8 ms·

Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight of the Adjunct Professor

• pkaye 11y ago
  My question is why are people so insistent on following the academic route with all the sacrifices it sometimes entails. I know everyone has ideals of what they want to do in life some sometimes you have to adjust to the reality. Why not work in the non academic field in the same speciality if there are more opportunities and better pay? Maybe this will even help correct the supply/demand curve for professors in the long run.
  • munin 11y ago
    > if there are more opportunities and better pay? Frequently there aren't. The subject of this article is an artist, so cue your STEM lord "do you want fries with that" jokes now. However, this can occur even in fields like math and computer science. You graduate with a PhD in math and a specialization in topology. Who will hire you to do that? No-one. Plenty of people will hire you to do something you can do, but what if you really want to continue research in your specialty? I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?" So if you want to work in your own specialty, you might need to work in academia.
    • EliRivers 11y ago
      so cue your STEM lord... The term is now "STEM Master Race" :)
    • g8gggu89 11y ago
      What are you doing with programming languages exactly??
      • jonsterling 11y ago
        Presumably working on their syntax and semantics. PL is a pretty broad field that encompasses proof theory, formal logic, language design, compiler design, etc.
      • munin 11y ago
        Formal methods and verification, analysis, compiler technology, type systems, concurrency, and education. Why?
    • jonsterling 11y ago
      Well put.
    • throwaway999888 11y ago
      > I'm working on a PhD in CS with a specialization in programming languages. Google came to do a PhD recruitment day and essentially asked "so what kind of PhD are you getting, machine learning or systems?" and we said "programming languages" and the reply was "wow what is that?" This explains Go. :-)
      • 762236 11y ago
        Is it me, or is there quite a delta between theoretical language specialists, and engineers that work with languages day to day (and thus who use it as a form of socialization with their peers, with all of the cognitive/psychological/epistemological fallout of this). Go-lang comes from people with experience developing systems in collaborative teams.
        • Avshalom 11y ago
          Go also comes from people who have been comfortably ensconced in research labs for their entire lives... which --if you've ever had to deal with the "completely reasonable" jury rigging found in every research lab ever-- explains a lot about why the authors think it's reasonable to expect the every user to re-write the same boiler plate crap until the end of time rather than just bite the bullet and write a more complicated compiler/OS/program.
          • throwaway999888 11y ago
            There's not much difference between an academic language designer being a sourpuss that his ideas/language is not appreciated outside of his circle, and Rob Pike being a sourpuss that "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant"[1]. When you think about it. [1] http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf http://herpolhode.com/rob/utah2000.pdf
    • dataminded 11y ago
      How about teaching K-12? Plenty of districts are experiencing teacher shortages.
      • munin 11y ago
        I've investigated that. Two problems: 1. Your PhD is not a credential that will get you a K-12 teaching job. You need a certificate that usually accompanies a Masters program in K-12 education. That's right, it's back to grad school to earn a MA alongside your PhD 2. The pay is bad. Really, really bad. And the places where teachers are needed is not where you want to live (or where anyone wants to live) and the conditions are not "ideal" and absolutely no one wants you there: not the other teachers, not the administration, not the community, not the parents, and not the students
        • Turing_Machine 11y ago
          "The pay is bad. Really, really bad." No, it isn't, or at least not everywhere. At one time teacher salaries were, in fact horrible. Now they mostly range from "meh" to "pretty good". They vary a lot from state to state, and from district to district within states. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/15/how-much-teachers-get-paid-state-by-state/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/... By comparison, the median income for a person with any bachelor's degree is about $50,000. Most of the teacher salaries shown are right in that neighborhood. Teacher salaries do tend to be lower in places like (say) Mississippi than (say) California, but living in Mississippi is also a lot cheaper than living in California.
          • munin 11y ago
            > By comparison, the median income for a person with any bachelor's degree is about $50,000 Yes, but if you have a PhD, in a field like CS (which is what we were talking about), these numbers are crazy. Why would I take a job teaching Trigonometry in rural Spotsylvania county (which Google wants to spell check to Transylvania and let me tell you, it is not that wrong) making $50k a year when I could be living in not-rural-the-South making five times that writing Javascript for whoever? The suggestion of K-12 ed is so close to "adjunct" that it might as well be the same. The GP suggestion of doing K-12 ed with a PhD is still off the mark because you don't get a PhD because you want to lecture - you get it because you want to do research. The "teaching" that most PhDs value is mentoring junior researchers - you don't do this as an undergraduate lecturer, and you especially don't do this as an underpaid babysitter.
