My message to department chairs is this: “Just say NO. And mean it. You have tenure. The worst upper admin can do is relieve you of that extra chair duty. And unless you're a little Hitler on a power trip, so what?” At the beginning of the first of my three years as a department chair at a mid-sized university in Georgia (and - YIPEE! - we were Division II national football champs several times), the dean asked me to hire adjuncts to cover more survey courses. This was the year after my department lost two full time positions to retirement, which were not replaced. I said, “Well, here's my standard. Our full-time faculty teach 4 courses per semester (yes, ridiculous load, but there it is). We now have one adjunct teaching two courses. I'll give him one more, but if we need more than that (which we did), then that means we need at least one more full-time position. I will not have more than three of our courses, upper or entry level, offered by adjuncts (for many of the same reasons you discuss).” By the end of that year, we had one of our full-time, tenure-track positions back. By the end of my third year, we had the other. In my experience, what it takes is department chairs with a little academic integrity, because you’ll certainly never get that from upper admin. Obviously, too much to hope for.
For some reason full time staff often act like the job could be pulled from them at any time and it is very strange. It may have something to do with the “academic career” not giving you a real job until your 40s. Thank you for sticking up for your workers!!
@@acollierastro A lot of this comes from the assault on the academy by a certain major political party that shall remain nameless that wants to abolish tenure entirely and that thinks every currently tenured university professor is massively overpaid, lazy, underworked, and trying to indoctrinate and recruit students to vote for the other major political party.
Jordan Peterson says faculty have abdicated to administrators. The focus seems to be on paying for admins who do nothing rather than professors who teach actual courses. Milking the government for all its worth.
This is why I made an effort to get out of academia. You're overworked and underpaid, but they dangle a carrot in front of you to keep you going. They'll say "If you put in your time now, you'll become full-time later." But that's a lie and it took me forever to realize it (because I'm gullible apparently). It took 8 years to realize the lie and another 4 to get out. It's a total garbage situation for everyone except the administration of the school.
I dropped out of academia immediately after getting my Ph.D. I could already see a string of pointless post-docs lying ahead of me, and I knew I hadn't published enough* to make it in that kind of world. *I had published some high-quality work that I am proud of, as it was ready. As any modern academic can tell you, that's nowhere near enough.
I wish it weren't like that. I wish you and so many weren't lead on. Our desire for the outcome we want clouds our judgement. Hope you're doing okay now ❤
As a STEM-lord BASc engineer with tons of "real world" work experience, it blew my mind when my English PhD partner explained how universities would waste so much money on a job search to hire the "best" professor, even though they have a fully qualified and tested VAP/adjunct. In the "real world," if someone has proof they can do the job, and do the job well, you KEEP THAT GUY FOREVER. Don't let them slip away, don't try to hire the hot new thing, grasp desperately on them. It costs so much time and energy for the high level employees doing the review, and there's no guarantee that even after you higher that "hot-shot engineer fresh from MIT" that people can stand being in the same room as them, or that they know the difference between writing code that works or writing code that's smart.
Unfortunately, teaching skills and research skills don't always coincide. An adjunct might be a great teacher and wonderful person, but they may or may not be able to contribute original research. Or their research specialty may not be in high demand. Or (most likely scenario), university departments knows that their adjuncts don't have any better offers on the table, and would prefer to keep around an exploited underclass to drudge for them while offering tenure to the hot-shot professors who bring in grant money and lend prestige to the university. It's a dirty business, made dirtier because it pretends not to be.
@@willjones8261 And bonus those same full Profs (and there are usually tenure track Assistants slaving to get tenure along with Associates) also know that they can't/won't teach the class, if only because in order to get tenure they need to have 20-30 grad students to pump out the needed research (and terrify they provost into giving them tenure or finding new spaces for all those supported grad students) so they NEEEED those Adjuncts teaching or they'll be stuck with the job. There really is no training for teaching at the elite schools so profs are thrown into the pool with a bunch of students for something they know (maybe too well) but no one else in the department wants to teach. Sometimes it's good, but it's a huge amount of work to create a curriculum (or even adapt someone eases) and learn how pedagogy works... time you don't have, if you want tenure. This all came to a head when I was a grad student, because an adjunct who had been there 10 years had to take 2 terms off to prevent him from getting tenure (weird rule someone passed to deal with exactly his situation), but there were so many students who were paying for masters degrees just to take HIS course that would be so angry they would leave, if he wasn't teaching it. The department wanted him to teach it and give him tenure (his wife was tenured and in the same department), but the University was like... If we do this for him, we'll have to do it for everyone or we might get sued?!?! Well, he got the job, but only after lots of screaming and because he was in such a special situation where a bunch of people including his wife could speak up without fear. Where does the money go? Administration. They are there for compliance. They make you (the student) and the professors lives hell, but reduce civil liability and bring in federal/state education$$.
@@qwerty4324ify Every times I wonder why American universities are such hell, I just have to look up how much an administrators get paid, vs how much an adjunct or assistant prof make to get why
I've even had 400-level classes where the professors had to run, literally run, after class to get to their car to drive to their next class at a different university.
I was an adjunct for my local community college for about four years. I mainly did it to get teaching experience. They only paid me after the semester was over just one time. It was about $1,900 before taxes for each course. I tried to get two separate full-time jobs at the school with either teaching or an education specialist. They already had their pick of course, so I didn’t get either job.
I'm one of those weird students that reads the minutes and the documents from salary meetings to find out what my teacher's make, and that's about on par with what my professors earned per class this year. Absolutely unacceptable as a practice. 2 student's tuition goes to the teacher and then everyone else in the class are 100% profit for the school? Wtf? @@ManofGod04
In my undergrad the university I studied at (University of Auckland) was adamant that when someone was teaching you they were always a current researching academic. I never realised why they were so proud of it at the time - like wouldn't that be the default, bare minimum? Now I understand!
Although, I was just a kid, there could have been scammy employer behaviour going on and I'd have had no idea. This is not an endorsement of University of Auckland 😅
The UoA Academic Staff Collective Agreement is available online. There are levels called like "Senior Tutor" and "Professional Teaching Fellow" who don't typically do research, but they do get paid at least $90k. There is also a "Tutor" level which is lower, but I don't remember any of my classes (in engineering) being taught by someone who wasn't at least a "Senior Tutor". Not all staff are union members so they're not all on the collective contract but I think most are
How else is the basketball coach going to feed his wife, three kids, two purebred dogs, and nanny with less than $5 million? He's out there telling people how to play basketball, what are you doing? Educating the next generation of humanity so that we don't go extinct? Pshh, get a real job
@@blib3786It’s kind of embarrassing most people miss this point. Yeah it’s a bad look that universities pay their coaches so much, but that money comes directly from the revenue the sports bring in. No Division 1 coach is being paid by tuition, they’re all being paid by the TV deals football/basketball generate
You're forgetting that thw basketball coach doesn't just have his wife, four kids, three dogs, and two nannies, he also needs the money to pay his mistress' rent!
