This is a shocking article. It describes the new world of academia, where adjuncts may be paid $10,000 a year to teach five courses. They get no benefits.
It was written by a woman who just received her Ph.D. in anthropology and is wondering if she will get a job and wondering how an academic can survive. After all, $10,000 a year is well below the poverty line.
Most people who teach in higher education are adjuncts. They are sometimes called “contingent faculty.”
The AAUP say that contingent faculty are 68% of all faculty in higher education.
The AAUP say that the huge increase in contingent faculty did not occur because of budget cuts, but occurred during flush times, when universities decided to spend on facilities and technology instead of instruction and faculty development.
Think of it.
Students pay tuition that may be $30,000-$50,000 or more a year, while their professors are earning a pittance.
How is this sustainable over time?
We need fresh thinking about making college affordable; otherwise how can we expect greater numbers of young people to enroll?
And we need fresh thinking about the use and abuse of adjunct faculty. Once upon a time, young men and women planned careers as college professors. That is increasingly rare, and will eventually erode the quality of higher education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Related sites —
• http://junctrebellion.wordpress.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/junct.rebellion
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Coursera and EdX are the future, it would seem. Why pay adjuncts?
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Thus far, those courses aren’t for credit. I teach online. To earn college credits at regionally accredited schools, a qualified professor is still required –for now anyways.
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Tell me about it. Contingent faculty means a job from term to term –the length of which depends on the school and how it divides up and offers courses within quarters or semesters –usually 5, 6 or 8 week assignments in my field.
I’ve been doing this for 17 years and came the closest to losing all that I own and becoming homeless earlier this year. Thought I solved it with a second job but just learned I’ve met their yearly quota of assignments for adjuncts already and they won’t offer me more work until January. So, now I’m at risk of homelessness again. I love my work, but I’m 60 and I really can’t take much more of this ongoing stress just for basic survival.
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“Tenured professors, we don’t need no stinkin tenured professors!”
But boy those folks at the top of the academic hierarchy are making a killing. Isn’t that the way life is supposed to be, a very few avariciously hoard all the more for themselves-it’s god’s way!
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We call it freeway faculty around here. You teach a class at one campus, and rush to the next campus to teach the next class. I did it for a few years before deciding to become a public school teacher, and it was a huge contributing factor. I wanted to teach and have stability. Another aspect of the freeway faculty life, at least at the developmental education level, was classes were always being cut or added at the last moment. I taught developmental education (ABE/GED and pre-college level) and ESL at 3 different community college campuses.
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This article says the professoriate is comprised of 75% adjuncts: http://www.opednews.com/articles/How-The-American-Universit-by-Debra-Leigh-Scott-120819-373.html
100% of the faculty are adjuncts at one of the universities where I teach. Yes, not one faculty member is full time there. I’ve worked at over a half dozen colleges and a number of those schools had no more than 10% full time faculty. I’ve seen statistics ranging from 67% to 80% adjuncts in the literature. I don’t know where any of those folks got their data but, in nearly two decades, I’ve never been polled.
I was fortunate to have had full time appointments in the past, but not where they had tenure. Though a full time position would certainly be my preference today, there are very few full time opportunities anymore. I have been looking for one for seven years.
Yes, salaries are high for top administrators in higher ed, such as college presidents, VPs, provosts, etc., but not necessarily for top faculty positions. In my last full position in higher ed, I just got course reductions for administrative duties as a Program Coordinator, not additional pay. I was responsible for hiring and supervising about 20 adjuncts, teaching on three campuses, writing all syllabi to meet standards, new program design, course revisions, committee work, etc. and I grossed $42K
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I’m glad you’ve finally learned about this, Ms. Ravitch. This has been going on for over a generation. Back in the 80s, some of us were agitating for Graduate Student Employee Unions in an effort to get our roles as TA’s defined and more money. The casualization of academic labor was rearing its ugly head back in the 1980s. Unlike primary and secondary teachers, tenured professors often viewed themselves as professionals with no need to exert themselves for those lower in the food chain Back in the mid 1990’s the OAH published several articles in their monthly newsletter. See http://www.oah.org/pubs/nl/96nov/adjunct1196.html
i recommend that those interested find themselves a copy of Marc Bousquet’s How The University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. It is an excellent introductory primer to this subject. What we are now seeing take place with the teachers’ unions happened to higher education long ago and is working its way down the educational system.
