I'm an adjunct, and I've written about various aspects of being an adjunct (e.g. here: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/12/22/how-do-you-know-when-youre...). But I'll add that there is a very good "excuse" why universities treat adjuncts how they do: because they can. When people stop signing up for grad school and/or to be adjuncts, universities will have to offer better pay and/or conditions.
Until that happens, universities won't. Markets are clearing.
Yep. When you flood two generations with easy college money and tell them they have to go or they're a failure, don't be surprised when a disproportionate number of people are exposed to post graduate options and they seem like their best choice.
Even so, stuff like this reminds me not to take too romantic a view of "non-profit" higher education.
It already is happening. So many graduates see the higher level of skill they have and the joke of a salary that adjuncts make and 'nope-ing' out into industry. Academia is going to starve itself of it's best performers by low pay and horrible standards for adjuncts and tenure track positions alike.
> I'll add that there is a very good "excuse" why universities treat adjuncts how they do: because they can.
That's very true, and current and potential adjuncts should wisen up. That being said, just because you can take advantage of someone doesn't mean you should.
My mother is an adjunct math professor at three universities in the Western NY area. She teaches 7 classes to support the family while she's also going for her PhD (she's got like a 3.98 GPA or something btw).
The thing that gets me is that we look around and the campuses have millions to put up for new buildings and infrastructure and sports, etc. But here they can't give my mother a full time job with benefits.
Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.
1. Enrollment
2. Retention
3. Graduation with a job.
Enrollment is priority one, so they need nice campuses to get you in the door, good facilities to entice you to come. They'll advertise small class sizes with individualized attention because the current generation loves to hear that. (Of course this means they need more faculty to be there in the room.)
Graduation with a job is second because they need to show that people come out of the school. This of course becomes marketing material for #1.
Retention is the one they leave up to the departments and faculty.
My wife works in primary-age education, and is fiendishly smart and academic, with a degree from arguably the best university in the world, again with a tilt towards maths.
She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.
Schools are able to hire people like my wife at below her "market" value because you don't need to be anywhere near as smart as my wife to be a teacher, and because there are couples like us who can walk away from more money for the improved lifestyle.
I agree with your main point, but mentioning new construction is something of a non-sequitur because that funding usually comes from donors.
We might be able to make the case that the donations don't cover the ongoing cost of operating the new buildings, but at least at my institution, the new buildings are usually energy-efficient replacements for old ones.
But yeah, the whole thing is nutty: a few years ago at a Chamber of Commerce function, one of our extremely wealthy doners (you probably know of them) told the audience members that they should be providing a certain minimal level of funding to athletics, even if it meant reducing their normal contribution to the academic side.
>Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.
Oh definitely. Admittedly, if you're an undergrad right now, a certain percentage of you are expected to fail, each and every year, because (it's assumed) you're just stupid or lazy.
I'm faculty at a regional university in the U.S. Our enrollment is dropping by 5% a year, and short term positions are becoming the norm. Tenure track positions are risky in that once you've got somebody with tenure, it's difficult to get rid of them (intentionally). Short term positions give universities flexibility. We are not a Harvard or Yale with billions of dollars in endowments. Tuition is 80% of revenue, and our existence in 20 years is in no way guaranteed.
I don't know how many universities are flush with cash and are just being stingy by using adjuncts, but where I work (small regional university), we have intense budget pressure. We'd have to raise tuition a lot to cover the cost of converting adjust to tenure-track positions.
I don't like how adjuncts are treated, but seeing the problem from our administration's point of view, I know why we have so many adjuncts.
As a former adjunct I can understand how you feel. That said, I agree in many ways with the article, you're also not seeing the budgetary perspective with a structure of 1960's university and only the 1990+ structure which probably currently exists at your school. That is a pre ponderous amount of administrators that used to not exist are eating a significant amount of the total cost of operation. If employee pay is the biggest constraint, the first look should be towards the administrators and not the educators. The educators are and should be the focus.