The big problem is the number of well-paid full time with benefits administrators. This includes coordinators and directors who administer "programs" (most of which do little or nothing for real student success). And of course each administrator must have multiple full-time employees working for their department which helps justify their existence. There are all manner of made up reports, data collection, meetings, required training, etc. which are portrayed as "essential" and contributing to "student success". The accrediting bodies are complicit in this GRIFT. Eliminate all this and you can easily hire all full time instructors. The worst part is the student and parents do not understand that only a small part of their money is going directly for instruction.
The big problem is that the administrators actually do important work, mostly with regards to dealing with legal requirements of the institution. The legal requirements are often with dealing with issues of revenues, observing rules regarding discrimination, etc. With the former, an easy way to smooth over this is probably making the funding all public and making the students dealing less with collecting tuition, and seeking out donations. With regards to discimination, a centralised body to deal with the litigation might help. Like maybe a government body.For the etc., maybe government helping out might help.
@@phillipsiebold8351 Do they? Last time I checked, the Science of Administration was laughably nonexistent and is more of a bureaucracy that hinders innovation by restricting how and who can have ownership of the relationship between the student and the course’s content. There needs to be a scientific revamp of this entire process, specifically dealing with inefficient bureaucratic processes. There is a body of research that shows this to be precisely the problem and has been coined as “bureasclerosis” since it slowly degrades and rots any organization that has the symptoms
@@zwitterion2910 Sure, there are significant problems and I'm sure the politicians who are writing the rules truly care about the problem. =/ The reality is that when it comes to heirarchies, as any bureaucracy is, there can be the problem of downloading responsibilities to lower members (local institutions), so as to avoid having the decisions on important matters being done on a more strategic and political level. Instead, it is your university administration who has to come up with their own policy as to how they are going to abide by things like discrimination laws, have their own means of litigating the issues as they crop up. It's all very piecemeal and too often duplicates the work that many are doing, and gets them all tangled up in disputes which refuse to be resolved at a higher level. When it comes to institutional bloat, it is best to look at what is being duplicated across the many institutions and see if it can be removed. The downloading, and consequent duplication, was a political choice. Often at the state level or the federal level. The task ahead is to ask why was the downloading done and how can it be reversed, pointing specifically at the bloat, lack of resolution, and lack of product by the burdened institutions.
@@phillipsiebold8351 In a complex environment, hierarchies do seem inevitable, but how much money and political value these institutions have is the motivational force that exacerbates hierarchies creating environments that tax human development and achievement. There is piles of evidence that show self-managing micro-teams/organizations that are unhindered by “upper management” perform markedly better since the reward is focusing on their deliverables, and not being taxed by what needs to be “downloaded” to motivate people to behave within certain parameters. This method removes human autonomy which reduces creativity and problem solving skills. For example, the candle problem experiment, in short: two subject participants are “high drive” and “low drive;” high drive were told the faster they solve the problem, the more they get paid, low drive participants were not given an option. The results are consistent, having a competitive, compensated environment significantly reduced problem solving, whereas low drive participants solved it the fastest. The high drive condition creates stress and sometimes a sympathetic nervous system. Doing an audit or diagnoses of money efficiency may just lead to more problems because that’s the main motivational factor. ‘You get a degree here, you make more money,’ which makes it more competitive requiring them to increase their budget and their staff. The reality is we don’t apply scientific evidence to institutions because it would disrupt the flow of money and political value.
@@zwitterion2910 The only problem is I have a dim view on the applicability of these experiments to demonstrate what in general needs to happen. It is likely less fruitful to concern ourselves over individuals than it is to look at what are the powers and responsibilities of each position and how they are distributed. To take your candle experiment example, what is the actual scope of the experiment? It seems to try to identify low drive and high drive people exist. Well, what does low drive and high drive have to do with it other than your hope that high drive people break the rules to deliver superior service? That reminds me of the Dirty Harry story, which tells us that a man doesn't really solve the problem just so that they can have a little catharsis.
I think one of the most concerning issues is that nobody seems to talk about this? I had never even heard the WORD "adjunct" until I was a senior in undergrad and thinking about getting into teaching myself. It was only after I went out of my way to do my own research that I discovered all my favorite "professors" weren't actually technically professors and were hovering around the poverty line. It actually kinda steered me away from getting a PHD too, since it seemed like a waste of time and money. The only reason I was considering it was because I liked academia and wanted to teach. But then I learned I could make more money pushing boxes at a warehouse. (And get health insurance too!)
You will never have heard this one either: Freeway Flyer - some one working as adjunct at more than one institution, possibly carrying a larger load than a tenured prof but making 1/3.
@@judychurley6623 Yeah I've never heard that term but I definitely knew some of them. I had a philisophy prof who taught at 2-3 different universities in the area. I also had a music prof who actually drove back and forth between Boston, MA and New Haven, CT (about a 3-4 hour drive) to teach at two different universities.
The sad thing is if more undergrad students knew this is what they were paying tens of thousands of dollars for, for their instructors to be treated like this and get paid jack, to hell with the consequences to the quality of instruction a lot of them would be absolutely outraged. But because of the abusive situation of precariousness the adjuncts are in, they'll never say a word about it to their students for fear of blacklisting.
I'm super late to this discussion (hi, binge watching your content) but I really wanted to add that the little undergrad students really just don't know what their adjunct profs are going through unless the adjunts speak out, but we absolutely care, at least my classes did. My FAVORITE professor was an adjunct who frequently vocalized how shitty her treatment was and how she had to work at both colleges across the street to feed her child. My classmates and I had her back, cut her slack often and comforted her as best we could, reassuring her she was GOOD and that it wasn't fair. She taught me a love for a field I didn't care about in the slightest before signing up for the "easy credit class" yet I have no idea where she is now. She's still in a big photo for the department site but her name is traceless. I hope now she's doing something better in every sense of the word, she deserves it. Abolish adjuncts!!
"Vanity"... more like "we taught at this Institution so we can place the name down for maybe better opportunities further down the line" which... I don't even know if that works or not =/ there's definitely the sunken cost fallacy in there though
@@aniellodimeglio8369 Absolutely. I can't speak for every university everywhere but where I got my bachelor's and master's, it was a few new/young Ph.D.'s sprinkled among a bunch of old guys. Seriously, we're talking boomers in their 70s and 80s. These guys are WAY behind the power curve. I'm 50 and I'm a spring chicken compared to them. One prof I had in my master's program (2013) got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1965 and worked on the Mariner 10 space probe. This guy is so old he's petrified. I just looked him up, he's still there!
