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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Eight ? Or Eighty? Eight seems terribly small!

edit: I just read on and you mention her new salary is $35K and it's a huge improvement but I find it still hard to believe that someone would actually go to work 15 hours per day for a $8K pay per year. That works out to be substantially less than minimum wage.

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I looked into teaching math at a California community college and the pay was just under $2000 per course. A course was either 3 or 4 credits. $8K for 15 credit-hours worth of teaching in Indiana sounds about right. When my sister was an adjunct faculty at a big state school she made $17K a year.

Wow. I had no idea pays were this low. How do you live? Is the job really that great? Why put up with it? I started making 50K a year when I first graduated from college and I still complained it was too low after a year there. And now I think that making $100K a year is still too low. You need to choose a different career. Else no point in complaining.

He's saying she's being paid eight thousand for teaching fifteen credits of classes in a single semester. Presumably she'd make another eight the next semester and a couple extra thousand in the summer. So probably $22,000 a year.

Yes, right, as noted in the other responses, 15 credit hours, not 15 hours a day. It just felt like 15 hours a day, given preparation and grading and the fact that two of her five classes were in the next town over and so there was four hours of driving per week in there as well (and no, no mileage).

I can't ... well. I can complain, clearly, but income is income, and she paid for our summer in Europe this year, and it was good prep for the visiting professorship, but ... it's still wrong. With all the time she actually spent, I doubt she hit minimum wage.

She didn't work fifteen hours a day. She taught fifteen credit hours.

Ah ok, I'm sorry I thought the '15 hour load' referred to the number of hours per day.

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