They're dropping for various reasons, I'm sure. But first and foremost because a bachelor's degree isn't worth anything anymore. Both my sister and my father have Bachelor's degrees and my dad's a janitor and my sister's a nurse. Granted, a nurse isn't that bad, but cleaning up people's feces on top of everyone in the practice being against her going to school to become a doctor (so she doesn't have to "ask permission" or clean up after people anymore) is a disgrace. And for my dad -- he's working with the lowest of the low. It's just awful that someone can bury themselves in 100k of debt to barely make more than minimum wage and clean up shit.
If you intern as a CS major, you will probably be paid somewhere between $10-$25/hr. If you intern in Hollywood, you will make a nominal amount.
Does anyone find this surprising? There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all. On the other hand, there is a finite demand for movies and a very large number of people who would like to do it.
Many people would like to be professors. Unsurprisingly, this depresses the wage. What else is to be expected?
Adjunct salaries will rise and/or more tenured professorships will be offered when either consumer demand rises or supply falls. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
>There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all.
I certainly find that statement surprising, considering that most of the programming work already done is economically useless. Unicorn-balloon inflation is not a real job.
There are many good points in this article, and I agree about the general gist that adjuncts are not well-served in this situation. That being said, I think that the article sets up an artificial binary between adjuncts and tenured faculty. There is a whole third leg of employment that is contingent full-time teaching. That is to say, one-year professorships, and lecturer/instructor/preceptor positions that employ people full-time, but without assurance of continued employment in the year to come (indeed, often with an explicitly NON-renewable contract). There is a large chunk of academic teaching from faculty who make an okay (not great) income for a year, but have no security for years to come, and are forced to go through an extremely grueling application process year after year (see this article from Slate.com on more about that process: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/09/how_do_...).
The "visiting assistant professor" treadmill is definitely in the same badness league as adjuncting. Another trap is the "tenure track positions" where no one actually gets tenure, and they end up being re-advertised every three years.
I used to be a tenured professor (senior lecturer) and while universities treat adjuncts badly they also don't treat tenured professors any better. While the job has a lot of good points respect from your employer is not one of them.
At least here in Australia tenure really doesn't exist anymore. If they want to get rid of you they just wait for the next departmental reshuffle (these seem to occur every couple of years) and eliminate your position.
Paying them more would increase tuition. Maybe colleges should shift the funds from elsewhere but that not as simple as just paying them more.
What is never talked about in these articles about the plight of the adjunct is that adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig. Almost charity work. You are supposed to do it for the experience. I'd had many adjuncts at northwestern when I was getting my law degree. They were partners at major law firms. They mad millions a year. They would have done this job for free. Maybe they did.
My wife considered adjuncting at her old college for the same reason.
It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.
Could you might address some of the points raised in the article? They seem to be at odds with what you wrote.
For example, you wrote "adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig", while the article suggests that these position were originally for '“the housewives of higher education” (eg, the wife of a man that the university wanted to recruit), or for female instructors where the university did not allow female professors. These were low status positions, quite different from the "fun side gig" you says it was meant for.
You point to Northwestern's law school as if it were the appropriate model for how adjunct teaching should be, and comment that many if not most made millions per year. However, the article says "31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line". What percentage of the 250+ adjunct professors in Northwestern's law school department live at or near the federal poverty line? Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?
You write 'But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.' The article also addresses that point rather extensively, starting with "But apart from feeling sorry for the underpaid faculty, why should we care that college professors have the same job conditions as day laborers, fast-food workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, or home-care aides? They did, after all, choose to pursue a career in higher ed." and ending some eight paragraphs later.
Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize, but 'While some schools like Georgetown have accepted unions without too much fuss, others have adopted the tactics long used by anti-labor businesses: falsely accusing labor officials of earning exorbitant salaries, hiring law firms that specialize in union busting, and firing those involved in the campaign.' Instead, they are "willing" to stay for the short term, because in the long term they help themselves, others like them, the students they teach, and the humanist values that a college is suppose to embrace. (All points that the article touches on.)
These differences between your comment and the article suggest that your understanding of the adjunct teaching issue is not well aligned with what most people mean when they talk about this topic.
