You wonder why all the adjuncts stick around. It seems like many of them could do a lot better taking a job in industry and by the time many had spent up to a decade in grad school, you would think they would have some understanding of the academic job market.
- Because industry tends to be highly prejudicial towards PhD graduates who spent time in academia due to perceptions they're theoretical/not practical enough.
- Many PhD programs...especially a decade or two ago and earlier preferred admitting students straight out of undergrad rather than accept someone who worked a few years because departments/Profs felt younger PhD students are "more malleable" towards being influenced/shaped by academic advisors than older students. This also means many PhD students/graduates have had little/no post-college working experience outside academia. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
- Pursuing PhD studies/academia is an all-consuming 24/7 thing. One can't do it part-time in most academic departments and be given serious consideration by one's advisor/department. In fact, if they do find you're not prioritizing the PhD/advisor's pet research projects in your life highly enough, they can and have invited what they considered "less dedicated" grad students to leave early on.
- A strong culture within academia...especially those in PhD programs that leaving the PhD program or if one has finished a PhD, leaving academia is the equivalent of "failure" and "betrayal" of not only one's aspired-to profession, but one's very identity as a "serious scholar".
Many who left and even successfully transitioned to working in industry on the surface actually never fully came to terms with this loss of that identity. A relative who has been working as a successful attorney after dropping out of his PhD program decades ago still has this very issue to this day to some extent.
In some ways, it’s similar to what I’ve observed and heard about some former military officers/NCOs who were forced to leave due to mandatory retirement rules or the infamous “up or out” system for commissioned officers. One case I know of is that of an outwardly successful doctor at a major urban hospital(fellow in some specialty) who took care of my father at one point.
Seems like despite a stellar medical career, he was still wistful about being RIFed out of the USAF as he still hadn’t fully come to terms with the fact he’s no longer an USAF officer and specifically an F-15 pilot. My father was puzzled about that doctor’s seeming obsession with talking about his former military career as a military pilot before being RIFed sometime in the '90s.
This theme is one expressed by everyone who wrote about leaving their PhD programs/academia…especially in the Arts & Sciences fields. Engineering academics/PhD students like my older cousin had far less of an issue with this because this mentality isn’t nearly as strong in many Engineering departments including the elite top 10 programs.
Imagine if colleges paid adjuncts significantly more than $3000 per class. The problem is that even more people would want these jobs! As the article points out, the main “problem” with adjuncts is that there are too many of them as PhD programs fail to limit their enrollment when their students are having difficulty getting jobs. If adjuncts were rare, their salaries might be much higher. The excess supply of humanities PhDs has been with us for decades if not forever. Even in our (non-humanities) PhD program, we try to explain to students that the PhD job market should be considered a national market but there are many students who want to remain in the area and there are not good jobs for all of them in our city.
There’s also the issue that there are still many departments and some Profs, especially older ones who started their careers in a much rosier market who fail to acknowledge/grasp this reality or worse, give misleading statistics about tenure-track prospects.
Universities have strong incentive to lie/mislead prospective grad students as grad students are a great source of cheap labor in the form of TAs/RAs.
This was one reason why back when I was an undergrad, a few older college alums who were then enrolled in elite PhD programs have joked about how some subfields* have exceedingly easy(For competitive PhD programs) because they have a shortage of TAs to fill recitation/lower division course lecturer positions.
However, forget about getting a tenure-track position in those subfields because they are overwhelmingly flooded with a glut of graduating PhD students coming onto the market and a decade or two worth of PhD graduates who failed to gain a tenure track position or failed to get tenure and had to start over at another institution.
*I.e. Victorian Literature, Elite US Politics, etc.
Demonizing the schools is a silly notion. Blame a cruelly efficient market.
@LOUKYDAD I agree to some extent, but these schools are charities (non-profits) and are given enormous benefits and subsidies by society. We should expect more of them.
Those benefits and subsidies are bestowed to benefit students and ultimately society, not humanities phds.
I don’t think it is generally in the students’ interest (undergraduates) to have 1/2-to-2/3 of the ‘faculty’ as part-time.
While I understand that some adjuncts have a lot to offer in their field as experts, etc, I believe that many are not available to students to the extent FT faculty are, and don’t contribute as much to campus culture.
Perhaps the field of study (e.g. business) is relevant, but not applicable to my family. YMMV.
As said above, it’s a question to ask if you are considering a school with a high percentage of PT faculty.
PT faculty contribute to the student:faculty ratio (at a rate of 2-3/FTE).
Consider two schools, each with a 10:1 ratio.
One has 15% of faculty as PT; the other has 60% of the faculty PT.
IMO, the school with the lower percent of PT faculty is likely to offer more faculty access and interaction, which can be important to an undergraduate experience.
What does $3000 a course end up being in hourly pay? Not familiar with the workload.
In my business ppl sometimes do this, but it is hard to get these positions, even for little pay, as there are many folks to choose from. I always wanted to do it. I’m far too busy at my day job to do it now, but maybe later as I slow down a bit. Interesting thread bc I know very little about this!
I’d guess around $10-$25/hr depending on exp. The more you do a class the less prep time you need. 1st time would be at low end at best. In class about 50 hours. Prep time at least 50 hours. Grading and other related another 25-50 hours.