I've been watching your videos all day and my takeaway is: don't do a postdoc, don't become an adjunct, don't study string theory, and it's ok that you don't know anyone who did graduate school. As a first-gen student who wants to pursue advanced physics education, genuinely, thank you for the insight.
Hi, currently finishing up my phd in physics here, i mean fair. I'd say probably don't do grad school just in the hopes of teaching at a university. I'm lucky in that my field has decent paying scientist roles at major public facilities and also at some private companies, so i'm doing that first, and if a tenure track role comes along I'd consider it. It's not all a nightmare, but please nobody ever do a phd unless you HAVE to for your career. Phd's are just poeple with 4-10 years of higher education getting paid less than you can make starting at a Target. If anything sign up for a phd, get paid to get your masters, and then bail with it once you're done with classes. That might help you out in some fields. Definitely avoid a post doc position if it's at all possible. Seriously though, if you really want to do physics, going into condenced matter physics (solid-state physics, transistors, electronics, quantum computing, etc) is a very well-selling career outside of academia.You could also probably do well with fluid dynamics, although you'd probably end up working for the military industrial complex, which is a moral issue for me and some people. Computational physics of most types can be leveraged for a job at a major tech company, if that's what you're going for. Again though, for a lot of these non-academic jobs, just bail with a masters probably, they don't care if you worked as a servant for a professor for a few years after.
Teachers deserve an order of magnitude better treatment and compensation than they are given. I have a friend who was 'kept on her toes' by her university about whether or not she would have classes to teach. It was actively harmful to her health. It is in a small way comforting (at least she wasn't being singled out??) and in a large way disgusting to hear of how widespread the practice is. It needs to stop. The examples you chose were vibrantly illustrative of the problems with the current situation. Thanks for making this video. I hope it helps.
@@IamdeaththedestroyerofWorlds Yeah I'm in Britain and my cousin works at Cambridge, I think it's just America. Still it's appalling that anyone should have to go through something like this.
This is a common experience. My BSc physics lab partner got a scholarship to Cambridge, co-wrote a quantum phys textbook and after surveying her prospects... quit physics and went to business school. My bff at Venturers got into Oxford for her Chem Eng PhD then lasted a year as a postdoc. The money vs hours again was the problem. She went into her uncle's dressage coaching business. Neither have touched STEM professionally since or have any intention to in the future.
It seems like exploiting a worker's passion and love for a field has become a thing. Starting pay for pilots is apparently absurdly low these days, and aviation is one of those fields that people fall in love with. K-12 teachers get paid less and less. And grad students and adjuncts. I feel like this must be something that's taught in business school. It's sick.
it's always been a thing, everything just got amplified over the years until now it is frankly absurd. "sexy is poor'. want to make money, pick the most boring and tedious sounding profession imaginable. the kind that will make everyone's eyes glaze over if you mention it at a dinner party. "refrigerant salesman" or "geologist at a cement factory" will always make far more than you expect and "nasa engineer" and "trendy restaurant manager" will make far less.
@@Yura135 not always, people weren't taught to love their job, and hobbies were just hobbies, it took a lot of propaganda to make people think you must love what you do and do what you love
I think it's that the more pro-social and useful your job is, the more they think you don't deserve to get paid. And the more anti-social (in the clinical sense, as in, DESTRUCTIVE of social bonds, not avoidance of them), the more they get paid.
@@yan-amar yeah the games industry is infamous for being exploitative I'm continually surprised there isn't more push within it to unionize, but it's more than just one industry, its everywhere. even stuff that on average pays pretty well like boring-ass business software development will absolutely short-change you if they think they can. I think pitchforks are gonna have to come out before shit turns around.
So... _all_ of American higher education is now completely hollowed out? It's all just huge tuitions going to pay endless administrators (full-time, great-benefits-having administrators)?
It’s dependent on your school and the specific program you’re going for. I went for graphic design and had a pretty strong core of full time professors with adjuncts maybe making up 30% of my courses max.
When I was an adjunct, I once taught 7 courses face-to-face in one semester at four different schools in one semester with every single one of those courses being an entirely different course. Despite publishing more and getting better reviews than the full-time professors, I had to leave the US to get a full-time job in academia and that was 7 years after receiving my PhD.. It took me an additional three years to become an Assistant Professor at a U.S. university but within 6 years of hiring I was promoted to full professor. That was 17 years ago and since then I have become a department chair and I have hired two different adjuncts into full-time positions, one as a full-time lecturer and the other, just last year, as an assistant professor. I encourage my adjuncts to take advantage of every opportunity we offer our full-time professors for extra money such as training programs and professional development funding, I invite them to all of our department functions, and I back them up when the administration or students try to take advantage of them. As department chair, I might not have any power over their salaries but I do whatever I can do to treat them with respect and my department colleagues treat them like they are one of us, because they are, and we could not do our jobs without them.
I taught 8 during my last semester, 13 years ago. Two different departments (math + soc.sci), so I was surreptitious. Glad to read your post, and to know that I was not the only one, and as the son of a Dean, not the only one to _care_ about outcomes. Thanks for your post.
Yes, I say that’s rare, too. I’ve applied to 20 full-time instructor/professor jobs in the four years teaching as an adjunct, and I never got hired. I’m having to work at Walmart full-time to get my other benefits. Also, I worked at Walmart while I was an undergraduate and graduate before I became an adjunct professor. 😅
@@ManofGod04 It is definitely rare but it is also the right thing for departments to do for their adjunct pool. Adjuncts are taken advantage of and we need to recognize that they are often our best instructors and provide them with opportunities to become full-time faculty,
Adjuncts need their own union. Universities can't exist without them, so adjuncts do have the power to fix this, but only by striking or threatening a strike. ETA: dang, some good strategery to go with that, too. This is a textbook case where worker power can make a huge difference in a very short amount of time.
The union needs to be the recognized bargaining unit or it is just a collection of malcontents and there's a lot of other unemployed degree holders waiting for those openings. I was both a classified employee and 'adjunct' faculty overhearing tenured Prof having a discussion of the contract negotiations at our college: "If the adjunct pay and seniority in class assignment are all that is holding this up, then let's settle!"
@@ik7584 Trade unions for educators are not illegal in Texas. There is a draconian law that prevents public employees from striking or performing other work stoppages; the punishment is removal of several benefits, not prison. Adjunct professors are almost certainly not public employees, especially since they're not even employees.
@@oasntet My post is about all educators, not just adjuncts. I am saying what I heard from an educator who taught in Texas for 30+ years. Now, I teach in Texas. They cut our salaries below what our salaries were in 2019 (even without adjusting to inflation), and faculty can do nothing about it. IIn the country without universal healthcare, jobs are slavery.