Adjuncts are supposed to fill in the gaps when there are more classes than can be taught by the full time faculty. The real problem is that as admissions increase, rather than creating more tenure track jobs, they create an adjunct position for 1/3 the pay, and use the other 2/3 to create an administrative position. From the article:
"Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."
"It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way."
The problem is that the universities do not advertise it that way. They don't take thousands of dollars from parents and tell them "thanks, hopefully we will find a volunteer to teach your kid by the time class starts next week".
Think about it like this: when the Senior Research Fellow from DuPont (back from when the fabled Experimental Station was still a thing) who is teaching one really good graduate level course at Penn as adjunct, when this guy walks up to the Chair, saying that his office space shouldn't be cut or he won't be back, the Chair will listen. When the adjunct at Tumbleweed State College who is teaching 3 courses of Gen. Chem. says the same, the chair will laugh.
The ones who get cheated is of course the students. They will get a credential instead of an education because no adjunct is going to get into an argument about teaching, and you can't force anyone to take the credential serious.
It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.
This sounds a lot like the argument that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage. Well, whether it is or it isn't, the current system (minimum wage or adjuncts) isn't working for a lot of people, so something has to change.
No, it wouldn't. Universities have plenty of money to pay living wages and not abuse their workers. It is a national disgrace that they so often choose to do so anyway. They just spend their resources on hiring more administrators to assist other administrators in administrating, expensive fancy unnecessary buildings that nobody wants, etc. As it mentions in the article we are discussing. There is more than enough money to go around, it's just going where the people with power decide it should go, as in any hypercapitalist system.
Paying people more doesn't necessarily make cost go up, if productivity makes up for the cost. But I'm at a loss to see how that would work here: is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor? Researching professors can bring in grant money, for instance. Teach larger classes? Other parts of the university system may resist that. There's something about a university system that only seems capable of ratcheting up costs.
Maybe one reason is that universities never go bankrupt (and colleges only infrequently go bankrupt). There's no way to dissect the components of the system and reconstruct them in a better or more minimal manner.
Another thing that is never discussed is that many of the schools relying heavily on adjuncts, including a lot of community colleges, face increasingly tight budgets. This literature (there are enough such articles that it is a literature) tries to give the impression that wealthy schools like Harvard are taking advantage of individuals that have fallen on hard times.
In reality, a lot of adjuncts are, as you point out, professionals that do this on the side. Still others are not looking for full-time work, but want to maintain a connection to the academic world.
Many articles regarding the mistreatment of part-time academics have been making their way onto hacker news, and I feel that this isn't really going to change any time soon.
More and more, universities are there to create a "brand image", not provide decent education. This is why there is such an emphasis on administrators, because decent academics just want to learn more and teach, not try to sell you on a whole host of rubbish.
This is why things won't improve. If you have institutions that aim to provide more luxury to their students, so that they have "great college memories", then how do you expect colleges to pay more for better teachers.
So if someone is willing to teach a class for $2000 per semester, they shouldn't be allowed to?
I've tried to get into adjunct teaching, but there are so many applicants that it's almost impossible. Supply and demand. Adjuncts are paid what the market dictates, and that's ok.
Problem is a two-way street. Making only $2000 a semester may deter an adjunct from 'going the extra mile'. Not that a full-time professor would do so because they're full time. However, a low wage doesn't necessarily encourage the adjunct to do more than the minimum.
Also, if you figure that the department head will just fire and hire until they find someone what will put in that extra time you're kidding yourself. They work on semester contracts, firing and hiring over and over again will be throwing too many new/untrusted people into the classroom only to start-over in another few months, not to mention the lag-time between hires. What ends up happening is the department heads will maybe bring in a new candidate the next year if there's a lot of complaints against an adjunct, but otherwise they just keep the same scheduling.
I am glad that employers that mislabel employees as independent contractors are paying for their mistakes, but I am always a little disappointed when these articles appear.
I am an adjunct professor, but I also have a full-time job as a programmer that has spanned almost 30 years. Wikipedia says "adjunct professors are often nominated in recognition of active involvement with the appointing institution, while they are employed by government, industry, a profession or another institution" and that definition fits me perfectly.
