How Much Does an Adjunct Professor Make? The Dirty Secrets of Higher Education Today

if you've attended a college or university in say the past 10 years in the u.s then you've been part of a course that's been taught by an adjunct instructor today only 25 percent of college and university courses in the us are actually taught by the traditional tenure track professors you can do the math that tells you that 75 percent of the courses that are taught today are taught by part-timers year-to-year contracts or sometimes people that just teach one course a semester at the school [Music] lisa i want some more and it's estimated that most of these part-timers earn around minimum wage when you add up all the hours of class time class preparation grading and any responsibilities like office hours that schools would ask of them so they could have skipped their phd and gone straight to asking you would you like fries with that or for philosophy majors why would you like fries with that hey but you're going to be still paying full price for those college classes taught by part-timers at minimum wage and the student loans that are going to be with you forever yep no discount on those this is the deep dark dirty secret of higher education today but there are solutions so tap the like button and let's find out what they are james callahan and this is the do-over show where we uncover the problems that get in the way of living life the way it should be lived and i have a confession to make i am an adjunct instructor i've taught at eight or nine colleges and universities public and private undergrad grad and professional so let me start off with the story once upon a time i taught at wheaton college in grad school and i was asked by the graduate dean if i would offer a special winter course one week intensive for grad students who needed to fulfill a requirement i said of course extra money on day one of the course there were almost 40 students there it was over enrolled since it was supposed to be capped at 20 and i learned that almost everyone was paying for this course wheaton grad school at the time didn't have a lot of scholarship money so that meant that almost all of the 40 students enrolled were paying the 2 000 per course rate you can do the math with almost 40 students that was around 80 000 for one week for one course during a break later on that first day the dean stopped by and asked me how it was going i looked in the room and counted the number of people involved and i said that's 80 000 right there and you're paying me 2 000 any chance we can renegotiate my rate and he smiled and said no that's the market and that is the market today because there is a surplus of people with terminal degrees phds and masters in their academic fields who would love to do teaching and research at colleges and universities but there just aren't that many jobs being hired for college and universities can function as hedge funds and real estate trusts running their endowments and educating kids on the side a school can hire five six or seven adjuncts to teach the same number of courses for around twenty thousand dollars that they would have to pay a tenured faculty member eighty to one hundred thousand dollars to teach over that same academic year and here are the real numbers of adjunct life today nearly 25 percent of adjunct faculty rely on public assistance and 40 percent struggle to cover basic household expenses according to a new report from the american federation of teachers nearly one-third of adjuncts earn less than 25 000 a year and that puts them below the federal poverty line for a family of four and another third say that they make less than fifty thousand dollars with most of that coming from another job a primary job a real job lisa i want some more the average amount any given adjunct is compensated for a course ranges from just under two thousand dollars to a few schools that pay as much as just over seven thousand dollars but the average pay for almost half of the adjuncts that work is about thirty five hundred dollars per course and the average course rate throughout the united states including community colleges is just over two thousand dollars per course now no one is trying to solve this problem because no one in higher education really thinks it's a problem that needs to be solved it's their market and with more and more phds and masters students applying for jobs 300 applications for the average job opening at colleges and universities today and bricks and mortar universities with lower enrollment pressure well they don't see a need to solve a problem that they don't think is their problem you hear of sporadic efforts at unionization for adjuncts sometimes backed by seiu that's also trying to back grad student union efforts and there's significant pushback from colleges and stronger universities to the unionization effort and they spend a lot of money to try to eliminate the pressure of collective bargaining here here's a little interesting thing in the catholic higher education tradition with its social justice emphasis many catholic schools have actually eliminated adjunct unions that were formed 10 15 years ago and there's the caveat of a rather perverse position by tenured faculty who are trying to protect the sanctity of higher education and they say that yes adjuncts are easily exploited so let's cap the number of courses any given adjunct can make now it doesn't lower the number of courses that are taught by adjuncts it just makes it harder for individual adjuncts to teach more than one course per semester at that school i know some people that work at two three or four regional colleges or universities just trying to cobble together part of a living as an adjunct while tenured faculty think well they're doing their part to change the world and into this mess steps a professional academic association called the modern language association you know by the acronym mla and you've probably used their form of citation on a college paper sorry about that and i have to tell you the mla's paper on part-time faculty compensation is systematically ignored in higher education and you probably haven't heard these numbers so let's take a good look at what everybody is ignoring the interesting thing is that it's not about what adjuncts need to survive by a generic standard of living in an area but what job or service they provide to the college or university