
Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight of the Adjunct Professor - benbreen
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/17/459707022/low-pay-long-commutes-the-plight-of-the-adjunct-professor
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pkaye
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
> 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.

~~~
g8gggu89
What are you doing with programming languages exactly??

~~~
jonsterling
Presumably working on their syntax and semantics. PL is a pretty broad field
that encompasses proof theory, formal logic, language design, compiler design,
etc.

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jseliger
I'm an adjunct, and I wrote about a somewhat similar article here:
[http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including-
ot...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/04/03/why-do-people-including-other-
humanists-love-to-hate-the-humanities/).

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
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.

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scarface74
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."

~~~
jlgaddis
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
So it was for the enjoyment -- there is nothing wrong with that. I also did a
part time "job" that paid almost nothing compared to my real job, but was for
"passion". But I wasn't crazy enough to make a career out of it like the
subject of the article.

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wheaties
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
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
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
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
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
Haha! No worries. Mom does not frame any of my Hacker News karma points, so it
is all good.

------
Shivetya
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
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.

~~~
analog31
Medicine is great if you have the money to invest in a medical related
business. The degree grants you access to those opportunities. More than half
of all doctors are self employed. They own the malpractice insurance
companies. They hire people to take care of the red tape.

Academics can start businesses, but they don't have unique access to business
opportunities.

~~~
nradov
In the US the number of self employed physicians is rapidly declining. The
overhead of dealing with billing, practice management, and EHRs means that
medical offices need economies of scale to survive. More and more physicians
are becoming regular W-2 employees of hospitals, payers, and large integrated
provider groups. Fortunately the unemployment rate for licensed physicians is
effectively 0.

~~~
analog31
Maybe that's good news. I have suspected that the rats nest of doctor owned
business entities is a significant driver of health care costs, because it's
impossible to figure out where the money is actually going.

The doctors will still have "insider" investment opportunities -- in my
locale, they own the provider groups as shareholders.

I will admit that I favor a government provided health care system, where
medical training is free (maybe even for nurses, dental assistants, etc.) and
everybody works for the government on a decent professional salary.

------
darkmarmot
the better question is how college costs continue to sky rocket in an
environment with an oversupply of labor?

~~~
gozur88
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
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.

