The Cost of an Adjunct
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
I know my personal experience with adjuncts has been good. They taught, not because they had to, but because they wanted to and they enjoyed it. I studied law these guys were partners making 1 million + a year. They had practical experience which is very useful.
My wife is doing a maters in international relations and she had Madeline Albright teach a class.
The article never really discusses the elephant in the room--adjuncts aren't meant to be full time professors. In fact many schools ban them from teaching more than a class or two at a time to prevent them from being full time. The job is designed to be a part time side gig. It's not meant to be a way to earn a living.
The people this article talks about are treating adjunct professors as a tenure track gig when the entire system is not-so-gently telling them the opposite.
The real issue is that PhD programs are like vampires on grad students and then pump them out into a world where they aren't anywhere near enough jobs. That's why these people are pretending adjunct jobs are full time professor gigs.
I agree there's a place for a few adjunct positions for people with unique experience to teach without being a full-time professor. If they were used appropriately, they would not be making up 65% of the faculty as they are at some universities.
The flip side of there being an oversupply of newly minted PhDs is that there must be a commensurately high demand for PhD-level courses. What's filling that demand when the university refuses to hire full time professors?
Just because they want it does not mean that they should get it. This is like taking walk on roles as extras or bit parts in Hollywood and complaining you can't live on it. The world is saying you aren't going to be a professional actor.
Worse, tenure track positions aren't very rarely hired from adjunct ranks. So doing this isn't really increasing their chances.
The answer to this problem is for these people to come to their senses and quit.
>The flip side of there being an oversupply of newly minted PhDs is that there must be a commensurately high demand for PhD-level courses. What's filling that demand when the university refuses to hire full time professors?
PhD's don't typically have a lot of courses and they typically go to school for free.
That doesn't change the fact that people who are paying up to $60,000 per year for an education should not be having classes taught by people who can't hold office hours because they don't have an office.
The demand for college education at all levels is the highest it's ever been, it should follow that the demand for professors should be high. Instead universities are charging premium prices and delivering a substandard product and administrators are pocketing the difference.
We're not talking about making a cheap cell phone and some of your calls get dropped, these institutions are charged with advancing and proliferating all human knowledge. It seems like the sort of thing we should care if they do a good job of it.
We keep automating the jobs for which they are well suited.
It's the question I love posing for people: we have a generation of people who are well trained in synthesizing information well, but are not well suited for technology jobs. We are automating the jobs that these people did well -- paralegals and law, white collar administrative work, etc... You name it, I'll find a startup or internal group trying to automate it to avoid hiring more people.
Where are the new jobs that these people are supposed to do? The world may not "owe them anything," but we have a crisis coming if nobody can figure it out.
All these claims about the professional class being put out of work are based on a superficial view of the industries. Lawyers don't exist to spit out the law for you.
Any AI that can lawyer for you is advanced enough to write software itself.
We still haven't even automated repetitive jobs yet. Maybe these people's kids or grand kids will have to worry about it, but not them.
I have been personally responsible for automating dozens of jobs throughout my career. These weren't layoffs in most cases - these were people that would have been hired without this software.
Paralegals are becoming more rare precisely because lawyers can search more effectively, are they not? Due to the search , one lawyer can be more effective than two decades ago, no?
One secretary services multiple Vice Presidents and directors in many organizations, and handles extra duties on top of that.
It isn't eliminating all jobs - it's making one person as efficient as three, five, ten, and even more were a generation ago.
Word perfect revolutionized document production at law firms. Before you had to actually take a red pen to a document and write in changes. If someone else gave you a document, you'd have a secretary go word by word and underline changes. Now that stuff can be done in 3 seconds with a plugin in word.
So what happened? People exchange drafts like 10X as often because it is easier. Sure some sectaries have been lost. But it's increased the need for lawyers because more work is done that couldn't before. And laypeople produce probably 50x more documents than before email and word processing.
Legal research: before you'd look it up in a book that contained key cases. You'd find something or not. Now with Lexis and Westlaw giving you way more cases to look at it, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up researching more. People dig for a needle in a haystack.
