What do adjunct faculty positions pay

Night-school classes, once paid for through separate budget lines, have been "in-loaded", so have to be covered by departments often with the same budget as before! So, hardly the time to think about equity for people who're willing to "work cheap".

The AAUP has long argued for better treatment of "adjunct faculty", but harsher economic times are not fertile grounds For that matter, often the real competition for adjuncts is grad students as Teaching Assistants, who are "more expensive" if their tuition is included in the package.

A crazy dynamic. It is true that the volatility of enrollments gives management incentive to find a way to avoid liability Nowadays, upper echelons of the university almost make it against-the-rules to cushion people other than tenured faculty against volatility The answer to this question probably varies quite a bit from one institution to another, although there would be some things in common.

I'm tenured at a community college in California. Here are the main factors that I think explain why adjunct faculty at my school are paid less:. Full-time faculty are unionized and have a fairly effective union. Adjuct faculty do not have effective union representation. Full-time faculty have many duties that adjuncts do not. They keep scheduled office hours, go to division meetings, perform miscellaneous contractual duties such as sitting in the bleachers at graduation, and do committee work hiring committees, faculty senate, curriculum, I teach science, so part of my work involves helping to keep our lab curriculum going retiring old labs and developing new ones, participating in discussions of what equipment to buy, At a community college, I don't think supply and demand have much explanatory value.

We don't do research at a community college. Part-timers have to do the same classroom work as teachers, and the non-classroom work doesn't require any special qualifications. Therefore the supply is the pretty much the same in both cases. Supply and demand may explain more at fancy research universities, where tenured jobs require exceptional creativity and research ability.

In addition to the rational reasons I listed above, there are probably many irrational ones. For example, community colleges may simply be emulating fancy research universities, or the structure may have become "baked in" as part of how society is organized. I don't think this works as an explanation, at least here in the US. The use of adjunct faculty arose between about and , and I don't think it's changed much in the last 40 years. The period of was not a period of disinvestment in education in the US; on the contrary, that period saw a huge increase in the amount of money flowing through higher education.

The reason adjuncts are paid so little is that colleges and universities have become businesses and have adopted the neoclassical economic and neoliberal political positions that encourage the exploitation of workers. Neoclassical economics and neoliberal policies are not mere labels but specific ideologies that emphasize markets, competition, and individual freedom while failing to regard any collective or communal responsibility. Administrations have ballooned in the last 30 years.

Can I be so radical to suggest that if the money that had gone into administration had gone into teaching, the problems with student success might not be as severe. But then, do we really want everyone educated to their highest potential? In other words, being an adjunct merely reflects a pattern consistent with general employment market.

Further, U. Labor law encourages policies that make all employment at the will of the employer. Fulltime faculty have annual or multi-year contracts. Adjuncts are also contract employees, but only for the specific academic term. The deeper reason for adjuncts and low adjunct compensation is that education has become a commodity and thus, like factory workers, education in merely inculcating content.

You can see how this flies in the face of reams of pedagogical research. There is in the mind of a politician voting on an annual or bi-annual state budget little qualitative judgment about what is needed in a classroom. In Virginia, where I live, the state legislature has failed in the past 20 years to raised college and university funding to meet the growth in enrollment.

Even the Democratic governor, elected in , has made sharp cuts in education funding requiring similar cuts in course offerings and adjunct employment. Thus, adjuncts are low paid workers because what they do and who they are is devalued.

We are going back to a place in American culture where education and the educated are suspect. We collectively talk a good game about the value and importance of education, but we have lost a deeper sense of what it means to be educated.

I often mentally compare being an adjunct to being a medieval monastic or an 18th century journeyman who lack the cultural capital to establish their place in the world.

In my experience, adjunct faculty are employed part-time , and thus cannot be paid at the same rate as full-time faculty. Often a university department has a set allocation for the number of full-time faculty it can employ, based on predicted enrollment.

So, adjunct faculty pick up the slack, as needed, based on actual enrollment. My wife is an adjunct teacher at a state university. How is that "getting paid very little? Well there are many professions that have to take their job home with them too.

Real Estate Brokers get emails and calls and have showings and open houses on weekends to name one. Or getting ahead in the corporate world for me has involved after hours extra work, usually more than she has to. The problem isn't that adjunct teachers get paid so little, it is that they work so few hours.

The bundling of these two ideas together is because they both mean dramatically reduced cost and commitment on the part of the institution, something that the tenure system makes all but impossible.

