59 - @juillet can probably speak to this better than I can, but, there does seem to be a two-tiered system of hiring with adjuncts occupying the college equivalent of the substitute teacher, sometimes filling in for professors on sabbatical, but increasingly acting as space-savers until the position is deemed important enough to merit permanent funding. At which point, the adjunct is summarily let go, often after years of teaching the material.
My hunch is that the main driver behind higher compensation for college faculty isn’t the salary itself, but, the benefits that go along with it, health insurance being the main one. Adjuncts aren’t eligible for sabbatical leaves, rarely run their own laboratories, and most importantly are rarely eligible for tenure. So, yes. You are correct in that many colleges, including elite ones rely upon part-time professors to a degree no one would have guessed thirty years ago.
That’s historically what happened. What it’s turned into, though, is that tenure-stream lines have been progressively changed into “visiting” and adjunct lines.
Seriously, there’s plenty of work out there showing that the overall cost of faculty (including benefits) has gone down, adjusted for inflation, over the past twenty or thirty years or so. Nope, can’t blame the teachers for driving up college costs…
Yes and no. Yes, health insurance premiums have been rising faster than inflation for colleges and universities, just as for other employers. No surprise there. But that’s mitigated by several factors. First, colleges and universities have shifted a higher percentage of health care costs to employees through higher co-pay & deductibles, higher employee share of the health insurance premium, etc. Also, as large employers (and in many cases leading health care providers themselves), many universities have taken the lead in restructuring health care benefits to promote healthier lifestyles through wellness programs offering health insurance discounts for gym membership & regular gym use, wellness screenings & coaching, etc. The shift from full-time faculty to part-time adjuncts who generally don’t qualify for employer-sponsored health insurance has also played a role in keeping total compensation costs down. As a result, while faculty salaries on average have remained essentially flat since 2002, total employee compensation has increased modestly per FTE student–but not nearly as fast as tuition. And much of the growth in employee compensation is the product of expansion of student services administrators, mostly in professional-level positions rather than top managerial positions. In short, it’s not faculty getting the gravy. Their salaries and benefits represent a declining share of college and university expenditures.
62 and #61 - I think we're really observing the same phenomenon, but, from different ends of the telescope. I'm saying, it's more expensive than ever to hire, mentor, and promote a tenure-track professor, much less lure one from a competing institution. That's the implicit argument you're both making. It's a matter of saving money.
“Laura Strong, a 29-year-old in suburban Chicago, owes $245,000 on student loans for the psychology Ph.D. she finished in 2013. This year, she says she hopes to earn $35,000 working part-time jobs as a therapist and yoga teacher—not enough to manage a loan payment of about $2,000 a month. But Strong isn’t paying anything close to that. She’s one of at least 3.8 million Americans who’ve qualified for federal programs that tie payments to income and eventually forgive debt for some struggling borrowers, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab.”
If this is true, why is the maximum amount the feds lend relevant if the taxpayers are on the hook for the entire loan?
Actually, based on a review of the AAUP’s and Chronicle of Higher Education’s salary databases, I’ll go ahead and say it hasn’t gotten more expensive to find a tenure-line faculty position.
If you want rawer data, there’s http://data.chronicle.com/faculty-salaries/ It doesn’t correct for inflation, and you have to be particularly careful with the full professor data—highly-paid “star” types can skew that one up pretty easily in a misleading way for any given institution—but the data’s there.
Forgive me, I do not get the distinction.
I assume that if that loan is going to be forgiven, the fed (aka we stupid tax payer) is on the hook for that $245k.
By the way, I do not quite understand the graduate school loan limit.
Is there no limit.
I have heard of people who went back to school (graduate degree) when their unemployment insurance ran out.
Essentially, I was told, they were using the school loan to finance their living expense in addition to tuition.
Is this for real? (it seems so, because they ended with $60K-$80K of debt to get a master degree - this cannot be pure tuition - right?)
Perhaps that may be the case where PhD holders in subjects like computer science, engineering, and economics are recruited to well paying jobs in industry, but does that apply to subjects where a single tenure track faculty opening attracts hundreds of applications from highly qualified applicants?
Another motivation to use adjuncts may be that student demand for courses and majors can change much more rapidly than the number of tenured faculty in the department can change. Use of adjuncts (particularly at schools other than research universities where graduate students constitute pools of potential TAs who can allow a faculty member’s lecture to greatly increase in size) may be a way of managing quickly growing and shrinking demand.
A cursory reading of the very first article cited by @dfbdfb suggests that one could cherry pick enough information to support either argument. Full-professors at a private, non-religious, doctoral granting institution may earn IIRC about 40k more than at a public and the ivies appear to tower over everybody. A sidebar suggests that there are eleven universities, including one public, where a newly-minted PhD can expect a six-figure salary right out of the box. Granted, most of them are on the east coast where the cost of living is higher.
Thank you, for graciously supplying all the citations. Another sidebar in the article quoted above suggests there are ten universities - with some overlap with institutions granting the highest starting salaries - where full-professors can expect upwards of $200k. I ask you, in how many industries can the average employee theoretically double their salary after years on the job? https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/08/aaup-survey-finds-average-faculty-salary-increased-rate-inflation-last-year
With inflation at historically normal levels, and a pair of promotions along the way resulting in normal-sized bumps to salary? By a back-of-the-envelope run through Excel, pretty much anyone, after 20–30 years on the job.
Well it’s a distinction in this thread, which is about an article discussing the cost of “college” - not the cost of graduate or professional schools. But for “college” - undergrad - only about $30K is available over 4 years and that’s not much of a $250K 4 year cost and unlikely to be much of a factor in that cost.
Grad/prof school where much more can be borrowed is a different animal. THose costs may well be higher because of large federal loans available.
So basically grad/professional students can borrow an additional $100K if they maxed out their undergrad borrowing.
Independent students for undergrad are relatively rare at the kinds of schools we talk about on CC but kids over, I think, 24, are independent, plus a few exceptions.
Remember, it only takes about 8 years or less for someone on tenure-track to reach the associate professor level. You’re saying it’s going to take another 15 years for his next “bump” in salary?
Lots of associate professors never make it to full professor, so yes.
I’m feeling like you might should do some research into the details of faculty employment. It’s not lifting heavy things for a living, certainly, but it isn’t the roses and chocolate a lot of people seem to think it is, either.