And if you want to see how far we've got to go, legal research is still mostly done by having a human read the case and create keywords and classifications. It's still more accurate that Google is for legal issues. But I bet that won't last long. Frankly I'm shocked searching isn't better.
But most professionals aren't doing repetitive tasks a machine is better at. For lawyers, the only real easily picked fruit I see is document review. People are trying what we call "predictive coding" now. But those jobs were already outsourced to not-real lawyers who worked temp jobs.
I sure wouldn't want to be a data entry person or a secretary. I really really wouldn't want to be a worker in a factory in the third world.
But we are far away from software eating the professional world. Software has already taken the easy gains away from these types of jobs. The accountant isn't spending a lot of time crunching numbers.
To increase productivity by multiples now, you'll need artificial general intelligence. If you can do that, we are replaced anyway, I hope our corporate overlords are merciful.
The goal of technology is to make our lives better and easier. What's the endpoint of that? What's the goal? I'd imagine it's something like sitting on our asses all day doing whatever we actually want to do while robots tend to our needs.
The issue is, though, that so much of who we are and how we're seen in society is tied to our job - especially in the US. Those who don't have a job (often because they can't find one) are dismissed as 'lazy' or 'moochers'.
But what happens when there are actually significantly fewer jobs that need to be done than people to do them? What if we only need the engineers, scientists and mechanics to keep our robot slaves up and running, while everyone else can just reap the benefits?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/ivy-league...
http://necir.org/2014/02/06/new-analysis-shows-problematic-b...
"Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase."
What you see in colleges and universities, you see the same thing in corporations and almost every business organization in the world. This is a common problem.
Why this occurs is very logical. It stems from a natural drive for people to maximize wealth while minimizing work. Leaders acting rationally will minimize their own work and maximize wealth. Thus, the leader, by being in control of an organization, will structure it such that he meets this rational goal. The side effect is unfair distribution of wealth and work.
What's the solution? In theory, Communism. In practice, only early pre-civilization tribal cultures have had societies where leaders only get their fair share.
Large institutions are (in practice) the most communist organisations in the western world (as they are managed top-down with a great deal of government support), and yet they seem to exhibit the problems you describe more than many 'capitalist' organizations.
You are using a Marxist analysis which is characterized by biased, myopic comparisons, and thinking based on personal preferences and sentiments, as well as the Cohen fallacy, and (unsurprisingly) reaching a Marxist result.
One could say the same of modern cultures. I'm not talking about the quality of the leader, I'm referring to the amount of power he has to redirect wealth and work. The only difference between modern leaders and tribal is in pre-civilization cultures, leaders had very limited power because the concept of wealth has not been fully established; leaders in the modern age, however, derive power from wealth. Thus as a result leaders in tribes are more or less relatively equal in power with all the other members of the tribe. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_man_%28anthropology%29
>Large institutions are (in practice) the most communist organisations in the western world (as they are managed top-down with a great deal of government support), and yet they seem to exhibit the problems you describe more than many 'capitalist' organizations.
They do. I never said they didn't. I only said communism was a solution in theory as opposed to how in practice in doesn't work. Read what I said again.
>You are using a Marxist analysis which is characterized by biased, myopic comparisons, and thinking based on personal preferences and sentiments, as well as the Cohen fallacy, and (unsurprisingly) reaching a Marxist result.
Not only is this not true. But it is an unnecessary and veiled insult. I did not reach a marxist result. Read it again: The only two possible solutions was communism (which only works in theory, and has been shown to be flawed in practice) and some pre-civilization tribal culture, both of which are worse then the current system.
There is no need to make comments about my character by saying I'm biased or myopic. It makes me angry and makes you look bad. What if I said something along the lines of: "When someone sits on the top for too long they develop harsh and protective views to justify their superior and unfair positions." Would that be an accurate description of you? Maybe, maybe not, but either way totally unnecessary.
