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The majority of people who actually teach in our universities and colleges are not tenure-track, or even full-time professors, but grossly underpaid temp workers. In the universities, many of these temp workers are graduate students. However, in the community colleges, which now enroll three-quarters of all Florida college students, approximately three-quarters of the teachers are mere temps, also called adjuncts, who labor with no health insurance, no job security from semester to semester and a pittance for wages
<p>I have stay at home mom friends who jumped at adjunct spots. The pay stinks, but it is better than having a ten year gap in their resumes while they stay home with the kids. They enjoy it, as well.</p>
<p>Sounds like it could be a win/win in that situation, as long as the SAHM devotes adequate time to lesson planning, grading, meeting with students, etc.</p>
<p>I have worked as an adjunct in several places, and in my experience, most of the adjuncts that I have met desperately want full-time work with benefits but can’t find that kind of job. They usually work as many hours as they can get. I would guess that the article accurately reflects the situation for most adjuncts, although of course you may occasionally find a retired person or stay-at-home mom who doesn’t really care about (or professes not to really care about ) fair pay or benefits.</p>
<p>It does work well, audio. In fact, as one friend tells it, her first teaching semester took so much planning & prep that she was earning below minimum wage. Each semester she was hired for the same course got easier & she only had to supplement with current info rather than start from scratch. This friend once was given four courses to teach in a semester because her department had a few emergency situations with the full time faculty. She was paid very handsomely that semester, as the school was between a rock & a hard place. Usually she only teaches two. Most SAHMs don’t need any benefits, much like teens who are dependants on parents’ policies. As for fair pay, that’s subjective. If a mom wants time home with her kids, the flexibility of teaching, while keeping current in an area she loves, is a huge bonus that won’t be captured in a paycheck. </p>
<p>Another friend loves the adjunct world because she can grade papers while relaxing at her lakefront vacation home. My neighbor does it because he was hired at the 11th hour when a professor quit & the dean knew of his unique expertise. He says his pay is triple what he used to get at another university. Plus it gets him out of the house one night a week --he has five young kids (priceless!)</p>
<p>When we look at any job, be it cashier at Burger King or adjunct professor, we tend to view the pay & benefits through our own prism, and often the situation looks very, very undesirable. But for the person doing the job, it might have all the pluses he or she is seeking.</p>
<p>If you look at the teaching faculty at lots of smaller state schools and junior colleges you would find many part-timers. Supply and demand. More well-educated people wanting to join the faculty than they need, so use them part time and save on benefits and (horrors!) the problems of tenure. It does work out well for some of the faculty, like the moms who want part time work. My own sister teaches 2 days a week at her local state college after retiring early from public school teaching. She loves it. Perfect way to suplement retirement pay and still enjoy the lively company of young minds.
However, some of her young co-workers are teaching at 3 different schools just to make a full time job. Of course no benefits or tenure-track at any of them.<br>
Don’t encourage your kid to get a PhD in liberal arts…</p>
There’s the down side, of course. You are so right – it is all about supply & demand. </p>
<p>In many fields and for many specific courses, an adjunct will bring much needed real world expertise to the students. I think a mix of tenured & adjunct benefits the school & the students.</p>
<p>This turns out to be a very thorny and complex issue. Schools want to use adjuncts to cut costs and you can assume their numbers will continue to increase as a percent of the faculty. It is one way state schools deal with budget cuts in particular. Some adjuncts are truly outstanding, others are not at all. This is often related to degree and subject matter. In many of the liberal arts (as dragonmom implies) there is an overage of qualified PhD’s running around so you can get very quailified adjuncts. In other areas, that is not the case. As for the real world experience, you have to be careful. It can often boil down to a person’s war stories or experience with one company. It often becomes a kind of one trick poney, when students need a braoder view of the discipline. One then has to wonder why this person is an adjuct chasing poor pay if he/she has had such meaninful experience. A retired executive who is basically not taking a salary versus a person with a Masters who is teaching at 3 universities as an adjuct are different. There is no simple answer to this, but you can bet you will see more and more into the future because of the cost savings.</p>
<p>I was fortunate that we didn’t depend on my adjuncting to live on, though I was, and remain, severely underpaid for it. Definitely less than minimum wage, as I teach freshman comp, and no amount of experience makes it any less time consuming to properly read and respond to masses of student writing.</p>
<p>Many of my adjunct colleagues do support themselves on it, poorly, usually by teaching at several colleges each semester, arduous amounts of classes (much higher class load than a “full-time” prof.) Often they can’t afford health insurance, which they’d have to self-pay entirely. Tuition (high as it is) is kept down at these schools at their expense.</p>
<p>Hikids, I really don’t think the “one trick pony” problem would be widespread. Even professionals who have long careers at one company go to conferences, deliver papers, constantly receive client feedback, represent their company at conventions, network, read or publish in trade journals, get involved in professional/trade organizations, etc. Some adjuncts simply enjoy teaching. Some do it for the resume boost. Some do it to help their career advancement, assuming it shows they’ve been granted some kind of outside thumbs up & are therefore pretty darn sharp. </p>
<p>I think dud teachers can be found in both the tenured & adjunct tracks. Problem is, only the adjuncts can be easily removed.</p>
<p>Some adjuncts, especially in fields with a practical component, like business, medicine and engineering, bring a component to the table that is all too often lacking among full time academics: real world experience. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, this quote is telling:
</p>
<p>Faculty members who are jetting off to post conferences are only doing so because they are fantastically good at their job, so someone else pays their way, or working their bottoms off to get grants to provide the funding to do so.</p>
<p>stickershock, I agree there a plenty of decent adjuncts, however, there have been a higher percentage of problems with them on average at 2 large schools I am familiar. Also there are other arrangements such as NTT’s (non tenure track people who are similar to permenant faculty) which are somewhat more expensive but have a more vested interest in the job. In any case, I did not mean all were poor.</p>
<p>I think the real concern comes from the admins who see this as a cheap means of putting people in front of classes. Some schools are better at checking out adjuncts than others and it works out. As you can imagine the better schools are more picky than those that are not at the same level. I am aware of two adjuncts leaving in the middle of the semester to take jobs, with no notice, as an example. Can you imagine that mess. And when the replacements came in, they found out nothing had been really done except to sit around and tell stories – all that experience stuff – non of the course material needed for subsequent courses had been looked at. Unfortunately, students will often not complain if they don’t have to do anything and believe they will get a good grade – CCers may not be like this, but the “average” student will be happy.</p>
<p>A friend of mine claims “Education is the one commodity where you can cheat the consumer and he/she is happy”. I have often thought he had a point.</p>
<p>I just saw Hillary talk at a local community college. I stood on line with some of the students there and it was just such an incredibly moving experience. It brought home in a very real way for me just how important these CCs are - both to the students who attend as well as their communities. One young man told me that his family was stuck in that never-never land where parents earned too much for much aid and yet due to family circumstances there was no way they could afford to spend $$ on tuition and they were unwilling to go into debt for it or encourage the S to do so. He’s straight A in biochemistry and interviewed at a top 20 LAC (and is anxiously awaiting to hear). I spoke to another articulate and lovely young woman who is an accounting student. For what it’s worth I thought I’d mention that as far as I can see, Hillary’s plan is the one that focuses the most on the nation’s community colleges and puts much needed resources in this area.</p>
LOL! Yes, when you see some kids searching for easy graders, and easy courses, when the college has so many wonderful resources & challenges, I’d have to agree.</p>