7 ms·

The Cost of an Adjunct

42 points by jcater 11y ago

OneOneOneOne 11y ago
Not trying to offend... but why do these teachers work for so little? This seems like an oversupply scenario. There has to be some other factor present.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  1) Sunk cost fallacy. 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
  - therobot24 11y ago
    Not always. My wife is an adjunct at two different colleges. She would love to be full time, not just for pay or benefits, but because it would mean that her opinions and class proposals would actually be taken seriously by the department. 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.
    - jrs235 11y ago
      I've heard it said that it's suppose to be "those who can, teach; those who can't, do". Doing something is often easier than teaching it to others.
      - victorhn 11y ago
        You would be surprised how many teachers don't know how to do practical tasks or be competitive enough to be employed on the public sector.
    - nowarninglabel 11y ago
      I think you are mis understanding "Sunk cost fallacy". 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.
      - rconti 11y ago
        Well, you need to pay the massive student loan bills somehow, and you've been studying something you are interested in and enjoy. 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?
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      I presume what eli_gottlieb meant by "sunk cost fallacy" is more like this: "I've spent X years chasing tenure; if I bail on academia now, I'll never get it (and therefore waste those X years), but if I keep trying, I might make it."
  - pcurve 11y ago
    Yep, and hope of securing a tenure track position, which is next to impossible these days. At least for those in STEM, there are post-doc positions that pay more than adjunct.
- imgabe 11y ago
  Some are chasing tenure-track positions of which there are fewer and fewer, but to get one requires staying active in academia. Some are industry professionals who may teach on the side for extra income or because they really want to teach. 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.
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    > Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. 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."
    - bunderbunder 11y ago
      "Eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track position" 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.
- cafard 11y ago
  Possibly because one enjoys it and finds one class per semester or year not to burdensome. Or one may be trying to break into the tenured world. 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.
  - santaclaus 11y ago
    How likely is one to land a tenure track position based on teaching, though? I mean, most professors have to teach if they aren't buying out their teaching load, but 90% of the tenure decision is publications and grants, no?
    - bachmeier 11y ago
      Depends on the school and the field. Some fields don't have grants. Some schools (a smaller number than in the past) have minimal research requirements, and teaching, working with students, and service are a much bigger part (even 100%) of the tenure decision.
    - cafard 11y ago
      I am confident that my wife's friend published, and I expect that those adjuncts who are trying to make it onto the tenure track are publishing or trying hard to do so.
- bachmeier 11y ago
  You have to be careful when interpreting the numbers. Although the adjunct numbers are large, the number that are paid really low wages is considerably less. Adjunct faculty in business, law, etc. are often paid well. You can live pretty well on a full-time, non-tenure track wage if you are an economist. $80K and up is common. 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.
- giaour 11y ago
  Once you leave academia for an unrelated job, you're out for good. There's no way to get a tenure-track job when you've spent a couple years working in a different field, but that possibility still exists if you're teaching at a University, even as an adjunct. They work for peanuts and a lottery ticket, not just peanuts.
- busyant 11y ago
  I am just one data point, but here's how I ended up in a position similar to that described in the article. 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.
- ja27 11y ago
  I don't know. My wife taught as an adjunct briefly but we finally had to set the rule that she couldn't accept an adjunct contract that would lose money for us. That's right, they pay music adjuncts so little that gas for a 20-mile round trip, parking, etc. cost more than her pay. They could have made it work if they'd move classes so she was only on campus Tue/Thurs but they insisted on MWF and TueThur classes the same semester. Even when she taught an on-line class, she had to be on campus 2 days a week which we didn't factor into the cost.
zcdziura 11y ago
My question is: if my (outrageous) tuition bill isn't going towards paying my professors a livable wage, then were is all of that money going?
- imgabe 11y ago
  Administrative salaries, new buildings, fancier dorms.
  - edgyswingset 11y ago
    In many cases, the University doesn't have legal authority to divert funds wherever they like.
    - imgabe 11y ago
      Someone, or some group of someones, does have that authority, and they have not chosen to prioritize hiring well-compensated, full-time professors.
      - HarryHirsch 11y ago
        But the students don't mind, and that's the elephant in the room.
        drmilsurp 11y ago
        When the administrators became executives, the students became customers.
- rndmize 11y ago
  Damn right. I choked on the "...as colleges attempt to rein in costs" bit. Last I heard, prices for private colleges are somewhere in the 60k range now (up from ~40k 10 years ago I believe?) and Jerry Brown is duking it out with the UC system over tuition increases.
cousin_it 11y ago
Possibly dumb question: why don't they unionize?
- cafard 11y ago
  At some places they have. I know that George Washington University's adjuncts, at least in the School of Professional Studies, belong to an SEIU local. (If they want--the school is located in Virginia, which is a right-to-work state.) However, unionization drives do face many difficulties.
  - mtbcoder 11y ago
    GWU is located in Washington, DC, which as far as I know, doesn't have "right to work" laws as neighbouring Virginia does.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  I've often asked this question. Why doesn't every worker from every field form a union? It is always better to negotiate as a group then as an individual.
imgabe 11y ago
It would be interesting if US News & World Report changed their ranking algorithm to heavily factor in "Percentage of classes taught by adjuncts". I know everyone complains about the methodology of the rankings, but almost every college except for the few who are consistently in the top seem to go out the way to improve their position. It could possibly reverse this situation quickly.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/01/adjuncts_in_american_universities_u_s_news_should_penalize_colleges_for.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/01/adjunct...
- rhino369 11y ago
  But nobody knows for certain if adjuncts are actually worse. 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.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    The people the article is talking about do not want to be adjuncts. They want the tenure-track gig. The problem is universities have stopped offering those positions in favor of only hiring adjuncts. 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?
crimsonalucard 11y ago
This is a common problem in any capitalist economy. Wealth tends to aggregate toward the top of the pyramid while people at the buttress, the people who do the actual work, get shafted. 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.
- nickff 11y ago
  In practice, pre-civilization cultures had some of the most rapacious, kleptocratic, arbitrary, and vendictive leaders ever. Modern tribes in many countries exhibit similar behaviour. 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.
  - crimsonalucard 11y ago
    >In practice, pre-civilization cultures had some of the most rapacious, kleptocratic, arbitrary, and vendictive leaders ever. Modern tribes in many countries exhibit similar behaviour 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 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.
Lavery 11y ago
Since many of the other angles here have been covered already, I'll just point out that fair pay and benefits aren't the only thing absent when universities move towards a heavily adjuncted workforce. One additional vulnerability of adjuncts is that without the protection from being fired that's part of a tenured position, political (or whatever people have decided to make political these days) speech could be held hostage by threatening someone's job. 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-harold-hamm-wanted-scientists-dismissed-dean-s-e-mail-says http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/oil-tycoon... [1]http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article12983720.html http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article1298372...