I left my adjunct job several years ago after listening to work friends who were 10 to 20 years older talk about how they couldn't afford to replace their car or considering applying for food stamps. A number of them died way too early. All were very smart and very dedicated instructors. Many would say I'm underemployed at my current job but I have benefits and savings now.
Thank you for this. I’m a single dad, writing a dissertation, and teach 4 courses at 2 universities, tutor a middle school privately, and I take on other tutoring jobs while I can. Barely alive here.
I studied maths in the 90s at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. All classes were taught by tenured professors, except for two graduate courses in applied mathematics (Mathematical models for computer graphics and insurance maths), where they brought in external specialists, adjuncts, which somehow made sense, because of their special real world expertise. Unfortunately, by what I hear, nowadays, it's becoming more and more common to have adjunct teachers with limited time contracts and on ridiculously low salaries for regular courses, also in Germany. This is not a good development. In the overall cost of running a university, the amount spent on salaries of adjuncts is a ridiculous small fraction. Whilst the whole concept is questionable, at least the pay should be good. Under the pretext of "improving teaching", some German states introduced student fees in the 2000s. Of course, the money ended up in the general pot and nothing actually changed, so they were abolished again state by state over the following years. As of now, there's not a single state with fees left.
Note: I would have loved to work in academia. I worked 4 years as TA during my graduate studies (which was actually good money for a student, and I loved the job), but unfortunately, I wasn't good enough. Got into software development instead.
I'm in the UK. I wish we had followed the German route but our country is highly centralised so we don't have state or county level governments with the power to do that. Only central government can and they're hopelessly neoliberal and haven't changed at all. In fact even the left wing parties now push for fees and with the economic crisis there's no way they'd agree to spend more on universities through direct government funding.
You are missing key point here: in Germany healthcare is free, there are workers' unions, there are mandatory holidays paid by the state, there are paid mandatory maternity leave, and there are no university debts.
@@VirtuelleWeltenMitKhan Well at least in Germany healthcare is free, there are workers' unions, there are mandatory holidays paid by the state, there are paid mandatory maternity leave, and there are no university debts.
I think the easy way to explain adjunct professors to people outside of the hellscape of academia is to ask them to imagine if your entire education from kindergarten to high school was taught by supply teachers. No hate against supply teachers, but that's just how universities treat their educational obligations. For me, one big reason I quit was because I didn't want to do the "grind" in the hopes of getting a job somewhere. I liked teaching, but after 6 years of being a grad student and living in poverty, another god knows how many years doing that just seemed terrible. The fact that being a sessional is basically an end goal for a lot of PhDs is pretty sad and another sign that you basically need to be independently wealthy to go through this process. That and the story of Margaret Vojtko, who was an adjunct for 25 years, was a real eye-opener.
@@judychurley6623 The problem stems from the fact that a lot of institutions have no incentive to get people out of the adjunct bubble. You're getting people who are desperate for the equivalent of 'exposure' in hopes of becoming tenure track there (if you're really lucky and they love you) or somewhere else, but for the people who can't make it and who can't fathom a career outside of academia, they get stuck in the adjunct trap forever, driving around different university campuses teaching 8 courses trying to make a living. In many ways young adjuncts are at the cutting edge, both of pedagogical techniques (everyone knows the old prof who doesn't like to use technology) and of subject matter expertise, but universities know they can underpay these people because there are always going to be new meat for the grinder.
Adjuncts and TAs are obviously limited by an implicit pay ceiling. There is no market incentive to create the best teaching environment through pay. Accidentally an adjunct could be much smarter than the professor. But There is no connection to school revenue resources and its teacher quality. The administration has huge subsidies in grants scientific or otherwise, and financial aid for students. The university or college can get away with inefficiency and incompetence. There is not an actual market for education that is not affected by the rush for government grants. They are not getting the market rate as the universities and colleges and students are being subsidized by government funds. This causes exorbitant tuition rates too. It’s run as a religious order, but secular, does it have dedicated administrators?
I appreciate the problem that students can't get recommendations from adjunct professors because that's exactly what happened to one of my daughters. Nobody told her that the adviser for her honour's thesis was an adjunct. Two years later when she wanted to go to graduate school, the "professor" was no longer at that university, and when my daughter tracked her down, her response was that writing letters of recommendation for students was no longer her job. When I did a bit of contract teaching as a favor to a friend, I told the students in my first lecture that I was a full-time researcher at a government research institute and not on the faculty at the university because it's only fair that the students know who is teaching them.
I am attending classes specifically because there is no faculty left at my alma mater to write recommendations for me. I didn't know adjuncts could not write letters of recommendation
@@marymegrant1130 Adjunct's can write letters of recommendation--anyone can--but often they won't. It takes time to compose a decent letter and someone trying to live off her earnings for contract teaching is already working like a rented mule, trying to teach as many classes as possible just to afford food and rent. As well, they likely have so many students in so many different classed that they would get asked to write far more letters than tenured professors. And they usually don't know enough about their students to say more than that the student is passing their course. One trick in getting aletter of reference is to write it yourself, be honest, and see if the professor will take a minute to read it and sigh it. Though it ought to be typed on the university letterhead.
@@marymegrant1130 It's not that they can't, it's that they often move on and may be unwilling. It never hurts to ask, but you have to be aware that they may refuse.
Not only are adjuncts considered subhuman, they are also the first to fall when budgetary shortages crop up (see DePaul University). Universities exploit and underpay so many positions, from the 'contracted' custodial crews, undergrad work studies and UGTAs to graduates and adjuncts. The only people who receive consistent and high salaries reside in the Deans' Offices and business departments of each school. :/
I'm not in academia, but it's so very interesting to hear about how corporations(very many universities are corporations) abuse their teachers. I think this is a broader issue, that stems from the fact that universities ARE corporations, and therefore have the same motive to treat their 'employees' like this because at the end of the day, someone you don't have to pay money is profit. I hope your video helps people understand we need to have better school systems with pay more equitably, and maybe this helps create a better society for us all.
As an associate professor (permanent position) at a Danish university, it is interesting for me to see how big the differences are between the Danish and the American university systems, and how the same words can mean very different things. Before I got my permanent contract, I was an "adjunkt" for 4 years at the same university. It was a time-limit contract, limited to 4 years, but it was a full-time position with an office, paid vacation (6 weeks per year) and pension and all that. The position came with the official requirement that I had to teach, which I did for about 3 months per year. The rest of the time, I did research (which was mostly sitting in more or less pointless meetings for the various research projectrs rather than doing the actual research, but that is another discussion). I don't remember my exact salary, but it was plenty to live comfortably in Copenhagen and also save up money for buying a house.