I don't see what's special about capitalism that causes pyramids (if anything, it seems more decentralized than a lot of other options). Pyramids seem more like a feature of large groups of people.
Just like how many horrible things have happened in capitalism. I'm not ignoring these things. Don't put words in my mouth. I'm presenting a reasonable explanation as to why there is wealth inequality in colleges: It's a feature of capitalism not exclusive to colleges. Let me make it more clear. I said the solution to this problem was either to switch to communism which only works in theory (and has been shown in most instances to be bad in practice) OR regress back to tribal like culture which is the only type of culture that has been show to have a relatively flat organizational structure in practice. Do either of these solutions sound appealing? No, They don't, and that's my point. There's no clear answer to this, capitalism is the best thing we've got right now but it is not perfect.
>I don't see what's special about capitalism that causes pyramids (if anything, it seems more decentralized than a lot of other options). Pyramids seem more like a feature of large groups of people.
This is not true. In nature when you look at early hunter-gatherers or tribes you see relatively flat structures with maybe one leader and everyone else being more or less equal. It is like this because one human can only hold so much power over another. You can think of this in terms of playground politics; can one child dictate the fate and actions of all the other children consistently? You can have leaders in playgrounds but these leaders can't tell all the children to start marching single file like the way leaders in north korea do it.
It is only at the dawn of civilization (or capitalism) do you see pyramid structures start to form. People in this age begin gaining huge, almost obscene amounts of unnatural power as lords, kings, queens and emperors and can command hundreds and thousands of people to build insane projects like great walls and huge pyramids.
How can one man hold so much power? Wealth. Once man gains the ability to save wealth you will get people who manage to store up obscene amounts of it and people who own a paltry amount. Now the rich man can pay the desperate poor man to do his bidding. In fact the rich man can employ thousands of poor people to do his bidding, but he'll probably need to employ managers to handle the load. What does that organizational structure look like to you? A pyramid. Wealth, money and capitalism leads directly to pyramids.
I shouldn't say that pyramids are a feature of capitalism. Pyramids are a feature of wealth inequality. Wealth inequality, in turn, is a feature of capitalism.
That's not to say I think capitalism is all bad. Excessive wealth leads to the ability to efficiently command human capital to build boeing 747s, the subway systems and other projects that benefit society as a whole. Being rich also leads to a huge amount of leisure time that allows people to stop foraging for food and develop hobbies like math, chemistry and science... therefore indirectly leading to the modern technological civilization as we know it today.
Make no mistake, society as we know it is built on capitalism, but this does not justify wealth inequality. Life is unfair.
2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
As for why she does it?
>> Sunk cost fallacy
I'm assuming this is based on the phrase "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". That all of her time has been teaching, so she might as well keep teaching. I'm also assuming you've never met someone who is actually passionate about their work. Is willing to work at 70% salary because funding is tight, or will take a pay cut to do something they love versus something they have little emotional investment in.
>> 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
I'm assuming here that you've never talked to anyone concerning their experience in getting a PhD. While many go on to academia, very little do it specifically to teach, many enjoy the prestige, pure research communities, and subject matter they study.
What the parent comment was saying, and something I'm quite familiar with, is that when you have invested a lot of time and money in getting a Phd, and then find the job prospects slim to none, you are likely not to just give up and take a different job outside your field because you have "sunk costs" into becoming an academic. Thus, you may take a job as an adjunct in hopes of getting to be a professor someday, even if your economic position may be better to just get a job in industry somewhere.
What's the alternative? Flipping burgers for the same pay?
Or do you imagine there are tons of industry jobs out there for folks without experience.. who will probably be considered overeducated but underqualified?
Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. This is a disservice to the students who are paying a fortune in tuition only to be taught by someone who, despite their best efforts, isn't given the resources to teach to the best of their ability.
I'd argue that the latter is a result of the former. The oversupply, enables universities to confidently eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track positions. The jobs will be filled despite being less attractive because there are just. so. many. newly minted PhDs all fighting over the same scraps.
