Capitalism?
^^If this were true, then the same argument would suggest that the mere existence of credit cards would make everything significantly more expensive. Do they? The credit cards certainly made some people financially irresponsible, and the same could be said about Parent Plus loans.
If you are a business trying to sell something cash only (without taking credit) you will have to settle for lower price and less profit.
Indeed, college loans easy availability (and the resulting high student debt) makes $70k colleges more profitable and harder to die.
Yes, the cost of benefits has increased, but the study indicates that the cost of benefits increased from an average of 25% of faculty salaries in 2001-02 to 35% in 2016-17. So, yes, a “driver” of overall cost increases, but a fairly small one. At public universities, faculty compensation (salary + benefits) typically represents about 30% of total costs, so the fairly dramatic increase in the cost of faculty benefits over that period would represent a 2.4% increase in overall costs.
Actually, it is clear. The study indicates that it’s based on full-time faculty salaries. Adjuncts aren’t considered full-time faculty. And it’s standard practice for full-time assistant, associate, and full professors to be on “9 month appointments,” on the assumption they’re being paid for two semesters or three quarters of teaching per year—even though in most cases they’re also expected to produce research that will have them working year-round.
As the article is about schools in financial straits, but still open - " those with weaker finances have found ways to keep operating." - I’m not sure that’s true.
Unless I missed where Harvard is just scraping by with it’s $36B endowment.
@bclintonk wrote:
And, under that definition there would be no way of differentiating a full-time professor from a visiting professor, would there?
That’s correct, but what’s your point? A visiting professor is not an adjunct. A visiting professor is typically an associate or full professor from another academic institution, brought in on a full-time but temporary basis either to fill a particular short-term teaching need (e.g., during the absence of a permanent member of the faculty due to a sabbatical or other leave), or for enrichment purposes because the visiting professor is doing research of interest to or in collaboration with one or more full-time members of the faculty, or as a “look-see” who is being considered for a potential lateral offer to join the faculty on a permanent basis. A visiting professor is typically paid at whatever professional salary and benefits they were earning at their home institution, and they retain their appointment at their home institution to which they have rights to return upon completion of the visit.
An adjunct is typically not a full-time faculty member at another academic institution but is hired on a temporary basis strictly for the purpose of teaching one or more classes, usually with no path to a permanent, full-time faculty position. An adjunct is paid on a per-class basis, essentially a kind of academic piece-work, usually at a fairly low rate and usually without benefits.
And to further complicate the taxonomy- there are typically two types of adjuncts.
Type A’s profession is being a professor. Maybe at two or more institutions because he or she can’t get a full time position, but this type of adjunct teaches for a living. Type B’s profession is something else. For example, law schools hire adjuncts for courses on Professional Responsibility, sometimes for the procedural type classes or for something specialized- cross border IP litigation, for example, where they are able to “snag” a highly regarded lawyer to teach the class. These are typically highly paid professionals, who teach because they love to teach and because there is a lot of prestige associated with teaching at a law school, but they earn their living as lawyers and the compensation they get from the law school is a negligible part of their overall pay.
You can’t mush together Type A- living on what they earn as adjuncts, and Type B- who do it for the prestige, the kicks, giving back, whatever but who have a well paid profession doing something else entirely. Whether it’s an art auction house specialist in Old Master Painting working as an adjunct in the Art History department, or the aforementioned lawyers- they aren’t in it for the money and they don’t need the benefits because they already have jobs.