There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts

It would also help if they weren't the locus of indignation at corporations for not treating workers well enough.

> When you flood two generations with easy college money and

Would that be why they are drowning in higher education debt?

Such failures in logic occur when you try to express a systematic social problem (erosion of labour rights and lack of unionisation in higher education institutions among adjuncts and graduate students) to individualist argumentation ("it's their fault for being exploited").

Unionization can only enable workers to capture more of the producer surplus; it can't fundamentally reverse a case of extreme oversupply.

For rough numbers, an epically good adjunct union might secure a 50% pay raise. But sane PhD pay rates would have to be something like 2x what they are now for it to be a viable career path for high-IQ white collar professionals. And that requires the supply to (take an economic hint and) contract.

Yeah, that's the smart thing to do, especially when there's strong demand for their skills, like from silicon valley. Heck, that would make a great plot for the show of the same name:

PP is looking to academia to hire and they informally offer a candidate "100", by which they mean "$100k/year", but (they later find out) the heavily underpaid post-doc took to mean "$100/day", and they debate whether they should write up the offer letter with the lower amount.

This. The fix for the pay issues is for the over supply to go away. If we attempt to legislate or worse, unionize the field, we will just end up with many who want to work with no job as requirements will spell out exactly who gets employed and how, effectively locking out any who cannot get on board.

I still of the opinion that the university system needs a good hair cut. They are able to rake in billions of federal dollars for student loans and unlike the medical care field where federal money also goes no attempt is made to course rates. As in, if you want students on federal loans this is what you can charge per course hour for this course.

If true, that sounds like a market correction. We may lose some good talent in the process, but it would likely lead to better long term outcomes.

I have a PhD in CS and seriously considered staying in academia. I really enjoy teaching, so I would have been okay with making less than I could with an industry job. But it's not the pay that pushed me to industry, but the shitty contracts you get. I don't want to change cities or even continents every two or three years. There are no permanent positions available at all and even five year contracts are very rare.

You're not entirely wrong, but due to funding models of state colleges, these priorities may be a bit different.

In Ohio, for quite some time, state funding was based on enrollment, so that's what state universities did: enroll as many students as they could.

Then, it was decided that enrollment was a terrible thing to incentivize because the incremental enrollees were far more likely to drop out. So the state switched to funding based on graduation numbers, so retention and graduation are far more important and universities have tightened their enrollment standards and started building stronger relationships with community colleges.

I teach in a college math department in the US. A typical adjunct for us would have a Masters degree and teach one or two sections of Elementary Stats. So, no PhD.

An assistant professor is a full time position. An adjunct is like the contractor/part time version of an assistant professor. The result is that adjuncts typically teach at multiple institutions, for example an R1 research university, plus a couple of local community colleges because 1 or 2 classes at one school is not enough to pay a livable wage.

In regards to credentials, in the US they can either have a PhD, be pursuing a PhD or have completed their Masters, but it depends on the institution's requirements to teach (and the classes they are teaching). You wouldn't have a Masters grad teaching graduate classes or an ABD teaching PhDs. Most well respected higher education institutions require a PhD to be an assistant professor (full time) but only be pursuing a PhD to be an adjunct/part time assistant professor teaching undergraduates.

> 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.

Probably more like $400-450k per year. And if you're fiendishly good as an investment banker, a lot more than that.

Nursing is a highly paid, respected profession. It is a different job than a doctor, just like a designer is different than a programmer.

Your sister doesn't sound like a nurse to me. An RN doesn't clean up feces.

I didn't downvote you but the sentence does make sense.

It's like saying "I'm staff, so I get benefits." vs "I'm on the staff, .."

You're right.

They say "professor with experience in her field."

Which is what an adjunct provides when done right.

Unfortunately enrollment is a big deal at schools, and sometimes more classes are offered than there are people to teach them.

And some adjuncts are simply just not qualified to teach anything because they have no experience that's relevant. Seen it too often in my time in public higher ed.

It's an open secret that professors don't teach a huge portion of these programs. Usually it's grad students who get paid even less than adjuncts (sometimes they actually pay for the privilege.

Though I do wonder if schools are lying to the adjuncts. Maybe suggesting this could help them get hired full tenture track. If so, that is abusive.

"is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor"

The text starting with the example of "Mary Grabar, who worked as an adjunct for many years" gives several examples of how an adjunct professor can be more productive: 1) having a lockable desk rather than having to lug a cart each time to a hot-desking bullpen, 2) remove the need to work additional jobs outside of teaching, which can lead to 'stress and exhaustion', and keep the teacher from mentoring students, writing letters of recommendation, or answering students who simply had questions, and 3) reduce isolation between teachers, because it:

> allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,” she says, and it “facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve them.”

The essay also suggests that a reason for the "ratcheting up costs" is that administration has been taking over most universities and the money has been going to "ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats." The article mentions Benjamin Ginsberg, who goes into more depth on this topic in "Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters".

I re-read the part you reference at your suggestion and I don't see how it debunks that adjuncts take these positions willingly. It talks about how schools spend a lot of money on administrators and that adjuncts provide similar or better performance than tenured positions.

The article suggest that some of these non-tenure track jobs are make work for spouses. I don't think that is a major use of them now. In fact, if it is then what is the problem? They should have the tenure track salary in the same household.