to the students and the life of higher education it's not based on generic numbers and it's not an unreasonable appeal to some virtuous they're so valuable they deserve to make a million dollars kind of dream world that's a fantasy but measured by the reality of what higher education pays people like them to do that work equal work equal pay is their baseline so here are some of their details from the paper entitled mla recommendation on minimum per course compensation for part-time faculty members that's a catchy title recognizing many variables they go into the per course per credit or full-time equivalent and they say that's where we'll start good some of the components that go into calculating a salary that they think an adjunct should receive would include the workload number of contract hours whether it's a three or four hour course of the school university the class size that's good whether advising is required in addition to office hours the amount of grading that would be required because some required courses and adjuncts teach some of those courses have higher levels of more labor-intensive interaction with students or even lab work and then interacting with students and what's expected of them other duties include recruitment i always get calls from admission departments saying hey we'd like to send a prospective student to your class and when they're there could you impress them please with an awesome class i say of course whether or not you have supervisory roles or responsibility whether or not they expect you to do additional research which does what well it helps you but it also ups the reputation of the school that they have people producing active research the academic term whether it's a semester or quarter the years of experience or professional experience whether in the field itself or at that school and the degree that's a significant measure why because it's so generic and usually tier structures are built on how long you've been doing this and what's your terminal degree other things like do you offer health and retirement benefits to part-time workers at the college or university and if not can you kick in a little bit so that you can bring them up to some level that you would compensate someone else for and then whether or not there are incentives involved in the contract most contracts are literally course by course semester by semester some part-timers have a one-year appointment that's great most schools don't want to do that because you are expendable and unless you're awesome like on rate my professor like i am then they're not going to want you back a second year let alone a second semester all right so here's their conclusion following a review of best practices in various institutions the mla recommends minimum compensation of 11 400 per semester course eleven thousand four hundred dollars i have never heard of someone making that kind of money teaching one course i have never been offered anything close to that for teaching at a college or university never so what's going to happen because of the mla recommendations well probably not much but i've done a few little things to try to push the envelope and try to move the discussion forward hey and i've also made a video of what adjuncts really hope for in teaching as an adjunct and you can check out that video here so not long ago i was approached by an area college asking if i would teach a course i'd said i'd love to the first thing the department chair said was great compensation is twenty five hundred dollars and i said is that negotiable and the chair responded no twenty five hundred dollars that's not negotiable i asked how many students will be enrolled are office hours required what kind of departmental responsibilities would you like me to assume do i have to be present for departmental meetings faculty meetings do you expect me to attend faculty events on campus or special events on campus and the chair said all of that's negotiable i said but the 2500 isn't negotiable and he said you're right and this is how it is for most adjuncts at colleges and universities just about everything is negotiable except the money so whatever you think about what adjuncts make or should be making remember if you've been in a college or university for the past 10 or 15 years adjuncts have been a huge part of the college and university experience for you it's actually affected the credibility the significance of the degree that you work so hard and paid so much to earn so what can you do about it well you can start to ask questions if you're a college or university student now you can ask your advisor hey what's the role of adjuncts here if you're an alumnus of the school and you get that call from the alumni association about paying it forward because you had such a great time at that school you want to make it possible for someone else you can say that's great where's my money going to go and can i ask what about adjuncts at the school how many do you have how many are using how much do you pay them believe me just raising that simple question about adjuncts at your school to the alumni association will get from the alumni association to the academic dean it will because at this point the best we can do is to raise the profile that as we are trying to manage the shifting economic reality and the prominence of higher education within life in the u.s whether or not the adjunct discussion can be part of what's going to happen in the future and thanks so much for being part of the do-over show and please tap the like button it really helps an adjunct instructor like me hey and while you're down there why don't you subscribe and bring the notification bell so you don't miss an episode of the do-over show every monday and friday i'm so glad you found me and i found you thanks [Music]

Channel: James Callahan - The Do-Over Show

Views: 18,500

Keywords: professor (job title), teacher (profession), school, university, job (quotation subject), college (tv genre), teacher training college, student, campus, whats it like being a teacher?, whats it like being a professor?, how do i become, how do i become a teacher?, how to i become a professor?, how much do professors get paid?, adjunct, part time professor, graduation, education, students, study, adjunct professor, adjunct professor salary, adjunct professor poverty

Id: KZ742ImLyvE

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021