- he's got a full workload (not a universal amongst adjuncts) and so the guy's skills are clearly in demand
- he's taking home peanuts
- students are paying a lot more in tuition than they ever did
In this, as in so many areas of business, the consumer (the student in this case) might wonder where all the money is going.
The student has no idea what an adjunct is, and doesn't particularly care. If it occurs to the student to wonder why the instructor seems frazzled or unprepared, or why he isn't available outside the classroom, the student assumes he is just a bad or lazy professor. But the vast majority of the students have no idea why they're there and are much more interested in their social lives than their studies, so it works out just fine in the end... well, society loses and bunch of overeducated schmucks are really getting shafted, but everything else is going according to plan.
For the same money:
- This guy could teach on a dozen students for a year. 20 hours per week class time and 20 hours of smaller groups or 1 on 1.
- The University or some external organisation could administer exams or otherwise check he was up to standard.
- The Students would get a lot better education that they would have from being in a class of hundreds.
Demand for the jobs is high, and supply is low. This keeps pay low.
Compare to tuition. Demand has been increasing over the last decade, and supply has remained relatively fixed or grown slowly. As more students seek to acquire trash art history degrees, price has risen to match the demand.
Most universities aren't for profit institutions churning out dividends for shareholders, so it's gotta be going somewhere internal to the schools.
I'm honestly a bit mystified.
What do you mean by "large recurring service contracts" ?
I also want to note that often the administrators have to ok so many contracts (which they have no expertise in) and there are so many options, that inevitably the university ends up paying for stuff that nobody uses. At least in my last school, it was apparent that there were many sources of waste.
No competition -> bad management -> all kinds of waste. It's sad. I don't know how to fix it though.