But some schools pay around $5k per class. That’s more like it.
As a high school teacher who has frequently taught community college classes over the years, I can confirm that these numbers are accurate. The typical rate of pay is $50-60 a class hour, no pay for office hours, prep, grading, etc… As someone who is married, my income falls subject to my husband’s income tax rate… I can’t afford to teach these community college classes. My childcare, transportation, time spent, and other costs mean I’m actually losing money over the course of a semester. It’s a bad situation for sure.
^^It also depends on the type of class. A huge percentage of freshman comp is taught by adjuncts, just on account of the huge numbers needed: virtually everyone has to take it (in most schools, for two semesters), and you cannot teach it in a huge lecture format. The grading for these classes is immensely time-consuming, especially because by grading, we mean “commenting and teaching.” Most papers go through three drafts. The first two get comments which help push the student towards better writing; the last, graded, one also has comments to help the student understand where the grade came from, and how to build on this for the next paper. Class prep is also time-consuming as again, this is a hands-on, always evolving type of class–we’re expected to follow the field, develop and use new approaches all the time, etc. You can’t just recycle from semester to semester. Adjunct pay was not great for the amount of time I put in.
I’m not a PhD and I got into this work sort of by accident 30 years ago. I’ve worked other jobs in that time, but I did go back to adjuncting full-time several years ago, for various reasons. I made a barely livable wage, but as said above, it was taxed at the rate my H made.
More recently, I teach as a NTT instructor full-time. Pay’s not super, but it does come with benefits, and I get a (shared) office! This involves teaching comp 4/4 and providing service to the department. It’s a huge amount of work, with no employment guarantee beyond a three year contract (renewable), but it is definitely a step up from adjuncting. My program, with backing from the University, has been expanding the number of NTT instructors to cut back on adjunct numbers the past few years. It’s not ideal, but it’s definitely a step up.
I just did the math to be sure, $50 a class hour comes out to $2250 for a 15 week class for the semester at the community college I’ve taught at in an affluent California suburb. It’s not enough money to make teaching that class worthwhile at all, not when you factor in the time spent in prep and grading. 5 classes a semester, which is a heavy teaching load, comes out to $22,500 for the school year, which is well below the poverty line. That teacher would be better served to go teach kindergarten honestly.
Don’t forget that they may be making substantial student loan repayments, which would have been on hold (albeit amassing interest) whilst they did their PhDs.
There is a reason why the standard response academics give when students approach them about becoming a professor is “don’t do it”.
I am one of these adjunct instructors! not in a business school though. The pay is poor, but I am fortunate to have a regular full time job and the class is just moonlighting for me (literally moonlighting, since it meets at night). My reasons for doing this right now are not financial. Having done all the different types of college teaching in the past (tenure track, adjunct full time, visiting, single course adjuncting) I think I have a pretty good handle on the situation.
Your child’s humanities adjunct may be the best teacher they ever have. Seriously, these people are doing it mainly for love of the subject-- because…food stamps?? Currently, my child’s best two professors (emailing on the weekends, meeting after class, complying joyfully with disability accommodations,etc) are the visiting prof and the adjunct prof. I can understand as a parent how it feels crazy paying high tuition for a college that has 50% or more adjuncts, but from my perspective there is little correlation between adjunct percentage and teaching quality…“rate my professor” is actually the most accurate indicator of quality in my experience, despite the presence of student trolls and the weird hot pepper rating. YMMV
(edited for punctuation)
Seems kind of counterintuitive to pay an independent contractor so little. I have never really delved into what actually costs so much at Uni’s though. It would seem like your instructors should make somewhat more than kitchen workers…or are they paid horribly too?
^ Don’t forget that at research universities, much of the actual teaching is done by PhD students on anywhere between zero and $25,000 per year. (plus free tuition)
Of course, it is a labor market whose ground rules tend to create something closer to a winner-take-all situation than in many other labor markets (winners = those who get tenure, losers = everyone else).
UCB- I don’t think academia is worse than many other markets. How many aspiring performers become Lady Gaga vs. teaching at a local music school and getting an occasional gig at a community music festival? How many aspiring athletes go pro and hit the big time vs. grinding it out in the minor leagues? How many visual artists earn a living from their art?
The pyramid is wide at the bottom and narrow at the top in many, many fields. What seems to be different is that parents (and society) somehow romanticize getting a doctorate (how many parents post on this board alone that their 17 year old is DEFINITELY getting a PhD) vs. the other fields. A reality check is useful across many dimensions.
Yes, arts and athletics are also examples of winner-take-all / high-Gini labor markets. However, how does the number of people working in them compare to the number working in many other jobs (e.g. marketing, accounting, engineering, construction trades, auto servicing and repair, manufacturing, transportation and materials moving, computing, military, health care, etc.) that are somewhat less of winner-take-all / high-Gini labor markets (i.e. where, even if you do not make it to the top of the pyramid, you can still earn a decent living)?
Of course, one could argue that the economy overall is trending toward a greater tendency to winner-take-all and increasing Gini coefficient. But that does not mean that all labor market sectors are similar to academia, arts, and athletics in this respect.