<p>I thought that as payers of tuition you might be interested in The Adjunct Project, a database which is being developed to provide you with information on how your tuition dollars are being spent. Are they being spent on the people who teach your children?
Here's the database:
<a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0ArLwcJ6E2dSydF9DT3FQUnNJaTR5WGx4QTg4Y1dRa2c&output=html%5B/url%5D">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0ArLwcJ6E2dSydF9DT3FQUnNJaTR5WGx4QTg4Y1dRa2c&output=html</a></p>
<p>It seems kind of disorganized. Hopefully that will improve as they continue to pull in information.</p>
<p>I’m curious as to why adjunct professors are considered bad by default. Many of the best professors I’ve had have been adjuncts. Sure I’ve had dud adjunct teachers, but I’ve also had adjunct teachers who were better than many of the full professors I’ve had.</p>
<p>+1 to pelicularities</p>
<p>Every college employs adjuncts or part timers. The concern is when the ratio of p/t to f/t faculty becomes skewed.</p>
<p>The database might be useful for someone who wants to work as an adjunct and needs to know typical salary ranges, though.</p>
<p>I think the vast majority of schools use adjuncts, but simply because a college uses a handfu doesn’t mean it’s education is automatically terrible. I was hoping to see the proportion of adjunct teachers relative to the entire faculty.</p>
<p>I’m confused, where is the study on colleges that have students teaching classes? Much rather have my money going towards an adjunct PROFESSOR then a TA whom to me has no qualifications at all to be teaching a class. I had some very good adjunct professors at school. And some very bad non adjunct tenured full time professors as well.</p>
<p>Fendergirl, there are plenty TAs who are better qualified than adjuncts</p>
<p>Generally, over-reliance on adjuncts can mean a number of things, including that the university is cutting back on funding in particular departments or is not committed to the development of tenured faculty.</p>
<p>Around 20 years ago, soon after I arrived as a graduate student at a private research university historically rated around the top 10-20 (national universities) in USNWR, the professor for whom I was assigned to be a TA informed me that he/she was extremely busy at the time with research projects and wanted me to teach the course by myself. I survived that experience, but as a brand new graduate student, I worried that the students were getting shortchanged. Years later, I still teach courses as an adjunct from that university and others from time to time. The university I am referring to is not on that schools with adjuncts list. I am pretty sure that one should not rely on this list for accuracy because it looks incomplete. However, it looks like a good resource for adjuncts! </p>
<p>In general, I think some ADVANCED graduate students may be good teachers and occasionally, tenured full professors may be burned out with teaching or more interested in their research than teaching. Many adjunct professors are great also. Certainly in fields like business and law, they can provide a “real world” perspective. I think its a mistake to generalize about these things.</p>
<p>Who are adjunct professors? I mean… looking at those numbers, $3000 per class is towards the higher end. So, you teach 3 classes each semester and make less than $20K for the year? That sounds like a terrible deal.</p>
<p>This list doesn’t come close to capturing all the universities that use adjuncts, sessionals, TAs etc. nor provide any sense of what percentage appear in a classroom at a given school. Even super top schools use non-tenure-track PhDs (future faculty have to start somewhere!). </p>
<p>Even though I’m a full professor/researcher, I believe you find good and bad professors at all ranks and one can make good arguments for why one type of teacher might be better than the others. Contrary to stereotype, some of those that are very serious about research are also super achievers that care very much about teaching well too (I can think of many personal examples) and they know the material extremely well and have a ton of experience. </p>
<p>But you can also argue that some grad students are fabulous because they are close to the ground, they remember learning the material themselves (how to learn it), and they are trying very hard the first few times around and haven’t gotten on their lazy laurels (some of our grad students win awards every year). </p>
<p>Adjuncts, who have virtually no job security have tons of incentive to work very hard to get great ratings, and they are often teaching very much 100% of their time so they take it very seriously and sink into it (in a way that those doing research and admin and teaching might not). </p>
<p>I am not sure this list is good for understanding our children’s experiences or where they should go to university. But I think this list is great for adjuncts to learn about how badly paid they are (and I do think that given the cost of tuition at some of these private schools, and/or the cost of a tenure track professor, they are terribly underpaid and often not treated well).</p>
<p>Here is a chart from the AAUP showing how part-time faculty numbers have skyrocketed and how full-time faculty have decreased in higher education. <a href=“http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/7C3039DD-EF79-4E75-A20D-6F75BA01BE84/0/Trends.pdf[/url]”>http://www.aaup.org/NR/rdonlyres/7C3039DD-EF79-4E75-A20D-6F75BA01BE84/0/Trends.pdf</a></p>
<p>Here is an AAUP article explaining why the turn to contingent faculty in universities and colleges harms students and exploits teachers:
[AAUP:</a> Background Facts on Contingent Faculty](<a href=“http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/contingentfacts.htm]AAUP:”>http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/contingentfacts.htm)</p>