I have a relative who worked high in administration at large state schools. They view students as product, and teaching staff as a cost to be minimized in producing that product. Educational outcome means less to the growth of the school than success of the sportsball teams. I hadn't realized they were managing to pay adjuncts less than groundskeepers. This cannot end well for the country.
I dropped out of my PhD program after passing quals because I saw no future as a post-doc. That and I was able to get paid a heck of a lot more in industry plus get great health insurance for my family. I have absolutely zero regrets.
You're really awesome, congrats. I can hardly understand why so little people talk about this. I notice there is an angle left unexplored, this issue is post 80s, when there has been a surge in PHDs from asian, south american, african and former communist coutries. There also is some PHD inflation from inside the US, but in no small part from americans born to immigrant parents, or blacks. These people for lack of transgenerational wealth have a lot less family support and hence more easily fall into these traps. In the end of the day the whole game is just racism with another name.
Good point. We know that community stature is more easily inherited, hence why more higher-level academics and admins come from more affluent families.
Hm, in my old country (Russia) it's customary to have "101-level", 200-person lecture hall courses be taught exclusively by professors from the top of the internal food chain, and the more advanced the courses get, the younger the teachers are. To me, this makes sense from all angles: on one hand, you can give the elderly nomenclatura easy stuff to teach while still collecting salary (there's no such things as tenure or pension plans in USSR), on the other, the most fundamental courses seem to be a reasonable high priority when best teaching talent is allocated. You always see a bit of both.
I have a PhD in engineering (I work in industry and don't teach), and during undergrad I had a lot of adjunct professors teaching the more basic engineering courses. As far as I could tell all these adjuncts were either a) working engineers who mainly were adjunct professors just because they liked teaching, and would typically only teach one course per semester, or b) were retired engineers who taught just because they enjoy it and maybe to bring in some extra cash to supplement their retirement income. Prior to watching this video I never realized that there are people who try to make a living doing nothing but being an adjunct, which seems crazy.
There are many adjuncts in humanities where leaving academia (even a bad adjunct position) is a career death sentence, and for many of us there is no “industry” for us to which we can turn. Working as an independent scholar can be done in certain cases but is difficult even under the best conditions, and without some kind of official university affiliation many avenues for funding are closed. What’s worse is that administrators force departments to hire more and more adjuncts instead of creating full time positions.
@@sams3046 Great points! This is an unfortunate situation, and probably not great for these fields as a whole to have fewer practitioners who are able to make a living doing research.
My husband is a retired engineer too and teaches one adjunct course at a local tech college. He does it because he enjoys it. We couldn’t live on the salary. As someone who has worked in industry, he can make the content more relatable to any future job these students may have. He also has relationships with employers and can recommend students to them.
That's still low, do a percentage of all course fees instead. 100 students at $3000 each? That's $30,000 per course. Sounds high? I mean... good, lol. I'm fine with valued teachers getting $120k for teaching 4 courses a year. If that sounds too high, consider lowering the price per credit, because $3000 per course is insane to begin with. Really, we need to nationally ban or severely limit academic funds from going to sports. No more than like, 2% of tuition fees should go to sports facilities or coaches.
@@KingBobXVI I would be completely fine with teachers getting paid more. Even $120k per year. It's such a shame that students pay bucketloads of money and teachers barely get to taste a drop of it.
I got my geology degree, and the single most useful class i took was taught by an adjunct. He is the owner of a large geoscience company, and taught a class on industrial applications. He really used it to recruit young and hungry people into his company and didn't care about the pay. It was one of the few classes that I actually use daily at work. Geophysics? Not one time have i needed to measure the tensile stress on a slip plate 😅 And litterally had the old research professor that hated teaching situation.
@caseyjones4 I hear what you're saying, but to me, your argument implies, "I don't use this knowledge every day, so it wasn't worth learning." I'm wary of that way of thinking. There's probably someone out there who didn't care about the industrial applications class but did need to know how to measure the tensile stress on a slip plate. So they could use your exact argument, but in reverse. Does either argument help prove a point? I'm not sure...
@treeleaf7808 I can see how you got there, but that wasn't what I meant. I think if you're going to have a degree in something, you should be a subject matter expert on that. I also feel that there are degrees of usefulness. Learning something practical is way more useful than learning something something that you'll refer back to on occasion. Both should be learned, both are useful. But the practical class has led to me being way ahead of my peers entering the work force. I think that is much more useful to me. 1 in 100 gradutes will go into acadamia. But the majority of what they learn is only useful there
Thank you very much for making this video. The fact that this type of practice is so common is completly unacceptable. It really needs more attention !
My spouse was an adjunct for several years. She'd graduated from the school with a Masters but was really on the fence about getting her PhD (her heart wasn't in it.) The school she'd just graduated from hired her to teach a couple of courses a semester and while it did pay crap, she got to be on the health insurance plan--as a type 1 diabetic, she was mostly doing it for the insurance while she figured out her next steps. Ultimately, working as an adjunct is what convinced her not to get her doctorate and get out of academia altogether. I didn't realize until much later how rare it was that she did actually get insurance out of the deal and how good that was (compared to the average). She also did have an office space. I assume they did that because she'd been a grad student in their department and they liked her. I thought it was exploitative enough as it was, I can't even believe how much some adjuncts put up with.
I recently was recommended one of your videos, and ended up binging most of your videos! This one lingered in my head, mainly because an adjuct I had during my undergrad actually did get hired. I just graduated with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, and had the best adjuct ever for Thermo I and Thermal System Design. During my senior year, one of the professors had to leave and we made a petition so the adjunct has a better chance of being hired. In one of the last weeks of the semester, it was announced he would be full-time in the following year. I know these situations don't happen often, but I thought it would be nice to share! Keep up the good work with these videos!
What does full-time mean, tenure track? Or full time adjunct? It would be the first time I've heard of an adjunct getting a tenure track position. And then even so, when he comes up for tenure, would he be respected enough to have a fair shot at it? The stigma might stick.
I misread the title, came here expecting to talk about matrices, then learned something new about academia and why it's SO damn important for teachers and academics to unionise. Thanks, Dr Collier.
This was the most entertaining video I’ve seen in ages! Very well thought out scenarios, entertainingly presented. The selection of classic music between chapters was . I’m so glad TH-cam suggested your channel to me.
I was an adjunct for a year back in 1994. The inflation-adjusted pay per physics course was $4000 in 2023 dollars per semester. The community college would have limited my yearly salary to $24k according to how many courses they allowed me to teach. For me it was only temporary but freeway flyers took slides to college and drove to other colleges to teach more courses in order to make ends meet.
