We have learned that adjuncts make $10-$18 an hour (in areas where parking is plentiful). This is a really low wage for someone who has invested in so much human capital. Someone shouldn’t be encouraged to get a masters degree on the basis of this wage.
Sylvan, do you teach writing, and therefore have to read lots of essays every week? If not, and you’re putting in 3 times the amount of time as the classroom hours, you might be doing something wrong. Are you typing out your exams on a Smith-Carona and having trouble with your Ditto machine? Cheddar, I never said colleges don’t charge students to park, but I’m sure the vast majority of colleges don’t charge faculty. And if you’re in an urban area where parking costs so much, how about mass transit? Would love to hear how many colleges that charge faculty to park don’t also have reasonable mass transit service. And I don’t know whom I’m insulting to say that someone with a master’s in math doesn’t need a lot of prep for a low-level math course…any more than someone with a master’s in Spanish needs a lot of time to prepare to teach an intro class how to count to 20 and say “Where is my dog?” in Spanish.
Yeah, that’s it. For sure.
B-)
People who pay to park probably do have some other transportation options but like everyone else, make decisions based in part on cost taking into account the added time spent on bus transfers, etc. Driving for me is the low cost option given the added time of bus transfers or biking. The denominator in the effective wage calculation would include any transportation costs including parking or transit fees and the opportunity cost of time. It is shocking that adjuncts’ pay is so low – the $10- $18 hourly wage you calculated is similar to what some of us pay good babysitters ($10-$14 per hour around here.)
“the fact that material is intro level does not mean that it is not difficult to prepare.”
Amen. In my limited experience as a teacher, beginners are a lot tougher to teach and doing it well requires a lot more prep. With advanced students (like when I was a law school TA leading a section of second-year constitutional law), you can just let the conversation flow, and the students will come up with new ideas. With beginners (like some of my ACT/SAT students), I have to plan out how to explain simple concepts that are intuitive to me but challenging for them. I have to create a framework of fundamentals for them; if I leave something out, they’ll be lost down the road. I find it much harder.
Oh my goodness, how did this thread get into a discussion of faculty parking costs? BTW, us faculty pay for parking on a sliding scale based on salary, where I teach.
Question for OP: how on Earth can your son think about a Master’s in math when he did lower than 2.0 in any math class? He needs to retake those two classes before he worries about grad school.
Getting a D or worse in a major course is not a good thing, especially for getting into grad school.
Start with the immediate issues and worry about longer term issues later, IMHO.
Mooop, are you quite young? If you were the age of the parents here, I’d be surprised that you didn’t know how poorly paid adjunct instructors are. $50 per hour of actual work? It is to laugh.
A brief foray onto Google will reveal the truth. Try “freeway flyer adjunct” to learn the bitter truth. Adjunct professors are notoriously poorly paid.
Let’s say that, even conservatively, there is an hour of prep per hour of classroom time (that is probably a large underestimate most of the time). That includes grading assignments, projects, and exams, and writing exams (and good instructors won’t necessarily use purely multiple choice exams and will write completely new ones each time), and having office hours that students can come to after class for additional help. So that reduces the pay to effectively $25 per hour. And if benefits (the various insurance type stuff, with medical typically being the biggest one) are not included, the adjunct / contractor needs to purchase his/her own benefits (and pay the “employer share” of some taxes). It is often said that a contractor equivalent to a $X,000 regular job is $X per hour (double the regular job rate converted to per hour pay), due to the need to purchase own benefits and pay extra taxes, and the sometimes unsteady stream of work causing a reduction in hours worked some of the time. So $25 per hour for an adjunct / contractor is like a regular employee being paid $25,000 per year, in the ballpark of a PhD student stipend.
Now, where parking or public transportation costs become relevant is that if the adjunct / contractor teaches a class that meets for an hour on a given day, s/he may be paying those costs for a one or two hour visit to campus, instead of an eight hour visit to the workplace that a regular employee would have. So while a $5 daily parking charge and a few dollars of car costs or a $4 round trip public transportation fare may seem small for the regular employee working in eight hour chunks, it is a big portion of the pay that adjunct / contractors instructor gets for teaching one hour of class on a given day.
(Perhaps actual adjunct / contractor instructors can comment on the assumptions above.)
The adjunct is also doing a poor job and won’t be invited back if no time is spent on preparation, and all assessment is by MCQ.
A lot of adjuncts teach at more than one campus. If parking charges are an issue, as they are in my area, that means buying parking passes at two or three schools.
OP here… I’m checking out, as I have no current concern about the pay associated with adjunct teaching 
Thanks for those who gave advice about my son and a masters degree.