Depending on your sources, between 49 and 66% of all college professors are adjuncts. Full-time, untenured faculty composes 19 percent of professors, which means, at most, only a third of professors are on the tenure track. As a PhD student, I’ve been steadily encouraged to keep up hope about becoming a tenure-track professor; assured that there is more potential for future tenure track job openings. Many of the professors I’ve talked to believe the rapidly coming mass retirement of Baby Boomers will open up a lot of the existing tenure track and non-tenure positions. They say I’m a good candidate for these openings. Worst-case scenario: I’d just have to adjunct or be full-time untenured for a few years until one of those tenure positions opens.
Tell me if that sounds familiar.
The huge number of adjuncts teaching in our nation’s universities has long been a crisis. Most of these “professors” are underpaid, receive no benefits, and get little support from their departments or university administration. Some adjuncts make about $2,700 each semester according to Sarah Kendzior, a recent anthro PhD graduate that has walked the adjunct path. Making $10,000 a year is close to the average for teaching a full course load (five courses taught over both semesters). There are a number of stories of adjunct professors on food stamps.
Many adjuncts do not make minimum wage and are living way below the poverty line. Some have begun asking if adjuncts are the fast food workers of the academic world, which has been divided into two castes: high-paid, elite tenure-track professors and low-paid adjuncts living in poverty.
To put this in perspective, when I first started doing archaeology, as a shovel bum archaeo tech I used to make about $12/hr. and would bring in about $1600/month for about 9 months a year. That was in 2002 and doesn’t even include per diem. Before the Great Recession, I used to make about $4,200/month gross as a project director, a little more than $50,000 annually. I had benefits and was eligible for retirement programs.
Basically, being a field tech 12 years ago brought in more than two thirds of America’s professors today. If you landed a job as a project director in today’s economy, you can be almost guaranteed to make at least 400% more than the average adjunct.
College costs have tripled since 1980, but where is this money going
I know you’ve all heard this tale before from your parents and, perhaps, grandparents. “When I went to college, a kid could actually work his/her way through school.” We’ve all heard how our elders worked odd jobs– as painters, waiters, or forest firefighters during the summer– to pay the their tuition. As late as 2001, I was able to push enough carts at Costco to cover the cost of my tuition at Boise State University which was only about $1,200/ semester. Two years later, when I started graduate school at the University of Idaho, in-state tuition was about $2,800/semester. This fall (2014) my sister enrolled at UIdaho as an out-of-state undergraduate freshman. It costs a little more than $12,700 each semester for tuition, room and board at UIdaho, which is a deal when compared to out-of-state tuition at the University of Arizona.
What the hell is happening to our higher education system? It is being run like a corporation, that’s what’s happening.
All across the country, our universities are being run like bloated, inefficient, government-backed corporations. Former CEOs and politicians are being hired as provosts, presidents, vice-provosts, department provosts, assistant to the vice-provost’s provost (why do colleges even need provosts when they’ve got presidents and department heads?) and these corporate elites are running things like education is a product instead of a right to all tax-paying adults with enough scholastic aptitude.
In the U.S., corporations are living entities that survive by amassing wealth while limiting liabilities. These entities have an innate instinct to pay their employees the lowest wages possible while charging the highest price possible to the largest number of people. A corporate-university’s product is the college degree, which is supposed to have an intrinsic social value that is recognized by all.
If tuition and fees are rising, what are universities doing with all this money? Why isn’t it going to the professors that are responsible for teaching students–the people that are actually creating the product? Weintraub (2013) has a pretty good answer:
“The university is diverting resources from the individuals who provide the most value for a university student — the instructors — to a bloated and inefficient administrative staff that doesn’t have students’ best interests in mind. Instead of prioritizing spending on instructional services, universities are happy to trim their budgets by relying on ranks of adjunct lecturers who barely earn a livable wage” (Weintraub 2013: http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/2013/10/universities-exploit-adjuncts-damaging-learning-environment).