My point is that the people taking these jobs are being foolish. They are taking clear part-time low paying jobs and then wondering why they part-time low pay income.

The reason they are taking these jobs is because they can't find tenure track gigs. Okay, so they didn't succeed. That is no excuse for taking a shitty consolidation job and then bitching about the pay.

>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?

I'm not saying we shouldn't care because these jobs go to millionaires. But we shouldn't care because these jobs aren't meant to actually support a person. Judging by the fact that they are part time and low pay, I think it's clear it's not just Northwestern that views them as non real career jobs.

In fact, several universities actually only let someone adjunct one class a year because it's not supposed to be a career.

>Moreover, they are not all "willingly" doing so. Many are trying to unionize

That sounds willingly to me. Of course they would rather get paid more. But their is a lot of supply for people who can teach these courses. Especially since the commitment isn't very high.

These jobs are essentially volunteer gigs that you get paid a token amount for. But some people want to be a part of academia so bad they are willing to live in poverty to do it. That's fine, but that is their choice.

EDIT:

I should also note that schools are exploiting the glut of potential adjuncts. But I don't really have a problem with that. As you note, we exploit lowerclass workers. Why should I care if the PhD is getting the same treatment as a janitor. In fact, we should probably care less since these adjuncts would more easily find a better white collar job.

> 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

No, the chair won't. This "Senior Research Fellow" is teaching a grad class. The grad class doesn't make the university any money. It doesn't even pay for the classroom it's taught in. If this "guy" is teaching 2 300 person sections, or writes and wins multi million dollar grants, or has the connections with DuPont that give the department money directly, then, yes, they are making the university money.

That's all the department cares about. That's all your management ever cares about, "what have you done for me lately."

There is some truth to what Ginsberg asserts (i.e., administration could most certainly be leaner at a lot of places), but the notion that administrators are disconnected from "the pursuit of knowledge" is a bit weak in my view. A lot of the reason for the growth of Ginsberg's "administrative class" can be attributed to the growth of research programs at universities. Administrators are primarily there to worry about real-world issues that most faculty can't be bothered with in the cut-throat world of publish or perish. These include checking regulatory issues (i.e., establishing policies for IRBs and medical research), aiding in grant preparation, outreach efforts, and balancing academic freedom with legal issues. These are all things that faculty do not have expertise in, as PhD programs do not train them for these kinds of responsibilities. Frankly they shouldn't worry about these things- they're there to do research or teach, not draft a policy. You could argue that administrators might be overcompensated perhaps (especially at the upper-level), or that there might be too many of them, but their necessity as a distinct organ of the university is indisputable in my opinion. The halcyon pre-70s days when faculty could regulate a university on their own are gone (and it's questionable whether or not they ever did a particularly good job at this to begin with).

It’s possible that Ginsberg doesn’t really see this as much because he lives in the world of political science, which doesn’t require nearly as much support infrastructure since it is so theory-centric.

You also might want to take what Ginsberg says with a grain of salt for the very reason that he’s a tenured professor with a salary of around $157k a year (http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/docs/JHU%20Fact%20...) while most administrative positions (perfectly fireable at the first sign of economic trouble!) at JHU are in the $40k-$50k range (based on Glassdoor). He’s not quite the victim of brutal administrative oppression that he claims to be.

Additionally, my old university has built 4 new buildings in the last 4 or 5 years that I can think of. Brand new buildings, even while none of the existing buildings are ever actually full. Couldn't this, for example, go to actually teaching? Or maybe some of those donors giving millions to the sports departments could be convinced to give to a teaching fund instead? Perhaps the university doesn't need to spend boatloads switching student management software for the third time in a decade?

As the article mentions, the number of students to teachers hasn't changed, it's just that most of those teachers are being paid less. When the universities are making significantly more than they were, the income of the teachers should at least be proportional.

My (poorly made) point was that they'd just keep spending and then spend more. If you could make them stop hiring pointless admin and pay adjuncts more, I'd agree.

Erm... isn't the actual root cause of the problem raised in TFA the opposite of debasement? Namely excess supply of people who're willing to go into academia to "do the most essential work in society", whatever the terms, as a sister comment from an insider pointed out? If the perceived value of being in academia was low enough, the market would force the universities to treat adjuncts better.

Also, aren't most or at least a great many of the most famous universities non-profits, competing for donations instead of trying to maximize shareholder value? I hear that in for-profit education, the average student is treated better and so is the average lecturer (you want to please your students whose money feeds you and you want to attract lecturers whose primary motivation is financial and who're good enough to please your students, so the for-profit institution kinda has to treat both well to survive.) Somebody living off donations, on the other hand, only has to please people donating the money (and someone living off taxes only has to please government officials), while pleasing either students or the teaching staff is no longer essential.

(I don't have firm or specific opinions on how higher education should be run, in general, just commenting on your points.)

I think the most essential-seeming jobs are "underpaid" because such jobs are (by their very nature) fulfilling, and people value that. If someone with the same qualifications would rather teach for $x than administrate for $x+20k, then naturally we end up with administrators being paid $20k more than teachers.

Pyramid schemes involve misleading and/or false promises. Do schools do this to graduate students?