric bill = $494.95.

Nice!


A Degree from a Proprietary School? Is it worth the cost?

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Reader Robin commented on Thursday’s post, “It Never Rains but It Pours,”

Off topic, but I watched Frontline’s investigative piece on corporate higher education (i.e., The University of Phoenix among others) last night and found it dismaying. Couldn’t help wondering how you felt about this burgeoning overlap of academia, corporate America and Wall Street.

This program aired on May 4, 2010. Anyone who’s interested in the state of higher education, who’s thinking about pursuing a degree at the University of Phoenix, Argosy, or a similar institution, or who has a son or daughter contemplating a program in one of these schools should watch it.

Graduation ceremony at Oxford

@ Robin: The University of Phoenix is huge. At 450,000 students it is now the largest university in Arizona, Michael Crow‘s pretensions to empire notwithstanding. It’s popular among people who want a degree for no other reason than to get a job or a promotion, because most or all of the coursework is online, few gen-ed courses are required, and the courses are very easy.

A friend is teaching an online course through UofP. Pay is even worse than in the community colleges. To give you an idea, at Paradise Valley Community College I earn $2400 for sixteen weeks of work. The course she teaches is a watered-down version of freshman comp. The amount of attention it demands is so slight she manages to hold down a full-time editorial job at Arizona State University, a part-time job tending bar, and a substantial freelance contract from a huge textbook publisher and still “teach” UofP courses.

UofP classes are canned courses: management gives the instructor a ready-made syllabus and a ready-made set of assignments with ready-made rubrics. Then they sit the instructor down and explain exactly how the course is to be conducted and how the assignments are to be graded. So there’s no room for flexibility, no room to communicate any research expertise, no room for much of anything. It is, in short, as a can of Green Giant peas to a basket of garden peas fresh off the vine. However, there are some reputable programs out there, such as DeVry’s business management program; you just have to sift through the suspect schools. Reputable sources such as U.S. News‘s “Best Colleges 2012” review online and part-time programs of this nature.

I do think this strategy represents the wave of the future for higher education, and probably in time for secondary education, too. Although mounting courses online is expensive, once you have it all in the can, running the operation is cheap: you don’t have to hire tenurable faculty, you don’t have to provide office space and computers or any other support for faculty, you don’t have to build classrooms. You don’t even need full-time faculty at all. Hence no expensive benefits.

And students love online courses. When I first started teaching online—I created the first fully online course in my college—I was astonished at the number of people who swarmed to get in. Offer a course online, and it fills in two days. So, these enterprises are potential engines of great wealth for their proprietors, some of whom are already billionaires.

Indeed, Arizona State University President Crow so likes the model that he regards these proprietary schools as direct competition and is moving to go head-to-head with them. Arizona State offers a number of online degrees—you can now get an MBA with ASU’s relatively prestigious name attached without ever entering a brick-and-mortar classroom. Online courses are offered in almost every department, and some of them have no caps. One adjunct writing instructor was assigned an upper-division course in Writing for the Professions that ended up with 400 students in one section! Under those conditions, of course, the quality of education students receive from a state university will be no better than what is described in the Frontline documentary.

Few employers care where rank-and-file white-collar or even middle-management workers get their degrees. I know people who have obtained master’s and doctoral degrees through proprietary online “universities” and then walked into high-paying jobs. One of my former students, who can’t write her way out of a paper bag, wouldn’t recognize a comma splice if it bit her on the ankle, and knows nothing about literature or writing, got herself an M.A. from a London-based for-profit online school and forthwith landed a full-time job teaching English at a Maricopa County college, where average salaries range from $63,000 to $68,000. Another got an online Ed.D. and was promoted at Arizona State to assistant dean, a job paid upwards of $70,000, depending on your department.

On the other hand, obviously if you’re training to be a nurse and your clinical is at a day-care center, as four of the former students of one proprietary school report, you’re not going to get a job. And just as obviously, if you aim for an elite career in business or government, you need a real degree from an elite school. You don’t see any U.S. presidents or cabinet members who graduated from Arizona State University or the University of Phoenix. But if you’re just going to be a working schlep, counting the days to retirement? Meh…maybe. Still, if it’s six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, why not take an online program at far less cost from a public school?

The problem is, these proprietary outfits pass themselves off as “private” schools and charge commensurately for tuition. Undergraduate tuition for an online degree at Grand Canyon University, which is mentioned in the documentary, ranges from $250 to $415 a credit hour: given a typical 120 hours for an undergraduate degree, a B.A. at this place could set you back $30,000 to $49,800! This will leave you strapped for cash, deep in debt, and with no guarantee of a job.

Graduate tuition rates at private nonproprietary schools are even higher. Over a year ago, a young friend of my son graduated with a master’s of international management from the Thunderbird School for Global Management, a school that has a decent reputation. Payments on her student loans are $1,400 a month. She’s never been able to get a job. She had to move back in with her mother and is now earning under-the-table cash by harvesting marijuana seasonally for a California grower. And that’s with a degree from a high-ranking private school.

