Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight of the Adjunct Professor

> if there are more opportunities and better pay?

Frequently there aren't. The subject of this article is an artist, so cue your STEM lord "do you want fries with that" jokes now.

However, this can occur even in fields like math and computer science. You graduate with a PhD in math and a specialization in topology. Who will hire you to do that? No-one. Plenty of people will hire you to do something you can do, but what if you really want to continue research in your specialty?

I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?"

So if you want to work in your own specialty, you might need to work in academia.

I think a lot of us think that we will beat the odds. We see people struggling to get tenure track jobs and say "well, that won't happen to me." Of course, now it has happened to me and my friends that have gotten tenure track jobs aren't happy. I'm giving it one more year to find a tenure track job before I give up. (Of course part of the problem is my degree is in the humanities so I don't really know what I'm qualified for...)

There's a lot to untangle here, and in your article. The supply/demand question reminds me of a seeming paradox about gentrification -- that a young professional (or artist) who moves to that up-and-coming neighborhood appears to be the one at fault, making the place more expensive, creating more churn, becoming another patron for the lifestyle shops. Similarly, it's tempting to blame the adjunct, as you suggest -- that by accepting the adjunct jobs they allow the system to survive. Your article also suggests blaming the careerist tenured academic for moral compromise: "The cost to the individual who manages to get tenure is low but the cost to the field as a whole is high."

While I share your moral outrage, I see these phenomena -- whether the dilution of academia or the dilution of vital neighborhoods -- as a series of top-down structural choices. That gentrification is the result of opportunistic investment and regulatory capture of local governance. That starving adjuncts and uninspired professors are the result of a devaluing of a liberal arts education in the name of a bottom-line STEM/entrepreneur-centric view of what is valuable to society. That a get-your-act-together chiding of those screwed won't correct a system willfully rigged to take advantage of the idealist.

All this to suggest that we shouldn't blame the victim, whether that is the adjunct or the badly taught and overcharged student, for having hope in teaching, learning, and an uneconomically rewarding practice.

I was an adjunct for a few years and I fit into neither of your "categories".

When I taught my first class, I did it as a personal favor to the department chair, whom I had a good relationship with (I'd often come in to different classes and speak to the students about our field and such). A few days before classes began, the instructor for this particular course "fell through" and she asked me if I would be willing to teach the course. After some thought, I gave in and agreed. I ended up teaching several different courses of a few years and I didn't do it for either of the reasons you mentioned.

While teaching the first course, I found that I genuinely enjoyed it. At the end of that term, I received my (anonymous) evaluations from my students and they were outstanding. I was compared to (and rated much better) than their previous instructors, many of whom I considered friends. I agreed to keep teaching.

I certainly didn't do it for money. I was only paid for the hours I spent in the classroom -- no pay for "prep time", the hours I spent grading papers, etc. All things considered, I earned less than $10 per hour. I could have made more working at a fast-food restaurant -- and probably been less stressed out.

I taught because I truly enjoyed it and became, to use your word, quite "passionate" about it. To this day, I remain friends with a lot of my former students -- many of whom now work in my field. I've even had the pleasure of working with a few of them professionally. It feels good to see them "grow up" and to have them thank me, years later, for making a difference in their education.

Sometimes I actually miss it but, then again, I never did it "just as supplemental income".

Indeed, the title "adjunct professor" used to be a fairly prestigious honour given to an expert in a field in exchange for some teaching. However, in lieu of paying teaching faculty properly, universities started handing out the title to anyone, and it has reduced its meaning greatly.

If I look at medicine as a comparison, when I graduated undergrad (early 90s), medicine was a field with seemingly very strong prospects. Fast forward 20 years, and the prospects in medicine don't look nearly as good, and certainly not when weighed against the investment (in time and money) and risk (malpractice, regulatory insanity, etc)

I wonder if the same thing happened in academia. If you look at the fundamentals a decade ago and continuing even now (consumption rate growing faster than the consumption of medical services, tuition rates rising MUCH faster than inflation), it's reasonable to think that the industry is growing quickly.

Whether or not it ought to be, and whether or not that's sustainable, I can understand a counter argument that even if the field is saturated now, if the industry growth continues as implied by the fundamentals, it could still be a good choice.

Now, if my teenage offspring ask for advice, I'd tell them to pick something that's meaningful and interesting to them and then double-check that they can survive on the value they create. If so, don't go chasing further monetary value.

I don't think the real issue is saturation. The problem is that universities aren't interested in tenured positions. So if you want to teach your only option is to take an adjunct position.

If not saturation then its the desire of the majority of people in these positions to work part time. The median income is still very high for this type of work. [1]. Read the links within the link provided.

Do note that there good numbers of those classified as Adjunct who are former retirees who purposefully work small loads and many in the humanities already knew their course of study had little to no bearing outside of academia which increased competition for what spots there were.

The only issue I have found that is truly actionable for people in this position is having to attend mandatory meetings and such without guarantee of pay which I cannot imagine is remotely legal.

If you are a parent or student and don't like the situation then ask the schools you plan to attend how they are performing in this area. It won't change unless students stop attending schools which rely on it.

Finally the costs of secondary educations are going to come down and this will put even more downward pressure on wages and have colleges and such refrain from tenure track employment. The reason it all came into being is that colleges felt price pressure and had no mean of cutting the tenure levels and worse bloated up non teaching jobs.

[1] http://mattbruenig.com/2013/12/04/what-does-the-national-dat...

Agreed, unionizing will backfire. There are simply to many PhD's for the number of teaching positions.

Because college is how the growing pool of labor competes for the shrinking pool of meal tickets.

Maybe costs do not raise, but revenues do?

Because goods and services cost what people are willing to pay, not what they cost to produce. The value of your college degree is based on the institution's accept/reject ratio, not on the quality of instruction (which is nearly impossible to quantify).

It means starting a new prestigious college is nearly impossible. Without excess applicants to reject, a new college doesn't rank well, which in turn means less interest by students and parents. The upper tier colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want without fear of competition.

That also means colleges put a lot more effort into attracting students than actually educating them. As long as there is an excess of people wanting adjunct positions, institutions can get away with a high-low strategey - a handful of well known full professors and an army of starving adjuncts.

The price of college is bounded only by the difference between the net present value of students' future income with and without a degree. Prices will tend to increase up to that point, absent government intervention to hold the price down. Some private colleges are already above the limit and will have to start cutting prices to maintain enrollment soon.