Discussion for article #235220
As the cost of a college education continues to rise, the public often perceives that professors with astronomical salaries are the ones “breaking the bank.” This article accurately dispels that explanation. The employment picture is not that positive for tenured faculty members either. Age discrimination is common - with universities dramatically increasing teaching loads, adding unrelated responsibilities, removing funding for academic projects, etc. in order to get tenured teachers to leave or retire. The exploitation of adjuncts is only one of a list of questionable policies in academia today.
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No mention of having grad students teach classes. While I was a grad student, I taught 3 different undergrad courses. This was back in the 80’s and early 90’s, and was paid about $750 a month. They also paid my tuition, which was nice, but didn’t really cost them anything.
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I believe Boynton has it exactly right, and I agree about two of the main causes of the situation – devoting funds to buildings and amenities rather than full-time faculty, and an absurd proliferation of administrators. I think the ranks of administrators in higher ed could be thinned by 50% without anyone even noticing.
I agree with Boynton that adjuncts are hard-working and often effective and inspiring teachers. But it is a disservice to students who are paying tens of thousands of dollars of tuition yearly to assign them instructors who are overworked (Many work two or three adjunct jobs to make ends meet) and often lack basics such as office space in which to meet with students.
Transparency about the practice may help end it, as would unionization. But the bottom line is that as long as there are highly trained people lining up to work for subsistence wages, it will be very tempting to hire them. Just say no and use your skills to get non-academic jobs, adjuncts!
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The article implies that as graduate programs have scaled back, there are fewer grad students to use for teaching. Also, at many institutions, graduate students are teaching assistants who grade and handle discussion sections, but would not teach their own classes, which an adjunct with a Ph.D could do. I think graduate departments in most humanities disciplines are still too big and produce more Ph.Ds than the job market can handle, but of course if they scale back too much their tenured senior faculty might find themselves without classes to teach, so they keep churning out those unemployable Ph.Ds. That situation has held since the 1980s.
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Possibly, if they thinned that herd of administrators, it would curb the manic pursuit of pouring ever more money into new facilities rather than, say, taking care of the faculty and staff and, oh, I don’t know, maybe doing some minimal g.d. maintenance on the existing facilities.
I still revere UNC (with the appropriate degree of irony, of course), but the school’s mania for replacing the already insanely scant parking with bright, shiny new buildings the school won’t be able to afford to maintain and can’t staff without a sufficiently impoverished adjunct faculty, even while sidewalks crumble and existing facilities become dated and dingy drove me, and still drives me, nuts. Part of it’s political–it’s a lot easier to get a state legislator to fund a big shiny new facility that some corporation or foundation or rich person has already agreed to help pay for than maintain existing infrastructure and staffing. Indeed, the latter two are like mental health care: the first thing that gets cut when times are tight and, once funding for them is cut, that funding level becomes the “new normal” from which the next round of cuts are made.
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I have one word for anyone, who is not a minority, chasing the dream of tenure with a Ph.D in the humanities and social sciences: plumbing.
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I can only dream of $3K for a 3 credit course. The most I’ve ever been paid was $1800/course/semester. It works out to about minimum wage, if that. It’s a writing-intensive course, and the dept requires us to review multiple drafts of each assignment and give feedback, long before grading. What’s interesting is the administration, even our direct supervisors, never seem to calculate our costs. They don’t have to, as we’re paid the same pittance no matter what. So they’ll require in-service training, not on anything relevant to the course, more how to fill out more forms, and make us come to a different campus to pick up our instructor textbook copies (because, see, it would cost the school $2 to ship it, and it costs them nothing to make me drive a half hour each way to get the copy myself). Every semester we have surveys to fill out, and we’re supposed to participate in evaluating and critiquing course material and possible texts, meet with students on our own time. It’s pretty constant, and completely uncompensated. Once I refused to fill out some 12-page survey unless I was paid for it, and I got a stern warning from the dean. And of course, we get no office, no computer, no internet access-- we pay for all that ourselves. We meet with our students in the cafeteria. Also we get no benefits.
I know-- we should 1) quit, 2) unionize. But we do important work, and it’s hard to think how many classes will be cancelled and students not being able to get the courses they need to graduate, and…
University administration has exploded, and they’re the ones who determine all this. (The senior faculty just averts its collective eyes and pretends not to notice.) I’m actually quitting, or (because there’s not actually a contract or anything), just not signing up for any more courses. There will probably be another adjunct willing to go on overload and take over the courses I’d be teaching… and she’ll probably get up to $19K this year that way.