Sad articles about the "plight of adjuncts" come out frequently, but I hope people understand that there is another side to the equation. The opportunity to work with motivated and passionate students that really care about the material is absolutely amazing, and it is a great way to give back to the community. I have stayed in touch with a lot of students over the years, and it is incredibly gratifying to hear how their careers have developed.
It's completely clear to me that universities using adjuncts as consultants are violating federal laws and likely many state laws as well. Like most other such problems, the only solution is a major class action lawsuit like the one against Uber. I have no doubt whatsoever that given a fair trial, any competent judge or jury would see abuse here, if for no other reason than they are forced to work at specific times in a specific place. There is just absolutely no way you can justify this as consulting work when they cannot decide either the time or location of the work being done. There are other obvious violations but these are so egregious, it's revolting. Of course, you have to see the lawsuit to its conclusion because the Labor department doesn't give a shit about labor laws being broken and will tell you as much when you try to bring that up.
It really isn't. Food service jobs don't require that you spend years and lots of money in order to qualify for them. Academia has really become a sort of pyramid scheme: lots of people going to grad school to support a few faculty who educate them to do faculty jobs that are increasingly scarce. A couple of decades ago, the deal was that you might have to adjunct for a year or two after grad school, but if you stuck it out, you'd have a decent chance of getting a proper job. Those days are gone, but somehow the folks going into grad school haven't gotten the message yet. The only way the situation will improve is if people insist on being paid what they're worth and otherwise withhold their labor.
Basically, don't go to grad school unless you have a plan to do something other than becoming college faculty with it. And don't take adjunct jobs unless you're doing it for fun as a side gig.
It's funny how the most essential work in society is under constant pressure of debasement. Feeding people is considered an ignominious job. Teaching people too is constantly debased. Now it's affecting higher education. The neoliberal transformation of capitalism decouples the value of goods and services from their value to humanity and instead pegs them against markets. Markets no longer merely transmit information about value. They are the definition of value. This is the ideological difference between liberal free market capitalism and neoliberalism; at least the former paid lip service to the idea that truth and value are ours to define. Not so. Capital determines value.
Universities are capitalist entities. They are trying to compete and appreciate in value for their shareholders. The market has replaced whatever value systems justified universities in the past.
And yes you could view these jobs as the coal mining jobs of today. The solution is the same now as it was then, unionize, negotiate and withdraw labor, it's been the same for more than the last century.
[+] [-] jseliger|10 years ago|reply
Until that happens, universities won't. Markets are clearing.
[+] [-] SilasX|10 years ago|reply
Even so, stuff like this reminds me not to take too romantic a view of "non-profit" higher education.
[+] [-] refriedbeans3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cousin_it|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgalt212|10 years ago|reply
That's very true, and current and potential adjuncts should wisen up. That being said, just because you can take advantage of someone doesn't mean you should.
[+] [-] bjd2385|10 years ago|reply
The thing that gets me is that we look around and the campuses have millions to put up for new buildings and infrastructure and sports, etc. But here they can't give my mother a full time job with benefits.
Education is nothing more than an industry. They don't care if I pass or succeed, as long as they've got a job at the end of the day. I'm convinced of that.
[+] [-] bphogan|10 years ago|reply
1. Enrollment 2. Retention 3. Graduation with a job.
Enrollment is priority one, so they need nice campuses to get you in the door, good facilities to entice you to come. They'll advertise small class sizes with individualized attention because the current generation loves to hear that. (Of course this means they need more faculty to be there in the room.)
Graduation with a job is second because they need to show that people come out of the school. This of course becomes marketing material for #1.
Retention is the one they leave up to the departments and faculty.
[+] [-] peteretep|10 years ago|reply
She could have easily gone and become an actuary, an i-banker, or a management consultant, but she didn't, because she wanted to be a teacher. This decision costs us ~$100k a year as a household.
Schools are able to hire people like my wife at below her "market" value because you don't need to be anywhere near as smart as my wife to be a teacher, and because there are couples like us who can walk away from more money for the improved lifestyle.
Why would a responsible organisation pay more?
[+] [-] noblethrasher|10 years ago|reply
We might be able to make the case that the donations don't cover the ongoing cost of operating the new buildings, but at least at my institution, the new buildings are usually energy-efficient replacements for old ones.
