Posted on 05/06/2015 10:36:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In January, Matt Debenham got a job at the grocery story in his Connecticut town.
There's nothing unusual about that, except for the fact that 44-year-old Debenham, married father of two, earns more stocking shelves and bagging groceries than he does working his other job as an adjunct college professor.
"Adjunct" is industry speak for "part-time," an arrangement that's increasingly common at colleges and universities. Huffington Post reports that while the majority of college professors are now adjuncts, 60% of them admit to having at least one other job.
In the 2015 edition of its annual report, the American Association of University Professors listed the average salary for a full-time professor as $122,171. Looking only at professors teaching at private schools, it's $148,036, and at public schools, $115,592.
Adjuncts, however, have a different experience.
In an essay at Buzzfeed, Debenham describes his earnings from working part time at two different schools:
If I teach undergrad for the Connecticut school, it's just under $4,800 per course per semester. For the small New York college, it's $2,000. It sounds like there's a clear winner here, except there's a rule in Connecticut: Adjuncts can't teach more than two courses at one time across the entire Connecticut State College system, which comprises 4 four-year colleges, 12 two-year colleges, and an online university.
So the most I can make in-state is $9,600 for a semester, regardless of which state institution I teach in. But there's also no guarantee I'll get more than one undergrad class, and most of the time I haven't; there are too few classes and too many other adjuncts to go around. Meanwhile, there's the graduate program, which pays a fraction of what the undergrad classes do — but Connecticut counts the MFA courses and the undergrad classes as the same thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
With a degree in what????
Still doesn't actually state his "advanced degree." If he had a degree in something valuable to society, he would have a salary commensurate with his intellect.
When I was in college the one adjunct professor I had worked at Allison Transmission for his full time job. What is this guy’s field? I think colleges should have to disclose upfront that certain degrees limit your employment opportunities to professor, or grocery clerk.
I read that one paragraph bio, 3 times, and the following occurred to me.
1. I still have no idea what he does for a living or how he intends to support a wife and two kids.
2. I feel much better about myself and my resume.
#2 to pay for all the democrat schemes.
Grocery store clerks are more useful than a college professor. Quit the professor job and go full time at the grocery store.
A few of the adjuncts I had were military instructors at the nearby Air Force Institute of Technology (and some of our full time professors served as adjuncts at AFIT). It was fun to give them some crap when they were running late and didn't have time to change into their civies. Other adjunct instructors (not PhDs) worked in industry and taught some night classes including one guy who worked down the hall from me during the day.
Maybe it was just because there was a greater demand for engineers in industry than philosophers, but I don't remember any crying about low pay.
So I didn’t need to get that graduate degree after all?
Each job paid him what he was worth to the employer.
Draw whatever inference you want from that.
A couple comments:
Adjuncts are supposed to supplement the full-time faculty, adding perspectives, experiences and specialties a school - especially a smaller one - can’t staff internally. As to what is an appropriate pay, as with everything else, it’s what the market will bear. If there are talented people out their who want essentially to give it away, the wage will be low.
A problem a lot of schools have is that there are a lot of fully-qualified people in English, History and so forth, and not enough semi-free people in specialities transferable to the private sector.
By limiting the number of courses any particular adjunct teaches, and restricting enrollment in those courses, adjuncts can add a lot to a program, have an enjoyable opportunity to share their knowledge with young people free of the internal politics of the university, and not get burned out. But, this means they need to have an independent source of income.
I like the rule of the University of Connecticut system approach to adjuncts. They pay maybe more than small privates, but they try to avoid inducing adjuncts into “careers” of working at multiple locations and trying to live off meager pay supplemented by food stamps and what have you.
As for the cost of higher education, it’s rising but not because of faculty. It’s rising because of non-academic personnel along with recreational and sports facilities, and a whole slew of centers concerned with affirmative action and such. The part of the cost of higher education due directly to faculty has been flat. And, those who pay the bills should question whether it actually is “an investment” in education to have young people to have four to six years of what is little more than a pre-career vacation interspersed with liberal garbledy-gook.
His advanced degree is an MFA, Masters of Fine Arts, as stated on his website.
the administrators, which are most decidedly not adjunct.
And why not?
Eating is certainly more important than smoking dope, getting laid, and learning Marxism.
I’d pay the grocery guy before I pissed away money on a college professor.
He’s wrong. You can only teach two courses per semester, but that’s at each level of the college system. So I could teach 2 courses in the community college system, 2 courses in the state university system (where there are 4 schools, Southern, Western, Eastern, and Central), and then 2 at UCONN.
Plus, there are a number of private colleges, technical schools, and universities where you could also teach.
Actually, I think I get paid a decent amount for part time work, which is what being an adjunct is - over $1.5K per contact hour per semester
KK <— Adjunct professor in CT since 1992
To university administrators and their support staff and projects the administrators generate that don't really serve the core purposes of a university -- teaching and research. (We have a university golf course, which the faculty, to a man, independent of political persuasion, regarded as a boondoggle and mocked mercilessly when it was proposed, but were powerless to stop).
I will cite my own institution over the past 20 years or so: while enrollment increased about 20%, the faculty shrunk by 0.4%, the number of administrators and support staff answerable to them increased by 50%, faculty salaries barely kept pace with inflation, while administrators typically got 8% raises. The phenomenon is not peculiar to large state schools, and is documented in a book by a professor at Johns Hopkins entitled The Fall of the Faculty: the rise of the all-administrative university.
Incidentally a lot of the politically correct rot at universities emanates from the administrative superstructure, not the faculty, liberal though most of them outside hard technical disciplines (and classics, for some reason there are conservatives in classics departments, but I digress) are, from places like the Office of Student Life, or even Housing and Dining.
First, an adjunct only teaches classes. Regular faculty teach classes, conduct research (or produce art if they’re in the arts) — one of the points of going to a university is to learn from someone who is pushing the frontier of knowledge (or an active artist) not a mere teacher — and help run their departments. The notion that a university professor’s job consists only in teaching is analogous to regarding lawyers as “not working” when they aren’t arguing a case before a court.
Second, most regular faculty object to the use of adjuncts, as harmful to the profession (which it is both economically and because adjuncts usually are not active scholars so their use dilutes the point of a university as opposed to a mere school), which is enforced by administrators who see the university as their personal fiefdom — to cut costs so they can pay themselves more or hire more staff or fund projects like “Safe Sex Week” or a training program in microaggressions for RAs — and have no loyalty to the University as an institution of Western Civilization.
“Huffington Post reports that while the majority of college professors are now adjuncts, 60% of them admit to having at least one other job. “
Good. I think anyone that teaches should actually know how to have a real job. Hopefully related to what they are teaching, because how can you teach what you don’t know?
My best profs were metallurgical engineering consultants. They brought in interesting cases from their work, giving us a real-life example of how we could apply what we were learning.
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