I kind of thought this was just happening at lower-tier schools like mine-- but Columbia? With the tuition they charge? That’s sort of shocking.
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Every assistant to the assistant dean, however, is making $60k with full benefits. Attends a lot of meetings with the other assistants to the assistant. I’m sure they earn every penny.
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Did you read til the end of the piece (or even the middle)? She literally talks about grad students teaching classes in the '80s and '90s.
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Actually, it doesn’t have to be plumbing. Someone with a Ph.D in the humanities has a host of skills that are transferable to both the business world and the non-profit world.
Exactly. The boards of these institutions should have stepped in to put a halt to the practice of administrators-hiring-ever-more-administrators long ago.
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Things are far worse than the author of this article lets on.
As a professor, from the research grants I raise I pay not just my research costs, but also most of my salary and all of the salary for those who work for me. On top of that, my grant funding pays ~$250K per year in rent to the University for my research lab space. My role, basically, is that of an independent research contractor.
The University doesn’t ask me to teach (too much) because it concludes that my time is far more profitably spent researching than teaching. They’ve learned they can pay someone $10-15,000/year for the teaching that I’m not doing, which would otherwise steal time from my ability to raise the dollars I need to raise to pay them rent.
It is a crazy, f’ed up system at all levels. I’m not as quick as others to blame the rise of the administrator as the source of cost evil. The biggest departments in terms of staffing at most universities are their IT departments, which barely existed a few decades ago when IT mostly meant a workable phone system. And most university research buildings are built on spec (with donor money) with the hope they will be filled with researchers like me who’s rent will pay off the bonds and the cost of operations. I’m not convinced that works out as well as the planners hoped.
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I teach one class at a local STEM University and agree completely with the conclusion that students looking for a college should ask the question about how many adjuncts or “professional staff” as I am called, teach at the school. My personal situation is different than most - I’m teaching to give back as my particular area of professional experience is very specific and in need - but I can see the quality difference between the full time staff and folks like myself. I had zero background in teaching when I started and without being able to dedicate more time to it (which I can’t financially justify), I feel like I’m not getting better at the speed I could and that the students deserve.
So students, ask that question. And if there is a large number of non-full-time staff, ask more questions. Are those non-full-time teachers there because they have specific real-world professional experience in their field? or are they there solely to save money for the school? For what you’re paying and the debt you’ll likely leave with, you deserve answers.
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I have a Ph.D. in an applied stats area, and have a job in medical research. There is a simple reason why the adjunct system exists: There are too many Ph.D.s. SUPPLY AND DEMAND. The supply is high, the demand is low, and the adjunct system is the result.
There is a simple approach to solving the problem. End the H-1B, L-1, OPT, and F-1 visas. These visas did not exist in the form of today before 1992. At that time, also, China and India opened up for emigration. Result: Americans are pushed out of our own universities by the massive numbers of underqualified and verbally challenged foreign students. They destroy our own undergrads’ educations, as the accents are often impenetrable, and they teach technically challenging subjects. They occupy slots that Americans are more than qualified to occupy.
It’s time, and past time, to reconsider our societal plan to replace our own students with foreign students. And, NO, they are NOT better qualified.
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Such an educated audience here at TPM! I was an adjunct for several years. Repeated requests for more than a pittance were ignored, despite very favorable evaluations from students and accreditors. I finally gave up. The labor economics faced by adjuncts are identical to those faced by minimum wage workers. It helped me to see how powerless those workers are and the need for intervention to help correct what is otherwise a market failure. I hope that adjuncts can get similar support from unionization or other sources.
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I’d say they’re better off going into plumbing.
Tell us more about your situation:
- What is your general area?
- What is the yearly product nationally in this area (# Ph.D.s)?
- How many full-time tenure track positions open yearly in this area?
- What was the general level of your graduate program nationally?
Yes, yes, yes, we hear that all the time. However, someone with a Ph.D. in the humanities AND a minor in something actually in demand is far more likely actually get a job. And as to your comment about oversupply in humanities, yes, this has been true for many years. I remember a Time magazine cover story from the 1970s when I was in grad school: “Revolt at the MLA”, which discussed the great annoyance and unrest of humanities grad students at the MLA annual convention. At the same time, my wife was ending her French Lit Ph.D. aspirations. Today, my daughter’s boyfriend is in a very similar area, for which I have concerns.