  • jccalhoun 11y ago
    I think a lot of us think that we will beat the odds. We see people struggling to get tenure track jobs and say "well, that won't happen to me." Of course, now it has happened to me and my friends that have gotten tenure track jobs aren't happy. I'm giving it one more year to find a tenure track job before I give up. (Of course part of the problem is my degree is in the humanities so I don't really know what I'm qualified for...)
    • niels_olson 11y ago
      Pro tip for life: if you ever think you can beat the odds, you should take more math.
      • Turing_Machine 11y ago
        Pro tip for life: if you think math/science/tech jobs are immune to drastic layoffs and structural unemployment, you should take more history.
        • niels_olson 11y ago
          I like to think of this as the niche problem: people love specialization, but avoid getting yourself into a niche that's so small it gets plastered over.
• Shivetya 11y ago
  No offense, but if you are in a saturated field then unionizing and making some of your fellows even more expensive will simply open up opportunities for others or even lock many out. I do not understand why people expect to be rewarded for making their career choice knowing full well the field is saturated. The ultimate goal is to get tenured which they should consider that the time invested is the payoff just as with any other career. You don't start in the upper half or top, you pay your dues.
  • sokoloff 11y ago
    If I look at medicine as a comparison, when I graduated undergrad (early 90s), medicine was a field with seemingly very strong prospects. Fast forward 20 years, and the prospects in medicine don't look nearly as good, and certainly not when weighed against the investment (in time and money) and risk (malpractice, regulatory insanity, etc) I wonder if the same thing happened in academia. If you look at the fundamentals a decade ago and continuing even now (consumption rate growing faster than the consumption of medical services, tuition rates rising MUCH faster than inflation), it's reasonable to think that the industry is growing quickly. Whether or not it ought to be, and whether or not that's sustainable, I can understand a counter argument that even if the field is saturated now, if the industry growth continues as implied by the fundamentals, it could still be a good choice. Now, if my teenage offspring ask for advice, I'd tell them to pick something that's meaningful and interesting to them and then double-check that they can survive on the value they create. If so, don't go chasing further monetary value.
    • yummyfajitas 11y ago
      The same did not happen in academia. When I was an undergrad (approx 15 years ago) I was well aware that it's a tournament - life is wonderful if you win, otherwise life sucks. A quick google image search suggests this Petrovich guy is about the same age as me. A lot of folks are in academia because they simply can't admit to themselves that they lost. See also people employed as an actor/waiter or musician/barista. Living that lifestyle is a personal choice.
      • 11y ago
• darkmarmot 11y ago
  the better question is how college costs continue to sky rocket in an environment with an oversupply of labor?
  • jjoonathan 11y ago
    Because college is how the growing pool of labor competes for the shrinking pool of meal tickets.
  • eveningcoffee 11y ago
    Maybe costs do not raise, but revenues do?
  • gozur88 11y ago
    Because goods and services cost what people are willing to pay, not what they cost to produce. The value of your college degree is based on the institution's accept/reject ratio, not on the quality of instruction (which is nearly impossible to quantify). It means starting a new prestigious college is nearly impossible. Without excess applicants to reject, a new college doesn't rank well, which in turn means less interest by students and parents. The upper tier colleges can charge pretty much whatever they want without fear of competition. That also means colleges put a lot more effort into attracting students than actually educating them. As long as there is an excess of people wanting adjunct positions, institutions can get away with a high-low strategey - a handful of well known full professors and an army of starving adjuncts.
    • niels_olson 11y ago
      It's easy to quantify quality of instruction. Just longitudinal analysis. Messy? Probably. But in serious industries, it would be done. But higher education administrators would rather listen to instructors than students and instructors really don't like the idea. If parents had to pay directly for college, I suspect longitudinal tracking of students to assess influence of prior instructors would start in a hurry. As a med student, I presented a poster at a medical education conference. The most common comment was "Woah! Data!" A brief tour of the faculty presentations indicated this field of study is a protectionist racket. Nothing good will come of it.
• scarface74 11y ago
  Why am I suppose to feel bad for these adjunct professors? They seem to fall into two categories - either they are full time professionals who take on a teaching job just as supplemental income, or they chose field and/or degree for which there weren't a lot of job opportunities. I would never support my child getting a degree in Ancient Chinese Art History, I don't care if it is their "passion". As Scott Adams said "Passion Is Bullshit."