42 points by jcater 11y ago

Not trying to offend... but why do these teachers work for so little? This seems like an oversupply scenario. There has to be some other factor present.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
1) Sunk cost fallacy. 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
- therobot24 11y ago
  Not always. My wife is an adjunct at two different colleges. She would love to be full time, not just for pay or benefits, but because it would mean that her opinions and class proposals would actually be taken seriously by the department. 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.
  - jrs235 11y ago
    I've heard it said that it's suppose to be "those who can, teach; those who can't, do". Doing something is often easier than teaching it to others.
    - victorhn 11y ago
      You would be surprised how many teachers don't know how to do practical tasks or be competitive enough to be employed on the public sector.
  - nowarninglabel 11y ago
    I think you are mis understanding "Sunk cost fallacy". 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.
    - rconti 11y ago
      Well, you need to pay the massive student loan bills somehow, and you've been studying something you are interested in and enjoy. 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?
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    I presume what eli_gottlieb meant by "sunk cost fallacy" is more like this: "I've spent X years chasing tenure; if I bail on academia now, I'll never get it (and therefore waste those X years), but if I keep trying, I might make it."
- pcurve 11y ago
  Yep, and hope of securing a tenure track position, which is next to impossible these days. At least for those in STEM, there are post-doc positions that pay more than adjunct.
imgabe 11y ago
Some are chasing tenure-track positions of which there are fewer and fewer, but to get one requires staying active in academia. Some are industry professionals who may teach on the side for extra income or because they really want to teach. 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.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  > Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. 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."
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    "Eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track position" 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.
cafard 11y ago
Possibly because one enjoys it and finds one class per semester or year not to burdensome. Or one may be trying to break into the tenured world. 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.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  How likely is one to land a tenure track position based on teaching, though? I mean, most professors have to teach if they aren't buying out their teaching load, but 90% of the tenure decision is publications and grants, no?
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    Depends on the school and the field. Some fields don't have grants. Some schools (a smaller number than in the past) have minimal research requirements, and teaching, working with students, and service are a much bigger part (even 100%) of the tenure decision.
  - cafard 11y ago
    I am confident that my wife's friend published, and I expect that those adjuncts who are trying to make it onto the tenure track are publishing or trying hard to do so.
bachmeier 11y ago
You have to be careful when interpreting the numbers. Although the adjunct numbers are large, the number that are paid really low wages is considerably less. Adjunct faculty in business, law, etc. are often paid well. You can live pretty well on a full-time, non-tenure track wage if you are an economist. $80K and up is common. 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.
giaour 11y ago
Once you leave academia for an unrelated job, you're out for good. There's no way to get a tenure-track job when you've spent a couple years working in a different field, but that possibility still exists if you're teaching at a University, even as an adjunct. They work for peanuts and a lottery ticket, not just peanuts.
busyant 11y ago
I am just one data point, but here's how I ended up in a position similar to that described in the article. 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.
ja27 11y ago
I don't know. My wife taught as an adjunct briefly but we finally had to set the rule that she couldn't accept an adjunct contract that would lose money for us. That's right, they pay music adjuncts so little that gas for a 20-mile round trip, parking, etc. cost more than her pay. They could have made it work if they'd move classes so she was only on campus Tue/Thurs but they insisted on MWF and TueThur classes the same semester. Even when she taught an on-line class, she had to be on campus 2 days a week which we didn't factor into the cost.

