<p>There have been other threads on this topic. Individual adjunct instructors may be excellent, but they are part-time instructors with part-time contingent commitment to the students and to the university. They aren’t on campus much. They won’t be around from semester to semester, and they won’t be available to write credible recommendations. They don’t set curriculum and they don’t do advising. There is a legitimate place for adjuncts in pre-professional programs where someone with special working expertise in an area can be brought in to teach a class. However, what happens more often is that universities use armies of adjuncts to staff general education, intro-level, and composition classes on the cheap. Some adjuncts may be happy to be part time, but those I know are mostly part of the army of underemployed Ph.D.s desperate to break into academe, and they are being exploited (with their consent) by the institution. Individual students may not have a problem with adjuncts, but overreliance on adjuncts to teach routinely offered courses leads to an overall decline in institutional quality that will eventually affect the experience of all undergraduates.</p>
<p>To my mind, it is absurd to pay 50K a year to be taught largely by adjuncts during the first two years of college. It’s a scam.</p>
<p>Edit: the purpose of the database linked to by the OP is to allow adjuncts to know what their peers at other institutions are making. It’s sort of like an adjunct pay rate wiki. It’s not intended for the consumer although it is interesting to see how poorly paid some of their instructors actually are.</p>
<p>As a parent, I found the database interesting because it gave a sense of the types of classes taught at particular schools by adjuncts, and I found the boxes marked “all” to be a little disturbing (under ‘what classes are taught by adjuncts/’)
I think it can be used to get a sense of how widespread the practice is at a school you might be considering, and might be a reasonable thing to then ask about when you go to look at schools.</p>
<p>I work at a small private LAC and I can tell you we have many good adjuncts.
Some have/are been in the “real world” and teach accordingly and have many good evaluations.</p>
<p>there are some adjuncts who teach a class simply because they enjoy it or after they are retired. But those pay rates are low for someone trying to earn a full time living, particularly in a major city. I wonder how those new PhDs pay their student loans.</p>
<p>With all due respect, allow me to correct that for you. There are exceptional TAs who might be better qualified than adjuncts. </p>
<p>Feel free to use the definition of the word exceptional between </p>
<ol>
<li>Unusual; not typical.</li>
<li>Unusually good; outstanding.</li>
</ol>
<p>As far as I am concerned, the first definition ought to be accurate in 99 percent of the cases. TA’s (and adjuncts) come in all flavors and shapes (not really) with amazingly different qualifications. </p>
<p>On the one hand, you have PhD students who might be one step away from presenting a dissertation, have earned a superior training from an oustanding faculty, and have opted to a career in TEACHING. And teaching means to actually be in front of a class, and not directing the following generations of … TAs while spending the bulk of their existence chasing the research dollars.</p>
<p>On the other hand, you have armies of students (many foreigners with poor language skills and NO desire to be teachers) who are recruited by academic factories to complete master’s degrees and forced (and being forced on unsuspecting hordes of undergraduates) to teach classes. </p>
<p>While the defenders of the system that is so often (ab)used are prompt to offer a rebuttal that the best research universities in the world (add your favorite HYPS and others) also use TAs, they are a lot less willing to admit that there is a world of differences in the quality, dedication, and training at those world class university and your … typical public university. And, yes, yes, the other rebuttal is that mythical TAs do not teach … they only lead sections and grade papers and hold office hours. </p>
<p>It is indeed quite unfair to criticize all TA (or GSI or whatever fancier terms the school invent) in block. An extremely small percentage of those poor souls are actually not deserving of the actual criticism. Hence why they are exceptional!</p>
<p>I think I 'd take an adjunct with real life experience and a desire to teach over a non PhD TA … any day of the week.</p>