As a former full-time adjunct (being at three schools at once), you are preaching to the choir here. Oh my goodness, five courses, three schools, you totally described my life for three years! Hope lots of people watch this video! I love teaching, but even non-adjunct full time lecturers don't make enough, IMO. If you have PhD, you can be a lecturer or "clinical professor" (misnomer but term used in some depts for teaching onlly) or "teaching professor", but I don't think even those positions are tenure-track, nor do they have the potential income increase of FT teacher+research tenure-track professor positions. Teaching AND writing grants AND managing a lab AND possibily doing research is just ridiculous, few can do all of that very well.
Former adjunct and “visiting professor” here. You killed me with the description of the full professor who comes in saying, “I hate freshman, I hate this course” and only teaches the 400-level invitation-only seminar. 😂 That was perfect.
Thanks. I worked in a hospital for almost 20 years, in and out of patient care. Physical Therapists used to call this "continuity of care", meaning the same therapist treats you the whole time (as much as possible). So they know that patient, and the patient knows them. I'd be surprised if any such thing still exists today. Nurses back then had become more administrative than anything else. It was the "patient care technician" who did all the actual daily patient care. The nurse only came into the patient's room to identify themselves, or to give medication. Otherwise, they were doing paperwork. And they earned a helluva lot more than the PCTs who did all the work with the patients. Today, I can't even seem to keep the same doctor. I've had 2 retire, and a third who moved to another practice. Now, I've had to change doctor's offices entirely. That'll be 5 in the last 5 years. Yeah for capitalism, I guess... *_NOT_*. tavi.
medicine is the exact opposite of a free market, this is not a "capitalism" issue. if medicine were a free market then insulin would be $3.75/dose and it wouldn't take fifteen years to become a doctor. the medical industry is literally the textbook example of "regulatory capture".
@@tissuepaper9962Capitalism by means of maximizing profits. Probably not the 'free market' aspect as much. Not sure exactly how integral the concept of the 'free market' is to the idea of capitalism since I'm just an uneducated bumkin that doesn't deal with more technical definitions for these types of subjects
@@gaerekxenos well, "regulatory capture" is a good search term for you. It's basically when a company or small group of companies advocate for a law that makes their product more expensive to produce by requiring tests and certifications, requiring a specific type of equipment, etc. The trick is, they either were already doing things that way, or they have enough money to retrofit all their production to a new standard without much of a financial hit. What this does is make it economically infeasible to start a new company in that industry, because a small business can't afford the lawyers and lab testing necessary to comply with those new laws.
The One and Done post gave me a lot of perspective because I’ve been taking online classes & it frustrates me to no end that for some classes, there is nothing in the portal up until like a day before the class starts. I assumed it was always the teachers waiting until the last minute, but it could very well be teachers literally unable to log in and upload things or they don’t know they even have the class until the last minute…absolutely ridiculous.
These videos are so incredible important... You're a source of advocacy, which desperately needed, in academia right now. A livable wage, health insurance and retirement packages shouldn't be a question for our educators, unbelievably disappointing...
I would love to see an in depth discussion of sports at college pushing back at the "ummm aksually sports fund themselves and make money for the university" narrative, ignoring *who* it makes money for and all the collateral damage it seems to cause in the process. I think it does actual damage to the education system of a given college.
The University I went to decided to forego all sports in order to avoid that problem. Pity it didn't resolve much =_=;; Said University also had an adjunct abuse problem. Also had a bunch of rather fraudulent sounding awards such as... "Green Campus" when they had tons of grass all around, used paper plates and plastic throwaway utensils, didn't have composting, and also had water fountains that were running - and this was the Southwest US area where we deal with drought =_=;; some local paper gave it the "Great Place to Work" title too =-=;; very yucky when you actually knew what was going on there
At my school, during a round of threatening to cut swimming and a few other smaller sports teams, it came out that most of the smaller programs were at least break-even financially while football was one of the biggest losers. And this was before NIL so I can't imagine it's gotten any better.
I had an adjunct professor for one of my electrical engineering courses, but he is very much an exception. He’s a retired senior executive from Northrop Grumman who just likes teaching electrical engineering so he’s adjunct because he doesn’t care about tenure or the pay. He’s definitely not hurting financially though like many other adjunct professors. The guy is the American dream incarnate. Grew up poor in Egypt, came the the US, became an electrical engineer and worked his way up in Northrop Grumman.
This is precisely why I changed fields late in my academic career. While pursuing a PhD in history I saw the writing on the wall and went to medicine. Not that I don't want to be a medical doctor, I always found medicine exhilarating, but I was writing my thesis on millenarian anabaptism of the early reformation with this nagging thought in my mind that my future would be consigned to adjunct purgatory with no chance at tenure. It's a travesty that this is the direction we've permitted higher education to devolve
So much of this was vexingly like my experience, but one of them -- lack of communication where you're the scapegoat -- really hit home. Nobody told me the textbook wasn't available at the start of the term -- I had my instructor copy, they didn't have theirs. Then the textbooks came in -- different edition from mine, of course. But then weeks after the textbooks came in, nobody told me the students weren't actually using them -- apparently in that course it was traditional for them to skip them in favor of prof notes, although I saw in class that *some* of the students had the book -- and I got blamed for giving them assignments they didn't "get" because they referenced the textbook. I got fired for making one course too hard, and in the other I missed a class because they told me the wrong room, and the department head took over.
I never went through academia myself, but I have been a college student for many years (before dropping out), so I have been around faculty, and I have a relative who's in academia and who I talk to somewhat often. This video helped me see what faculty go through. Some of my instructions and professors were going through this, and my relative, who's now a tenured professor, might have gone through this at some point. This is a great video.
The tone and message of this video is on point, and the problems and then goals you lay out to solve the problem are grounded in material reality: it's refreshing to see someone address issues like this who knows both why they are happening and also has a solution that isn't just "hope for something better" Capitalism is the root of this problem, and disrupting it, or getting rid of it altogether, is the only way things will get better for us little people, from walmart workers to part-time professors If we want a better world, we have to get unionized, get organized, and fight back Thank you!
When I was younger I thought my teacher lived at school. By the time I got old enough to take a college course, the adjuncts were living in the dorm. $30,000 a year is what undergrads should be paid to take classes. Building more houses and roads is not going to fix the wage crisis, look at what happened in the Soviet Union in 1923. If they get paid in sneaker money, they will buy a pair of sneakers.
This is the best video you have ever made in my opinion Dr.Collier. I’m surprised it has only 88K views. Some profound food for thought. We need to fix this.