zcdziura 11y ago

My question is: if my (outrageous) tuition bill isn't going towards paying my professors a livable wage, then were is all of that money going?

imgabe 11y ago
Administrative salaries, new buildings, fancier dorms.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  In many cases, the University doesn't have legal authority to divert funds wherever they like.
  - imgabe 11y ago
    Someone, or some group of someones, does have that authority, and they have not chosen to prioritize hiring well-compensated, full-time professors.
    - HarryHirsch 11y ago
      But the students don't mind, and that's the elephant in the room.
      - drmilsurp 11y ago
        When the administrators became executives, the students became customers.
rndmize 11y ago
Damn right. I choked on the "...as colleges attempt to rein in costs" bit. Last I heard, prices for private colleges are somewhere in the 60k range now (up from ~40k 10 years ago I believe?) and Jerry Brown is duking it out with the UC system over tuition increases.

cousin_it 11y ago

Possibly dumb question: why don't they unionize?

cafard 11y ago
At some places they have. I know that George Washington University's adjuncts, at least in the School of Professional Studies, belong to an SEIU local. (If they want--the school is located in Virginia, which is a right-to-work state.) However, unionization drives do face many difficulties.
- mtbcoder 11y ago
  GWU is located in Washington, DC, which as far as I know, doesn't have "right to work" laws as neighbouring Virginia does.
crimsonalucard 11y ago
I've often asked this question. Why doesn't every worker from every field form a union? It is always better to negotiate as a group then as an individual.

imgabe 11y ago

It would be interesting if US News & World Report changed their ranking algorithm to heavily factor in "Percentage of classes taught by adjuncts". I know everyone complains about the methodology of the rankings, but almost every college except for the few who are consistently in the top seem to go out the way to improve their position. It could possibly reverse this situation quickly.

jacobolus 11y ago
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/01/adjuncts_in_american_universities_u_s_news_should_penalize_colleges_for.html http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/01/adjunct...
rhino369 11y ago
But nobody knows for certain if adjuncts are actually worse. 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.
- imgabe 11y ago
  The people the article is talking about do not want to be adjuncts. They want the tenure-track gig. The problem is universities have stopped offering those positions in favor of only hiring adjuncts. 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?

crimsonalucard 11y ago

This is a common problem in any capitalist economy. Wealth tends to aggregate toward the top of the pyramid while people at the buttress, the people who do the actual work, get shafted. 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.

nickff 11y ago
In practice, pre-civilization cultures had some of the most rapacious, kleptocratic, arbitrary, and vendictive leaders ever. Modern tribes in many countries exhibit similar behaviour. 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.
- crimsonalucard 11y ago
  >In practice, pre-civilization cultures had some of the most rapacious, kleptocratic, arbitrary, and vendictive leaders ever. Modern tribes in many countries exhibit similar behaviour 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 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.

Lavery 11y ago

Since many of the other angles here have been covered already, I'll just point out that fair pay and benefits aren't the only thing absent when universities move towards a heavily adjuncted workforce. One additional vulnerability of adjuncts is that without the protection from being fired that's part of a tenured position, political (or whatever people have decided to make political these days) speech could be held hostage by threatening someone's job. 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-harold-hamm-wanted-scientists-dismissed-dean-s-e-mail-says http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-15/oil-tycoon... [1]http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article12983720.html http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article1298372...