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I concur with Brian’s comment, and it happens in all fields, even the vaunted STEM fields, and has been for decades.
Remember this quote?
“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”
Of course, the punchline is … that Stephen Hawking *is* British and has been treated by NHS all his life.
The secondary punchline is that graduate students and postdocs often haven’t had access to health insurance, and that most likely any young person with ALS would have had a lot of trouble finding a job that could provide it without exclusions. No one, no matter how brilliant, ends up in academia without a tour or two in this post-doc and adjunct temporary, low paid status.
These adjunct teaching positions are endemic from community colleges to the most elite universities.
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Although it probably can’t hurt, having experience as an adjunct is no guarantee of obtaining a full time job. Full time jobs very rarely open up anymore. When full timers leave, so many of those positions are replaced with adjuncts.
I’ve stayed in one of my positions for four years, because I’d been told our programs were growing and I was first in line for a full time job. Since I created those programs for them, as a Subject Matter Expert (SME), I had every reason to believe that would be the case. Ultimately, however, instead of full time positions opening up, they made all existing full timers part timers –which none of us had predicted.
In my experience, private colleges are most likely to have dropped union affiliation, and tenure was eliminated thereafter. That was usually due to concessions faculty had agreed upon, such as paid family leave and free tuition for dependents. Not an even trade, IMHO, but it was done in the 80s and faculty said they hadn’t envisioned how so many full time jobs would be replaced by adjuncts.
Ultimately, I think accrediting bodies are culpable, because they are accepting of such high percentages of contingent faculty. Remember when the quantity of books in college libraries was a big deal? Now they look for the number of online subscriptions. Times change.
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Another chapter in the Bain Capitalization of education… outsource to MOOCs or adjuncts who don’t get benefits and make sure your shareholders get theirs…
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“Don’t mourn–organize.” ~Joe Hill
Nothing unites people like adversity.
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Organizing faculty at an online university is particularly challenging, because they all live in different parts of the world. (Meetings are online and by phone.) Few even show up for commencement, due to travel costs.
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Do any of the college rankings list the percentage of adjunct vs. full time professors?
Is there a way to get that info?
Went on a Big Ten college tour, and a rising senior with an accounting major yet to be conferred told us he was the t.a. for a freshman accounting class. He was making $1,500 a semester.
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you could probably just ask
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I’ve not seen info about percentages of contingent faculty included in reports on college rankings. Though they would probably tell you if you asked, I don’t know of any colleges which otherwise provide that info up front
At some schools where I’ve worked, only faculty designated as “Core” were listed in catalogs and on school websites. “Core” is a designation that some colleges (usually with no union or tenure) often give to full time and half time faculty. They don’t usually define what “Core” means or indicate which faculty are full time and half time.
When adjuncts, who were not designated as “Core” asked why they weren’t included in faculty listings at one college where I’ve worked, they were told it was “too much to keep up with the high turn-over” of contingent faculty. After accrediting bodies insisted they do so, the college eventually added adjuncts to faculty listings, though none of the info provided indicated which faculty were adjuncts.
TA’s have various duties and they are not necessarily involved in the actual teaching of courses. Regional accrediting bodies want to see instructors who’ve earned at least one degree beyond the level of the students they’re teaching. It’s very rare for colleges to employ faculty with just bachelor’s degrees for teaching, let alone someone who’s not yet earned a degree. Most colleges require at least a master’s degree of instructors. TA’s who are involved in teaching are typically grad students.
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