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • jlgaddis 11y ago
    I was an adjunct for a few years and I fit into neither of your "categories". When I taught my first class, I did it as a personal favor to the department chair, whom I had a good relationship with (I'd often come in to different classes and speak to the students about our field and such). A few days before classes began, the instructor for this particular course "fell through" and she asked me if I would be willing to teach the course. After some thought, I gave in and agreed. I ended up teaching several different courses of a few years and I didn't do it for either of the reasons you mentioned. While teaching the first course, I found that I genuinely enjoyed it. At the end of that term, I received my (anonymous) evaluations from my students and they were outstanding. I was compared to (and rated much better) than their previous instructors, many of whom I considered friends. I agreed to keep teaching. I certainly didn't do it for money. I was only paid for the hours I spent in the classroom -- no pay for "prep time", the hours I spent grading papers, etc. All things considered, I earned less than $10 per hour. I could have made more working at a fast-food restaurant -- and probably been less stressed out. I taught because I truly enjoyed it and became, to use your word, quite "passionate" about it. To this day, I remain friends with a lot of my former students -- many of whom now work in my field. I've even had the pleasure of working with a few of them professionally. It feels good to see them "grow up" and to have them thank me, years later, for making a difference in their education. Sometimes I actually miss it but, then again, I never did it "just as supplemental income".
    • scarface74 11y ago
• jseliger 11y ago
  I'm an adjunct, and I wrote about a somewhat similar article here: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including-other-humanists-love-to-hate-the-humanities/ http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including-ot.... WRT this one, I'm distressed to not see the words "supply" or "demand" appear. The more people are willing to be adjuncts, the worse the pay / conditions will be for adjuncts. I'm part of the problem! But my primary income also comes from being a consultant; I just like students and teaching.
  • trop 11y ago
    There's a lot to untangle here, and in your article. The supply/demand question reminds me of a seeming paradox about gentrification -- that a young professional (or artist) who moves to that up-and-coming neighborhood appears to be the one at fault, making the place more expensive, creating more churn, becoming another patron for the lifestyle shops. Similarly, it's tempting to blame the adjunct, as you suggest -- that by accepting the adjunct jobs they allow the system to survive. Your article also suggests blaming the careerist tenured academic for moral compromise: "The cost to the individual who manages to get tenure is low but the cost to the field as a whole is high." While I share your moral outrage, I see these phenomena -- whether the dilution of academia or the dilution of vital neighborhoods -- as a series of top-down structural choices. That gentrification is the result of opportunistic investment and regulatory capture of local governance. That starving adjuncts and uninspired professors are the result of a devaluing of a liberal arts education in the name of a bottom-line STEM/entrepreneur-centric view of what is valuable to society. That a get-your-act-together chiding of those screwed won't correct a system willfully rigged to take advantage of the idealist. All this to suggest that we shouldn't blame the victim, whether that is the adjunct or the badly taught and overcharged student, for having hope in teaching, learning, and an uneconomically rewarding practice.
• wheaties 11y ago
  As a former adjunct in math, this is a depressing but common phenomenon in lower tier schools. I remember my first pay check, walking up to the Dean and asking why there was a "0" missing. Turned out the "pay period" wasn't bi-weekly but bi-semester. I learned a lot that day. My career in software has been much more fulfilling
• santaclaus 11y ago
  This is super crazy, I didn't realize people tried to survive off adjunct teaching positions. In my grad school experience most adjunct/visiting faculty (e.g. Bjarne Stroustrup) were fairly senior industry figures who enjoyed teaching on the side.
  • goodcanadian 11y ago
    Indeed, the title "adjunct professor" used to be a fairly prestigious honour given to an expert in a field in exchange for some teaching. However, in lieu of paying teaching faculty properly, universities started handing out the title to anyone, and it has reduced its meaning greatly.
    • bobochan 11y ago
      Ssshh! Don't let my mom hear that. She framed the first appointment letter that I received as an adjunct and gained great book club credibility by being able to refer to "my son, the Ivy League professor." Don't tell the deans, but I would happily teach for free as long as I can keep making her that happy.
      • chrisbennet 11y ago
        I think I downvoted you by accident. I was trying to up vote you but those little arrows are tiny and close together on mobile. So sorry.
        • bobochan 11y ago
          Haha! No worries. Mom does not frame any of my Hacker News karma points, so it is all good.