Let me get this straight, students pay more to get taught by professors earning the league minimum? And, universities hire more employees that do not actually help create the product (a degree)? Sounds pretty American to me. Surprisingly, these adjuncts actually do a stellar job of teaching the next generation considering the limited funding and support they receive.
At the University of Arizona, my current school, the number of professors only increased 3.1 percent while administrative staff increased 45.8 percent between 1993 and 2007. UArizona employed more full time administration staff than faculty members in 2007 (Weintraub 2013). Despite the economic downturn, I have every reason to believe that many of these administrative positions were retained.
The problem is: What happens when that expensive degree can no longer get you a job with a middle- to upper-class wage? A good job like, say, being a professor?
Gen Xers and Millennials live in the most educated American society in history. Millennials are widely known to be educated, but underpaid. They also have pretty big student loan debt and are having a hard time finding work. One in four minimum wage workers has a college degree. Many of these folks are Millennials (I wonder if adjuncts were included in that calculation). Statistics are showing that the expensive degree we’re all purchasing is defective in many instances. Even prestigious jobs like being a professor only pay peanuts.
Many are starting to ask: Is a college degree even worth it?
Why be an archaeology professor?
The United States touts, among many things, our amazing technological prowess. Not only does our popular rhetoric state that we’re the “Greatest Country on Earth” (much like the Ringling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey Circus), but we also tell ourselves we’re the richest and most intelligent. Proof of this vast intelligence can be seen in the amazing research institutions across the country, many of which are at major universities.
Students pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend these universities and have the chance to learn from some of the country’s greatest minds. I do not doubt that the professors in our nation’s universities, even the adjuncts, ARE among the country’s greatest minds. But, I wonder how this legion of underpaid, knowledge-workers is affecting the research that is taking place at our universities.
For one, the attrition rate for professors has to be pretty high. How many full-time, un-tenured professors would keep pursuing research for decades with little hope of reaching the stability of the tenure track? How many adjuncts would keep living a second-class lifestyle just to be considered a professor?
Second, since most professors are adjuncts, at least half of all the professors have no time for research. They’re too busy selling plasma or working a part-time job to make ends meet. That means we actually have fewer of these top minds researching than we would if we paid adjuncts enough to pay their bills.
Finally, universities have no way to keep up with the research power of for-profit businesses. They are also choosing not to pay professors a high enough wage to keep them working in academia. This is particularly salient in archaeology where the vast majority of research is being conducted in the cultural resource management industry. Large CRM companies regularly work with multimillion dollar budgets that anthro departments could only dream about. Even small companies are able to conduct university-level research while providing livable wages.
As a CRM archaeologist, I was tasked with planning, executing, and writing-up interesting projects all across the country. It was mandatory that I write a report for every one of these projects. CRMers are forced to publish. I was also paid to give presentations at conferences. Most of my costs were even covered for conferences in foreign countries.
The companies I worked for also had “article bounties”—a monetary reward for publishing journal articles or contributing to books. They paid $1,000 for getting a single article published in the biggest journals, which is almost half of what an adjunct gets paid to teach a single class section. Most of the journal articles I wrote were distilled from CRM reports that were translated into academiaese so that they could be digested by students and professors. Finally, I was paid a livable wage for my services. Per diem was like the icing on the cake.
Basically, for ten years I did the same research that archaeology professors do but I didn’t have to deal with students or any of the “service” obligations expected from professors and I was paid more than most adjuncts and untenured professors. I got to do archaeology, all day, every day, and was rewarded for being a “good” archaeologist (i.e. publishing academic writings). Sound sweet? I guess you could say that.
If CRM is so great, why would anyone want to be an archaeology professor? Seriously, that question is for all the folks that read this whole article. Why do you think any archaeology PhD would want to be a professor instead of a CRMer?
Please tell me what you think. Write a comment below or send me an email.
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