But yeah, the whole thing is nutty: a few years ago at a Chamber of Commerce function, one of our extremely wealthy doners (you probably know of them) told the audience members that they should be providing a certain minimal level of funding to athletics, even if it meant reducing their normal contribution to the academic side.
[+] [-] thomasahle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
Oh definitely. Admittedly, if you're an undergrad right now, a certain percentage of you are expected to fail, each and every year, because (it's assumed) you're just stupid or lazy.
[+] [-] jimmar|10 years ago|reply
I don't know how many universities are flush with cash and are just being stingy by using adjuncts, but where I work (small regional university), we have intense budget pressure. We'd have to raise tuition a lot to cover the cost of converting adjust to tenure-track positions.
I don't like how adjuncts are treated, but seeing the problem from our administration's point of view, I know why we have so many adjuncts.
[+] [-] wheaties|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjd2385|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hoogleud|10 years ago|reply
That doesn't make any sense as a sentence. Faculty is a noun, not an adjective.
Do you mean 'I'm part of the faculty' or 'I'm on the faculty'.
[+] [-] kauffj|10 years ago|reply
Does anyone find this surprising? There is a practically unlimited amount of programming work to be done and not enough programmers to do it all. On the other hand, there is a finite demand for movies and a very large number of people who would like to do it.
Many people would like to be professors. Unsurprisingly, this depresses the wage. What else is to be expected?
Adjunct salaries will rise and/or more tenured professorships will be offered when either consumer demand rises or supply falls. Anything else is just wishful thinking.
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
I certainly find that statement surprising, considering that most of the programming work already done is economically useless. Unicorn-balloon inflation is not a real job.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ves|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chitowngal|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
At least here in Australia tenure really doesn't exist anymore. If they want to get rid of you they just wait for the next departmental reshuffle (these seem to occur every couple of years) and eliminate your position.
[+] [-] zanewill9|10 years ago|reply
I was first alerted to it by (of all places) The magic-the-gathering professor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcQ4KIOqNic
(bonus if you're looking for some great magic-the-gathering videos)
[+] [-] rhino369|10 years ago|reply
What is never talked about in these articles about the plight of the adjunct is that adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig. Almost charity work. You are supposed to do it for the experience. I'd had many adjuncts at northwestern when I was getting my law degree. They were partners at major law firms. They mad millions a year. They would have done this job for free. Maybe they did.
My wife considered adjuncting at her old college for the same reason.
It seems a huge part of this problem is some are treating these jobs as real, life supporting careers. They aren't meant that way. Maybe colleges are taking advantage. But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.
[+] [-] dalke|10 years ago|reply
For example, you wrote "adjunct professor is supposed to be a fun side gig", while the article suggests that these position were originally for '“the housewives of higher education” (eg, the wife of a man that the university wanted to recruit), or for female instructors where the university did not allow female professors. These were low status positions, quite different from the "fun side gig" you says it was meant for.
You point to Northwestern's law school as if it were the appropriate model for how adjunct teaching should be, and comment that many if not most made millions per year. However, the article says "31 percent of part-time faculty are living near or below the federal poverty line". What percentage of the 250+ adjunct professors in Northwestern's law school department live at or near the federal poverty line? Why you think your experience at a graduate program Northwestern can be generalized to undergraduate teaching and is applicable to most other schools in the US?
You write 'But these adjuncts are also taking advantage of themselves willingly.' The article also addresses that point rather extensively, starting with "But apart from feeling sorry for the underpaid faculty, why should we care that college professors have the same job conditions as day laborers, fast-food workers, cashiers, taxi drivers, or home-care aides? They did, after all, choose to pursue a career in higher ed." and ending some eight paragraphs later.
Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize, but 'While some schools like Georgetown have accepted unions without too much fuss, others have adopted the tactics long used by anti-labor businesses: falsely accusing labor officials of earning exorbitant salaries, hiring law firms that specialize in union busting, and firing those involved in the campaign.' Instead, they are "willing" to stay for the short term, because in the long term they help themselves, others like them, the students they teach, and the humanist values that a college is suppose to embrace. (All points that the article touches on.)