The only limiting factor is that you do need to have a few tenured professors to get your name out there by publishing high profile papers. But there is only so much room in the high profile journals, so you really don't need that many of them. A sprinkle of graduates from one of the 2 or 3 top-ranked schools in their field will suffice.
To that end, I think the deeper problem is twofold: First, in order to support their own careers professors need graduate students. Many times as many graduate students as there are open positions that the professor will create by retiring. Second, schools aren't being honest with their students about this fact, and non-top-ranked schools in particular aren't being forthright about admitting, "We probably wouldn't hire one of our own graduates for a full time position, not when we can easily snap up one of the surplus doctors that Yale keeps churning out."
Eesh, right there in the 2nd sentence. WTH, people, why are you upvoting? I'm never going to learn to proofread if you'll even give me karma for a train wreck like that.
I taught briefly as a resume-builder. My wife did so to help out a friend who was taking over a class but not prepared to teach all of it; she later taught a restructured version by herself. Neither of us depended on it for a serious contribution to income.
But a friend of my wife's did the business of four classes at three colleges for a good while before she manage to catch on at a school prepared to offer her a tenure-track position. There is only so much work out there for an anthropologist.
In addition, you have a lot of adjunct faculty teaching for low compensation because they want to teach. Some work full time and want to keep their ties to the academic world. Some don't have a PhD so adjunct work is their only alternative if they want to teach at a research university. Some are taking time off to raise children, and with a well-paid spouse, they are in a position to teach for $4000 a class. Some are grad students trying to make enough to support themselves while writing a dissertation.
As for the others...good question. Many are holding out hope that one day they will get the magical tenure-track offer. It's wishful thinking in many humanities fields, to be honest.
They work for peanuts and a lottery ticket, not just peanuts.
I went to a "HYPS" school for grad school and postdoc (molecular biology). I wanted the typical tenure-track research position. At the end of my postdoc I had two interviews, one at at an ivy and the other at a very good state research university. Both jobs fell through for financial reasons (basically, both schools decided to withdraw funding for the position). At the time, my postdoc funding was running out and my sponsor suggested working at a startup in Cambridge. I took the startup job. It was a great job doing great research. However, after about 6 years, I decided that I needed to take care of aging parents and be closer to family. I quit the startup and moved to a place where there is essentially no biotech industry. There are some good schools in the area, but it's difficult to get back into the tenure-track research world as you get older (you can transition from industry to academia as an older person if you're "great", but I'm not great...I'm what I would call, "pretty good"...and a pretty good mid-to-late-40-year-old isn't getting tenure-track jobs at quality research universities). So, I'm geographically tied (by my choice). I work as an adjunct at a local university and as a full-time non-tenured faculty member at a local college (not a fancy school and no research). I also run a small consulting business. So, with 3 different jobs, I have cobbled together a salary that is similar to what I had in the biotech world (probably a little less than the biotech job).
A lot of the details in the Atlantic story rang true. I meet students from my adjunct position at the library (not by my car!). I keep almost everything in electronic format (including electronic scanning of student labs) so that I minimize lugging papers from school to school. The full-time faculty where I am an adjunct are quite nice, but you still get that vibe that you're a 2nd class citizen. If I want to write a student a recommendation, it's not a trivial endeavor to go to the adjunct school to get the proper letterhead paper. However, I've just downloaded the school's logo and made my own electronic version of their letterhead.
I think I'm in a better position than many of my colleagues. I'm still making decent money in aggregate. I think some of the adjuncts have very difficult lives, living check to check. And the ones who aren't very good at teaching (or who don't get along with the full-timers) feel like they're under constant threat of getting fired.
This sounds pretty outlandish, but just recently we saw an attempt at this very thing in Oklahoma[0]. While that didn't succeed, if a massive donation was tied to a professor's dismissal, would every university resist that? Florida officials are now banned from using the phrase "climate change"[1]; it's also not inconceivable that state schools could be subject to similar restriction.
[0]http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/oil-tycoon...
[1]http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article1298372...