The ones I know are paid per class. But a college may only give them one or two classes, in which case, some seek work at multiple colleges to cobble together a full time schedule or take on part time jobs at grocery stores and such to pay the bills.
That sounds truly awful. Any idea about the compensation per class?
I think it varies by college, but I know it is rarely enough to pay a truly living wage alone and, when you factor in things like course prep, office hours, and other work outside of classroom hours, it can get close to minimum wage. Some adjuncts even qualify for food stamps. And these are people who have spent years becoming experts in their fields.
And meanwhile, as we all know here on CC, tuition keeps going up and up and upâŠ
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thank you.
In broad numbers, it looks like ~410k tenure and tenure track positions. What would be great to know is how many of these 410k turnover each year, thru retirements, career transitions to industry/govt, and the like.
By another source, we graduate 55+k PhDâs per year, half of which get a job in academia. (but this source doesnât say how many are TT jobs, or at least I couldnât find it)
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Itâs not the current professors who decide how many Ph.D. students they accept. Itâs the university. In this public university (not state flagship) I know fairly well, the push for Ph.D. programs has something to do with ranking and funding.
I have family member who is a university professor, and many friends who are. The majority of them do NOT want to take as many Ph.D. students as they currently have. Shaping the students into potential assistant professors is very very very very hard. Half of the professors I know who chair Ph.D. student studies either have experienced or are currently experiencing career burnouts.
Some engineering adjuncts at large state schools not on the coasts are paid 8k-10k per class, so 4 classes in spring + 2 in summer + 4 in fall add to 80k-100k per year. Not horrible, but they could be better compensated working in the industry. We lost a couple of adjuncts recently for that precise reason.
This article is a bit old (2020), but I canât imagine anything has changed:
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adjuncts in different fields of study receive different wage, even in the same college.
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Iâm not familiar with other disciplines but in engineering, professors do decide how many PhD students and who they recruit. They can support as many PhD students as their fundings allow. When short on funds, professors can âoffloadâ some of their PhD students, still working with them on research but asking them to double as TAs which are typically paid by their departments. There is definitely departmental pressure to have PhD students for promotional/ranking reasons.
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College Scorecard itself has entries for PhD as well as BA/BS and MA/MS graduates, but most of the entries have no pay information, or no information at all beyond the (small) number of graduates. Note that College Scorecard only uses pay information from students who took federal financial aid, so if the PhD student was funded by the school or non-government sources, and did not take any federal loans, their pay information after graduation is not included in College Scorecard.
There often is pay information for professional school graduates who commonly take federal loans (e.g. JD, MD).
pre pandemic our local CC paid $2300 for an English class, the adjunct instructor who shared this number with me had years of experience and a PhD.
Around 10 years ago somebody in the local press published access to a list with all salaries of our state flagship faculty. I remember seeing tenured prof salaries in the high 40K and 50K for library science and history faculty, some six figures for business and engineering.
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However, there is probably a âsuccess biasâ built in when asking professors who successfully got tenure-track jobs and then got tenure.
The same can apply to other highly competitive fields. How many high school or college students looking at medicine talk to successful physicians to get an idea of what it is like, and how many of them talk to weeded-out former pre-meds who are working in much less prestigious jobs with their bachelorâs degrees in biology?
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I decided to look at the finances of a typical state flagship, and I picked the University of Arizona. I found the FY2021 annual budget summary online:
They had roughly a $2B budget, and of that, about 60% went to salaries and benefits (no breakdown between teaching and administration).
Also interesting was that 30% of the revenues were from research grants and contracts. I would think this would be skewed towards STEM fields.
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Yes, engineering and CS PhDs do have non-academic job prospects, since there is engineering and CS research going on in industry (and they typically can work in âregularâ engineering and computing jobs as well), so the pay levels and job markets for those with PhDs in those subjects differ from those in subjects where there is little or no non-academic demand.
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While this is a fair point, it is much easier to predict which second year pre-med student will become a doctor than it is to predict which second year PhD student will get a tenured professor position.
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One other point that I think is important is that at many schools, adjuncts donât necessarily have to have their PhD. So, that makes getting adjunct jobs quite competitive as well, even with the relatively low salaries and absence of benefits (at least for many part-time contingent profs).
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The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) seems to apply to the job search in academia - 20% of the candidates get 80% of the offers.
When someone applies to Ph.D. programs, they should check the outcome track record. If a program (given field in a given university) or lab (under certain PI) has a (drop out + fail + ABD) rate higher than expected, donât apply there. If a program keeps graduating Ph.D. and placing them in the workforce, itâs likely they have a system in place to maximize the studentsâ success.
Yup, and about 1 in 8 got their PhDs from 5 schools: Berkeley, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, and UWâMadison.
I feel like the goalposts of the OP have shifted considerably. This thread started with recent graduates of top PhD programs not getting tenure track positions anywhere close to the âtop tierâ of academic positions. As if that is somehow some tragedy, or unforeseeable after the last 40-50 years of academic hiring.
Now it has shifted to how difficult it is in general for PhD graduates to get tenure track positions. And that somehow tenured professors should be babying and discouraging adults with supposedly superior research skills who want a PhD from applying because those adults somehow cannot figure out how poor the employment options and pay are for most PhD graduates?
All that being said, professors at top schools have been discouraging PhD applicants since at least the early 1990s (from my experience and observation).
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I can say from personal experience that Berkeley really works hard to prepare PhD students for the academic job market. There are numerous resources available, workshops to prepare teaching philosophy statements, research opportunities, mentorship in academic publication, and any support you could ask for. So they do try and graduates are competitive for the academic job market.
But there still arenât enough TT jobs available for all graduates, of course, and not even for the tippy top graduates. And so there is always some combination of a few students who hit the TT lottery, a somewhat larger number that get an adjunct/lecturer position with the hope of going back on the job market in a future year, and those who become disenchanted and leave altogether. Oh, thereâs usually a few who jump over to academic admin jobs so that they can stay in academia in some manner, but actually receive decent pay for their work. Berkeley does everything right, but itâs still not enough.
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