These differences between your comment and the article suggest that your understanding of the adjunct teaching issue is not well aligned with what most people mean when they talk about this topic.
[+] [-] nwjtkjn|10 years ago|reply
"Even while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions. In the old days, different professors would take their turn as dean for this or that and then happily escape back to scholarship and teaching. Now the administration exists as an end in itself and a career path disconnected from the faculty and pursuit of knowledge. Writing a few years ago for this publication, the Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg described colleges and universities as now being “filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” So while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."
[+] [-] wmagato|10 years ago|reply
The problem is that the universities do not advertise it that way. They don't take thousands of dollars from parents and tell them "thanks, hopefully we will find a volunteer to teach your kid by the time class starts next week".
[+] [-] HarryHirsch|10 years ago|reply
The ones who get cheated is of course the students. They will get a credential instead of an education because no adjunct is going to get into an argument about teaching, and you can't force anyone to take the credential serious.
[+] [-] nitrogen|10 years ago|reply
This sounds a lot like the argument that minimum wage isn't supposed to be a living wage. Well, whether it is or it isn't, the current system (minimum wage or adjuncts) isn't working for a lot of people, so something has to change.
[+] [-] wfo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaitai|10 years ago|reply
Adjuncting in law and business schools is a very different gig than the folks teaching English, history, math, physics, sociology, art, etc.
[+] [-] ianbicking|10 years ago|reply
Maybe one reason is that universities never go bankrupt (and colleges only infrequently go bankrupt). There's no way to dissect the components of the system and reconstruct them in a better or more minimal manner.
[+] [-] bachmeier|10 years ago|reply
In reality, a lot of adjuncts are, as you point out, professionals that do this on the side. Still others are not looking for full-time work, but want to maintain a connection to the academic world.
[+] [-] gamesbrainiac|10 years ago|reply
More and more, universities are there to create a "brand image", not provide decent education. This is why there is such an emphasis on administrators, because decent academics just want to learn more and teach, not try to sell you on a whole host of rubbish.
This is why things won't improve. If you have institutions that aim to provide more luxury to their students, so that they have "great college memories", then how do you expect colleges to pay more for better teachers.
[+] [-] jayess|10 years ago|reply
I've tried to get into adjunct teaching, but there are so many applicants that it's almost impossible. Supply and demand. Adjuncts are paid what the market dictates, and that's ok.
[+] [-] therobot24|10 years ago|reply
Also, if you figure that the department head will just fire and hire until they find someone what will put in that extra time you're kidding yourself. They work on semester contracts, firing and hiring over and over again will be throwing too many new/untrusted people into the classroom only to start-over in another few months, not to mention the lag-time between hires. What ends up happening is the department heads will maybe bring in a new candidate the next year if there's a lot of complaints against an adjunct, but otherwise they just keep the same scheduling.
[+] [-] bobochan|10 years ago|reply
I am an adjunct professor, but I also have a full-time job as a programmer that has spanned almost 30 years. Wikipedia says "adjunct professors are often nominated in recognition of active involvement with the appointing institution, while they are employed by government, industry, a profession or another institution" and that definition fits me perfectly.
Sad articles about the "plight of adjuncts" come out frequently, but I hope people understand that there is another side to the equation. The opportunity to work with motivated and passionate students that really care about the material is absolutely amazing, and it is a great way to give back to the community. I have stayed in touch with a lot of students over the years, and it is incredibly gratifying to hear how their careers have developed.
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberte|10 years ago|reply
e.g. Chief Student Financial Aid Officer $83,726
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
At least it's a step up from "do you want fries with that?"
[+] [-] hcayless|10 years ago|reply
Basically, don't go to grad school unless you have a plan to do something other than becoming college faculty with it. And don't take adjunct jobs unless you're doing it for fun as a side gig.
[+] [-] danharaj|10 years ago|reply
Universities are capitalist entities. They are trying to compete and appreciate in value for their shareholders. The market has replaced whatever value systems justified universities in the past.
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|10 years ago|reply