Proprietary schools, which are anything but high-ranking, can be enormous rips. The quality of their education is highly suspect. At one point I had a client who hired me to turn her dissertation into English; she was pursuing a doctorate at Argosy University. Her dissertation was extremely weak. Sections of the document that made no sense and reflected no credible research were accepted, and it soon became clear that her chair was simply pushing her paper through to move her out of the program. Unable to get into Arizona State’s graduate program because of her inadequate preparation, she was so anxious to obtain a doctorate—largely, she admitted, for reasons of ego—that she was willing to pay extravagantly for it, and to hire someone else to rewrite her dissertation under the guise of “editing” it. This woman was going to end up with a degree that would leave her no better trained or educated than when she started and would qualify her for nothing.

Students who seek vocational degrees tailored to help them land specific kinds of jobs would do far better to attend community colleges and universities. Many decent public schools now offer a broad choice of online courses and even entire programs conducted online. If your grades and test scores are too low to get you into a university at the outset, two years at a community college will generally qualify you for entry at the junior level. Compare a community college’s $71-per-credit-hour cost with Argosy’s breathtaking $510. A fully online undergraduate program at Arizona State will cost you $3,980 for twelve credit hours, or $331.66 per credit hour. Take yourself in person to the campus, and the cost is a bit lower, $3,423 for anything over 7 credit hours; for a 12-credit semester, that works out to $285.25 per credit hour.

Costs are still very high, but nothing like the gouge from a proprietary school. And an established public college or university does have a tradition of legitimate teaching and faculty who are paid decent salaries to teach, do research, and share knowledge creatively with the next generation.

That is different—way different—from what you’ll get from a course that comes out of a can.

Gimme that ole-time real food…

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The other day when I was over at M’hijito’s house, he served up a couple of artichokes with some Trader Joe’s organic mayonnaise. Out of curiosity, I read the label. And to my amazement: no sugar!

Hallelujah! Next time I was in the vicinity of TJ’s, I ran in and bought a jar for myself. It’s the first time in years I’ve seen real mayonnaise come out of a bottle. And the flavor? Exactly like mayo used to taste, back in the Pleistocene when men were men, dinosaurs were dinosaurs, and food was really food.

Yeah. I know. Best Foods—Hellman’s in the East—claims to dish up “real mayonnaise.” And once they did make real mayo. But…read the label. It’s full of sugar. Has been for decades; even more so since 2006, when they changed the recipe.

What happened was Miracle Whip. This vile concoction, a hangover from the Great Depression, was peddled during the 1950s with a great flurry of publicity and perky new-fangled TV advertising. Yum yum! I remember the girlish excitement around the stuff. All of a sudden, everyone was dolloping it onto their Jell-O salads. Next thing you knew, you couldn’t find a sandwich with a schmear of genuine mayonnaise on it. Everyone wanted the sweet, gunky Miracle Whip. To compete, Best Foods was forced to sweeten its own mayonnaise. That’s my theory, anyway.

Mayo is supposed to be a savory condiment, not sweet goop.

Consequently, I haven’t bought mayo in years. If I need it, I make it. But it’s a hassle, so most of the time I do without. So I was pleased to find some real mayo in a jar.

What is it about Corporate Foodarama that it’s so determined to cram sugar down our throats? Have you noticed how many things that aren’t sweet and aren’t supposed to be sweet are doped with sugar or corn syrup? Things like rye bread, for example. Rye bread doesn’t need sugar to rise, and it doesn’t need sugar to taste like rye bread. There’s absolutely zero point in dosing a loaf of rye bread with high-fructose corn syrup.

The other day, preparatory to starting back on Atkins, I bought a package of tasty-looking bratwurst at Costco. Naively, I failed to read the ingredients until after I got home and busted open the plastic wrap, tossed a couple in a frying pan, and watched caramel form on the bottom of the hot pan as the brats cooked. Grab the package, read. Less than halfway down the list: corn syrup. So all those things had to go into the freezer until after the ten pounds are gone from the belly.

Corn syrup. In the brats. Eeeew! Why??? Brats don’t contain sugar. Or honey. Or corn syrup. What makes them taste sweetish is mace, allspice, and marjoram. Actually, the predominant flavor in Costco’s brats was salt. Lots of salt.

Are we really so divorced from our food that we don’t even know what food is supposed to taste like? Does Big Food really have to dose every bite we eat with sugar to get us to swallow it? Well…probably, given what’s in some of that stuff.

I was entertained to discover this morning that my fellow food cranks and I have made the Big Time: Nicholas Kristof reports that the President’s Cancer Panel, “the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream,” is about to issue a report urging Americans to seek out organic foods and avoid the pollutants that are ubiquitous in everything we eat and drink. Contemplating the 300 chemicals that have been found in the umbilical cord blood of newborn infants, the panel’s members remark that “to a disturbing extent, babies are born pre-polluted.”

No kidding?

The panel recommends that you and I practice caution about what we ingest and rub on our skin. They suggest filtering water and storing it in glass, not plastic, containers; buying organic foods when possible; avoiding meats that are cooked well-done; and checking radon levels in our homes.

Okay, we don’t eat radon.

But we do eat sugar. To my mind it’s just one of a whole passel of undesirable chemicals that pollute our food and our beverages.