I am thrilled to see these kinds of discussions on TPM.
It’s helpful to see the trend towards cheap labor as a ubiquitous phenomenon, not just one impacting so-called “blue collar” and “low end” positions.
May I suggest several additional causes for these problems, besides union-busting, supply-side fantasies? Ones that are unique to the traditions of the American “residential college”?
There now exists a vision of the undergraduate years as a sort of prolonged adolescence. A chance for students to “make memories” and further “find themselves,” but only in a completely risk-free way. Instead of thinking of a college freshman as an adult, totally and completely, on day one, we now think in terms of transitions, an eight-semester transition in fact, from child to adult.
We’re trapped in this self-reinforcing attitude. College begins to cost more, so parents get more directly involved with their children’s postsecondary choices. Return on investment, amrite?
And so, we see the rise of academic support services, accommodation services, extracurricular events, and on and on and on.
It’s unique to the United States. Yes, Oxford and Cambridge also have residential colleges and so on, but by and large, universities elsewhere basically teach. They are buildings that are filled with classrooms. Students need to find their own apartments, shop for and prepare their own meals, and basically get on with the business of living without any demands made on the school to support or provide these things for them.
American universities are also: gyms, grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, coffee shops, internet cafes, doctor’s offices, triage clinics, tutoring centers, and so on.
We demand these services because without them, many in the current generation, raised by helicopter parents and constantly tested, scheduled, and administered, would crumble. Only the brightest, most resourceful, most independent students would thrive. The others would crater. And the lower-end schools, ones that don’t fill up with valedictorians, would then have enrollments tank.
And so the system reinforces itself. Parents demand more bang for their buck, schools respond by promising to mitigate and counsel and support every Unpleasant Experience a student might encounter.
No, I’m not one of these idiots who can’t miss an opportunity to kick the rising generation. Reflexive disgust of Millennials is for other publications, not TPM. I’m not saying “kids today are weak” but I am saying that we, the adults, have been clamoring for more and more “student services” so that now, TEACHING is a minor line item in any large university’s balance sheet.
Adjuncting is a symptom of broader malaise in our labor market. And a more pro-union, pro-collective bargaining, pro-living wage attitude, broadly speaking, will help fight this. But in addition, within the American university system itself, there exists a set of demands to make these institutions act more and more like “all inclusive” Caribbean resorts.
Imagine a school that said, fine, we’re cutting tuition. In addition, we are selling off all of our dorms, our gym, our computer labs (not research labs, but, just, cubicles with computer workstations in them), our cafeterias and other dining facilities, our student wellness center, basically everything except our classroom teaching spaces and our library.
Yes, I know that fees are designed to support things like the wellness center, and yes, I know Sodexo does its level best to ensure that schools actually turn a profit between what’s charged for “room & board” and what’s actually expended on the meal plans. But I still believe there are lots of hidden administrative costs, and issues of resource allocation, that generate these needs for extra administrators.
Finally, we have to remember that wifi, servers, bandwidth, etc. are all essential components of modern-day education, and these cost money. Lots of money. And, like an earlier commenter mentioned above, this must remain in our minds when we’re discussing tuition inflation. Add to this the costs of running a digital, not just paper, library, and some things are brought in to perspective. So not all of this inflation has been driven by frivolous, useless things.
But a university that basically says “live your life on your own time, we’re just here to instruct you”? Could you imagine?
I mean, in another couple of years, yet another office will need to be created and staffed just to accommodate the growing numbers of anxiety service animals being prescribed as medically necessary for students to continue their educations. Full-time staff positions to register the animals, keep track of them in a database, approve or reject applications, IT staff to generate the website to handle the forms and keep secure doctor’s notes, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Assistant Dean of Animal Support Services! Hooray!
I wonder if anyone else buys in to what I’m selling: some weird, almost Tea Party-esque, “back to basics” approach whereby colleges and universities get out of the hotel, restaurant, fitness, and health care businesses and do nothing other than offer classroom spaces for teaching. Teaching here being interpreted in the broadest ways possible…inviting guest lecturers, touring jazz bands and opera companies, all of the “lecture and recital” stuff still being on the menu. Just, dorms and dyslexia counselors, not so much.
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