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Comment by bluetwo | Hacker News Reader

As an adjunct professor running one class per year, I ran the calculation of:

(Amount I'm paid per class / (students in class * cost per credit * credits for class) )

And found I'm paid about 10% of what the students pay for the experience of taking my class. I can't help wonder what happens to the rest of that money.

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Now that's a business model screaming for disruption.

When people talk about "disruption of education", they usually mean either online courses or boot camps. I think that's unfortunate. There are huge benefits to learning stuff the traditional way, by taking a class in person, on a schedule, with a curriculum and a teacher and an exam at the end. There are also huge benefits to hanging out with working scientists and picking up their enthusiasm. These are the important things about attending a university, and they aren't even that difficult or expensive to set up! Can we get that kind of "disruption", please?

The only benefit I see is the piece of paper I'm going to get from the university at the end of my wild ride.

Ironically, adjuncts are a disruption of a previous business model.

http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Sta...

Honestly, as an adjunct professor, you don't make much. Full time faculty are, on average, probably paid at least 3 times what you make (based on numbers from 2013).

That probably doesn't make you feel great, but as a percentage of costs, faculty salaries are still the biggest expense at all schools I know of.

Staff for non-academic activities outside of the VP chain and coaches are also generally much lower than faculty salaries - Student life, activities, diversity, etc are closer to what you make.

Look at how much gets taken out of a grant for "overhead," too! Stunning.

For those that are unfamiliar, when a faculty member wins a grant the university takes 50%+ for themselves. Right off the top. So if you are awarded a grant for $100k from DARPA, NIH or some other granting organization you'll only end up having ~$47k to spend. The rest goes straight to the pocket of the university.

This is actually untrue. People just think that because they don't understand how the overhead % works. 100% overhead would mean the university taking 50%. But all overheads are <= 65%, so no university takes more than half. It's about 1/3 in the top tier universities.

Dang. That's cold.

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