You've done this so, so well. FWIW, at one point in time, I taught 4 math classes, 4 econ classes, and 1 pol.sci. course, in one semester. Four classes made you the oxymoronic "full-time adjunct." Yeah. Five was easy to garner. Six, and you had to have permission of the Dean. But with Math and social science, I reported to two departments, and escaped the scrutiny. What was my record? For standardized classes (given transfer credit throughout the state of Indiana), I had above-average completion, and above-average grades. "Great job, Tom!" Yeah. And what did that get me? Nada-Zip-Naught-Zed-Nothin'. *I'd had quite enough, and went back to financial trading, as it was less stressful.* I kid you not.
You just summarized clearly the 10years surrounding my phd... In France. These adjuncts agents are called *vacataires* and the contract is called *vacation* (it means to fill blanks in a schedule, but sounds like holidays). 70% of the teaching job in universities is done by such agents with precarious situations. And same reasons to not quit until you find a real job! Thanks addressing this topic and for your hectic emotions about it!
I think the spirit of the adjunct professor has been lost over time. Now, I'm probably wrong (usually am). That out of the way, my gut says that an adjunct ought to be someone outside of the institution and is a tenured professor or public/private professional that has some semi-formal affiliation with some university they are adjunct to. Perhaps they're sharing knowledge or resources and this professional chooses to teach a course in some auxiliary capacity. I think that through a twist of unfortunate events "adjunct" has come to mean subordinate and not auxiliary. It's my estimate that this switch from auxiliary to subordinate is where the modern incarnation of "research affiliates" or "affiliate associate professors" emerged from. It seems like the adjunct role has become a tool to transform tenure-track into a selling point on job offerings from universities. When in reality, tenure-track ought to be a given. Anecdotally, I have never met a professor that started as an adjunct. I hardly know any that even started as assistant professors.
Thank you for doing these videos. I have dropped off of the tenure track application process because I am wasting years doing that instead of doing research. The pandemic cemented that for me. I have never wanted to adjunct because of the sill amount of work to pay ratio, and this video really articulates all the problems I've been wary of.
I worked as an adjunct for 12 years. Finally was hired full time when I let them know I was going to have to find a "real" job to afford my health insurance. Most adjuncts will never be hired full time.
Wow. You are really a good person. Glad I found your channel. I also saw your related Postdoc video. I'm not in STEM, but I could tell you horror stories about paying a ton of money to get an MBA from an elite Ivy, going into deep debt (lower middle class person) with the expectation that I would have a commensurate career. Whoops, didn't factor in I'm Black. So, I found myself living like a pauper for years, post grad school, with a "regular" job, paying back tons of student loans, while my peers were going on ski trips to Europe and were buying their second (vacation) homes.
Yeah it's the same in Australia. Bloody depressing. If you're in the arts you're also setting up / organising / promoting / creating work for / "volunteering" at exhibitions a few times a year as well. If you are trying to impress people, you'll also be doing all this for conferences, which you then have to pay to attend, or writing articles, which you then have to pay to submit to journals. Absolutely nuts.
I had listened everything you said in this video even if I never been to school.. .. I hope you understand how much respect I have for you ! I'm listening because I want to understand why some people around me have so much difficulty to make their way into what they decided to put lots of energy in. Like I said, I never been to school.. I don't have any degrees in anything.. I did messed up my life because I took bad decision instead of doing sacrifice, or personal efforts for having a better living situation.. I'm 44 and for the last 10 years, I did find people like you who were teaching or explaining how things works in our world.. our society.. our universe. I know I already said that in many videos from you but once again, thank you very much for everything you did inside the communication world ! 😊 People like you makes me believe that I can learn more and more everyday.✔️ Full respect sister 🤘😎💯 (I hope my English is okay) 🙏 thanks
I did a few semesters of adjunct work at UPitt back when my wife was getting her masters at CMU. I didn't mind it at all and the pay was fair for how many hours I put in. I was offered enrollment in the UPMC health/dental plan even though I was part-time faculty (I guess that kind of thing varies wildly by university). Maybe the example of the English prof is just a lot of extra work vs teaching engineering. Grading essays seems like it would take way longer than grading some statics homework sets and grading blue book exams also seem way more daunting than a multiple choice exam. My wife and I have a few million in savings and are looking at retiring early in our mid 40s. I've thought about being an adjunct again just to help train the next generation of engineers and earn some extra money to pay for hobbies. I never really thought of it being such a problem until watching this and hearing more about what others have experienced.
This is an excellent video, with a very accurate commentary. Solution: Get a job in the private or public sector with a nice salary and benefits, then do adjunct work part time, in the evening, once or twice a year. Make adjunct work just an avocation, not a vocation. Your elder years will arrive, at which time you'll need savings, a pension, and adequate Social Security benefits (based on your 30 years employment history). Also, your home or condo should be paid off before your retirement so you don't see endless years of rent increases. Bottom line: There is a massive surplus of USA academic professors, so adjunct wages will remain very low except for upper level tenured scholars. Best wishes to all of you. mark o. Seattle age 70
10 years ago, my college has a few deans only. Now almost 100 deans. Just a STEM dean has two assistant deans, and their own secretary. A dean has salary 10 times of an adjunct. The system is controlled by these deans. Of course, their jobs are to find way to cut down the payroll for adjuncts, otherwise what resource could afford their big fat checks. It is not about the fairness; it is about the power. Those deans always told me they are really bad in Math, but they are the ones in charge of STEM.
Thank you for highlighting this. It's a travesty and more people should know about it. I'm lucky that I left after I finished my post-doc instead of playing the academic lottery for another year or two, because the hiring situation in my new career got a lot worse not long after I entered it.
Glad you called out Reagan. He cut aid I received to attend school in the 80s (CU in fact, they had a shitty over-paid football program back then too). He set so many aspects of our nation on a downward spiral that continues today. I appreciate you noting such things in your vids. Gives me a glimmer of hope!
Glad you posted the Reagan article. I remember his statement: the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity”. That infuriated me when I was a student (and still does). And yet Reagan is today paid homage in lofty tones by Republicans and, more paradoxically, by Democrats. Incidentally, it would also be good to make a video on the exploitation of graduate student teaching assistants by universities. I'm sure you would get a lot of comments on that one!
I think the part you're missing is "Why don't you pay to take this course a second time?" works out GREAT for the owners. Yeah, if you think about it, EVERYTHING about adjuncts works out better for the owners. It's just the gigification of University jobs. Soon every teacher will be a part time professor.
This is such an important issue, I am sharing this with everyone I know. I've had so many people who don't understand this industry try to tell me I'm just "paying my dues". I've been "paying my dues" for 7 years across three different colleges with no real hope for tenure anytime soon.
FWIW, I'm an adjunct at a private uni in Georgia in the US. I'm a saxophonist. However bad the problem is for engineers, please know that it is even worse for the degrees deemed "unnecessary". And, we have even less power to change anything.