That's how the adjunct position "augments" the value of the "regular" at one time, majority faculty. The "misuse" of adjunct positions was there from the beginning, willfully, but only now gets greater attention because of numbers. If universities had difficulty finding adjuncts, they'd pay more, but they don't. Sadly, it's all about supply and demand. Adjuncts get paid little because there are enough adjuncts to go for a dime per dozen.

The abuse that adjuncts are subjected to is borderline bizarre - in some places front-desk secretaries or assistants are treated with more importance than an adjunct instructor. Supply and demand can't be ignored in answering this question. If there was not a sufficient number of persons willing to take these positions at such ridiculously low pay, then we would not see what we are seeing. That does not mean less willingness to take the job would mean higher paid adjuncts as it could also mean more full-timers and fewer adjunct.

However, there are factors beyond pure supply and demand that also play a role. Just 15 percent of adjuncts said they are able to comfortably cover basic expenses from month to month. Fewer than half of respondents have access to employer-provided health care. About 20 percent rely on Medicaid. Some 45 percent of faculty members have put off needed health care, including seeking help for mental health.

Two-thirds have foregone dental care in the last 12 months due to the cost. Just 54 percent of respondents have access to some paid sick leave, while just 17 percent have paid family leave and 14 percent have paid parental leave. Adjuncts at her college now have some sick leave after campaigning for it, she said. Three-quarters of professors said they only get semester-to-semester or quarter-to-quarter contracts. Sixty-three percent are 50 or older. Nearly 40 percent of adjuncts have been teaching for 15 years or more, including as graduate employees.

Nationally, about 20 percent of the faculty are full-time, non-tenure-eligible, compared to 12 percent of the AFT sample. Seventy-nine percent of respondents were part-timers, and 3 percent each were graduate employees, professional staff or other.

All professors surveyed teach at two- and four-year institutions. Nearly half the sample 46 percent teach at four-year public institutions. Adjuncts are most assuredly an exploited labor class — a tool of convenience that provides universities flexibility and cost savings. And what happens when people become tired of exploitation? They unionize. In the book " Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America ," numerous authors examine the national labor movement that resulted in 35 collective bargaining agreements being ratified between and As a result, some adjuncts have achieved higher wages, better benefits, and greater job stability.

Despite these important gains, critics claim the unionization movement has done little to meaningfully change the contingency nature of adjunct employment.

As an adjunct myself, I've never considered making a move to the ranks of full-time faculty, assuming that's even possible. Like many part-timers, I teach courses related to my profession, offering students insights from the trenches that complement what they learn in books and articles.

These "pracademics" add special value to the curriculum in certain fields and are quite often perfectly happy maintaining their part-time status. Yet for another class of faculty, especially those in the humanities and social sciences , teaching is Plan A.

So many adjuncts enter and exit graduate school eyeing a career doing what they love — teaching students and immersing themselves in university life. They tire of hearing comments suggesting no one is forcing them to remain on this treadmill, that they chose this path fully aware of the flooded and difficult academic job market, and that they should finally consider giving it all up and doing something else.

They love their field and want to teach, and they'll cling to the faint hope it'll all work out someday. For most, it won't. But perhaps their conditions will continue to improve through collective bargaining and the growing realization on campuses and beyond that these dedicated academics deserve better. View the most relevant school for your interests and compare them by tuition, programs, acceptance rate, and other factors important to find your college home. Drozdowski, Ed. Share on Social.

Related: Learn About Being a Teacher. As with any professor, an adjunct professor teaches college-level students.

Most adjunct professors teach entry-level courses although this may vary given the needs of the department, particularly if there is a section for the term that needs to be filled just as the semester or quarter is about to begin. The adjunct professor typically has similar responsibilities to full-time college professors.

Here are some adjunct professor job duties:. This large difference is because adjunct professors only work part-time. Your salary as an adjunct professor will depend on the school you're working for, your location and how much experience you have.

Here are the top salaries for this profession by state:. To be a successful adjunct professor, you'll need a combination of both soft and hard skills. Here are some examples of each:. Soft skills include people skills, social skills and your overall personality and etiquette. Here are some examples of soft skills that an adjunct professor should have:. Hard skills refer to more technical skills—often skills that can be taught—such as math or reading abilities.

Here are examples of hard skills that will be useful in your role as an adjunct professor:. Related: Hard Skills vs.