<p>At public universities, there has been a strong disinvestment in higher education in the last 20 years. 20 years ago, 70-80% of state university budgets came from allocations of state dollars. Today, in most states only 35-40% of the budgets are from state allocations. Tuition has gone up to make up the difference; however, the main budget-balancing technique has been to hire contingent faculty who will teach lower-level courses for no benefits and no salary. Instead, they are paid a flat, per-course fee of around $3000 per course in the humanities, $5000 per course in the sciences and businesses. Newly graduated Ph.Ds. are willing to teach for $24,000-40,000 a year with no benefits. But most leave contingent faculty teaching after 4-5 years when they are unable to gain full-time teaching positions with benefits.</p>
<p>DH was a university administrator who had the crazy notion that adjuncts should be treated like professionals. Tried to offer benefits, reward the top teachers with better contracts. </p>
<p>Fat chance. Never got close. Yes, soccerguy, as libartsmom confirms, it’s a terrible deal all around: for the adjuncts and for the students.</p>
<p>
The “qualifications” for teaching at the college level are often somewhat vague. Having achieved the equivalent of a Master’s Degree in the subject is generally qualification enough for at least the intro courses, and is often the degree level of the adjuncts. Many TA’s are at the level of education which qualifies them for teaching intro undergrad courses, your personal evaluation notwithstanding.</p>
<p>ETA: Thanks to your H for at least making an attempt, katliamom.</p>
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<p>I would be thrilled if we got that much of our budget from the state. Try 17-18%. Like most large research universities our existence is based on funds from the Federal government, our own foundations, renting out our facilities, and tuition.</p>
<p>Why is there a problem using adjuncts? Do you want to spend $50k+ per year for teachers who need to be on food stamps to make ends meet? Who have no benefits or retirement? Do you really want to support that? Of course there are wonderful adjunct professors, but shouldn’t they be making better than poverty wages? What should Universities represent - models of civilization or not?</p>
<p>Many, but certainly not all, adjuncts already have full-time jobs and teach for the fun of it and a little extra cash. I did that many years ago at Rutgers-Newark. For some individuals who are still holding out hope for an academic career it is a way of making a living, albeit, not much of one. Part of this latter group may be fully qualified spouses who followed their mates to a college and teaching is what they do. So while it is almost nothing, it is better than nothing.</p>
<p>There are also some stay-at-home spouses who have chosen to leave a full-time academic career to care for their children, but who teach 1-2 classes a semester to stay sharp and keep one foot in the game.</p>
<p>Also remember that at the big schools with the big names, those big name professors are rarely teaching undergrads. The biggest name in my department teaches a class when he feels like it - and only to graduate students - and the two other biggest names only teach a graduate course once a year each. So if you’re seeing famous names and are expecting those famous names to be teaching your kids Psychology 101…think again, because they’re not. At BEST the kid MAY be able to get into a mixed grad/undergrad 400(0)-level course limited to 20 students (and probably for which about 60-100 students are fighting to get in, so better be at the computer at 9 am on the first day of registration).</p>
<p>Unfortunately at this point the reality of academe is that big-name professors are hired to do research first and foremost, and train graduate students secondly, preferably so those graduate students can help them become a well-oiled machine that churns out publications (especially in the lab sciences and other fields where research groups and collaborations are the norm). The universities don’t want to give benefits and offices to everyone, so they hire contingent labor - adjuncts, part-time professors, and increasingly, teaching “assistants” - to teach the lower-level and sometimes upper-level courses in their fields (there’s a post-doc in my department teaching a 300-level class this semester, although I know she’s got great ratings and is a good teacher). I think I read somewhere that 70% of the teaching at tertiary institutions was being done by contingent labor.</p>
<p>I’d be curious to see what happened if parents started complaining about it en masse.</p>
<p>My son’s favorite prof at Penn was an adjunct. The man is a top columnist for the Philadelphia newspaper and a great and interesting teacher. My son took 2 (maybe 3?) courses from him and actually got a writing gig at the paper through the man. The level of discussion in the class was stimulating and more intellectual than my son found in many of his other classes. I don’t see a problem with adjuncts.</p>
<p>I’m actually more worried about it when I think about where my daughter might go to college than when I think about my son’s college. Daughter is more of an average student and in my experience adjuncts don’t often know that much about the university where they teach, since they’re only there for a few hours in the evening. Chances are that if my daughter struggled in a math class, for example, an adjunct professor might be less likely to know about support services, etc. and that burden might fall more on my daughter, who honestly probably would not be up for the challenge. I’d be worried if my child was a foreign student who might need extra help with writing, as well. A more experienced professor might be better equipped to read past the language barrier to see what my child was saying than one who was new. Mostly I just don’t like being ripped off – If I’m being asked to be a full-pay parent at a school where tuition is 60,000/yr., I feel like the school is stealing from me if my child then gets multiple professors who are being paid 1500/course. What exactly am I paying for then?</p>