The fact that the full time staff only coffee was put in the ADJUNCT LOUNGE is CRAZY. It’s like the university is purposely taunting and disrespecting them
Excellent job. Valuable content. Playlist: Dropkick Murphys : Worker's Song Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town Working Class Hero: John Lennon Billy Bragg: Power in a Union Tom Morello: Union Town Johnny Paycheck: Take This Job and Shove It Judy Collins: Bread and Roses Pete Seeger: Solidarity Forever Woody Guthrie: Union Burying Ground Greg MacPherson: Company Store Florence Reece: Which Side Are You On? Woody Guthrie : 1913 Massacre "Working class" marked by jobs that provide low pay, limited opportunities. The only thing that is different, academia never thought it would come for them.
No joking, this video, along with the post-docs-are-a-scam one, was one of the things that made me reconsider applying to grad school. I’m now happily employed as a welder, and only a few years in, I’m already making much more than I would’ve ever made as a grad student (or an adjunct, for that matter). Thank you so much, Angela :)
I ended up dropping out after going to talk to a professor that I had thought I had a fairly close relationship about how during that semester my grandfather had passed away and my mother was about to die of cancer and what I could do to make up whatever work I needed to. It was meant to be my final semester, and was the week before final exams, and her reply was to simply say that it was not possible for me to pass the class no matter how well I did on the final because she "didn't remember seeing me in class enough", and therefore my attendance was too low, despite her not actually taking any formal attendance for that class. And I had shown up nearly every week. I was so offput by that and stressed by everything else that I couldn't even be bothered to file a complaint against her, either for failing me over attendance despite having no record, or for refusing to consider my personal circumstances. And I wasn't going to take a whole extra semester for a single class (and it would have to be a full year later because it was the fall semester and so spring applications were already filled), so I ended up just skipping exams and leaving the university and never going back. A few years later, after all my personal circumstances had been taken care of, I started looking in to see if I could finish the degree somehow but was told that it wouldn't really be possible due to my gpa (which had dropped considerably due to giving up that full semester of courses).
@@-tera-3345 Jesus that's horrible. I do not want to be presumptuous, but if you think you can get away with it, do what I do and lie. Just make sure you can back it up with the know-how and you will be fine, by the time the job or whatever it is figure it out (if they ever do) I doubt they will want the fuss of replacing a knowledgeable person over a technicality. (only exception would be ironically enough, academia, which you can be sure will probably check). On the other hand, that prof. Sounds like a complete menace. I would have told her to go fuck herself, and I understand completely the feeling of just not wanting the aggro, after something like that you just realise you don't care about things like that anymore. But even so - she sounds puny. She deserved to hear it
This might be another problem for adjuncts: They are not in the same union as the full-time faculty, which can become a problem when the union is taking action. When I was going to university, the professors went on strike. I was in full support of them, but I had to cross the picket line because one of the courses I was taking was taught by someone who was not a member of the union. I am not sure if he was an adjunct or just a "low-level" lecturer. But it is a similar situation. He had to continue teaching the course during a strike and the students were required to cross the picket lines to attend the course. The professors on strike were sympathetic and didn't hold anything against the people in this situation, but it was a pretty sh*tty situation to be in.
that just seems like oversight or outright corruption at the union leadership. the whole point of unions is to unify the working class (defined as someone who has to work to make ends meet). if anything, the strike should include truckers, baristas and everyone else in the community, see how long the university can hold out once the garbage men get in on the action.
This is my favorite video I think I’ve ever scene. The over saturation of graduate students was never, ever meant to meet demand in terms of the number of PhDs needed as professor retire-the number of graduate students is determined by the number of incoming freshman and returning sophomores that need to be taught! Grad school at large state schools is a racket to get highly qualified instructors for pennies on the dollar.
An some snooty tenured professor is writing books and columns about raising the minimum wage to a 'living wage', while exploiting this system. I spent 2 years as a TA in grad school. The ubiquitous hypocrisy is mind-numbing.
I am a current undergrad about to graduate and have only had one adjunct professor. This made me lookup stats on my university's hiring practice and I found out ~13% of their teachers are adjunct/part-time. Just based off your description and scenarios, I feel EXTREMELY lucky that this is the case. I had no idea about this issue or how it might impact me when I applied as an undergrad but it would have. I got a lot out of my undergrad experience and a BIG part of that was meeting professors with research experience who could vouch for me and this started early on. No idea where I would be if instead of real professors I could rely on I instead was taught by adjuncts who were eventually pushed out. I also found out that the average for all universities is ~50%. That is CRAZY! That means , on average, universities inly fully employ HALF of their teachers. That is nuts!!! Great video!
the state I live in pays for 2 year school, but because of the demand spike, most of the classes are taught by adjuncts that have never taught before and don't seem to have ever so much as watched a youtube video on it, but they take anyone they can get. the classes are a nightmare and even though the people work in the field they're teaching and have years of experience, they really don't understand how to actually *teach* it. Reallly grateful for your video, it makes a lot of great points
Hell yes. You f*****ng rock, thank you for calling out this problem and actually tying it to the things political institutions can do about it if and when we force them to. My one note is that doomerism about the ability of adjuncts to get organized is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. We need two feelings above all others to win: anger, to move us through our fear; and hope, to move us through our helplessness. Believe me, I get it if you're feeling hopeless yourself. But that's why we all need to practice dreaming of better worlds. So we can one day build them. Much love, keep up the fire.
You are such an amazing storyteller. Funny without trying, detailed to the perfect amount, sincere and off the cuff - learning DM physics from you would be a great class.
And this is exactly why I chose a university (in 1979) where 98% of all classes were taught by full time professors, not temp staff. I'd heard stories from others about taking classes from adjuncts, grad students, and temporary staff.
First of: Love your passion for the topic, its healthy (for me) to see how someone else is as frustrated as me with some of the current systems. It is also weird to see because im from germany and everything works so much different here. Like university is almost free, healthcare is taken care of by the employer for every single job etc. And all these systems have been implemented after the war where the us, russia, france and gb got together to figure out how we should set up a goverment. So fast forward to today where we are way ahead in that regard here and everything went downhill in the states.. i just cant compute..
10/10. Thank you so so so much for putting my pain into words. I've wanted to be a uni teacher for the longest time, yet I've kept myself away from it because I've seen first (as a specialty TA) and second hand, how little respect unis have for their teachers. Thank you. I hope you are well 🫶🏼
My understanding is that in "the good old days" over 90% of the employees at a typical college or university were teachers. Now I believe it is around 50% or less. That plus all the new accommodations for students like pools, luxury dorms, etc. means the universities don't just have the money to pay teachers. So many administrative positions that add questionable value to the university need to be reconsidered.
I'm just going to call it out: In the endless pursuit of efficiency, the society has started to lean out many resources, and one of those resources is the humans themselves.
Most of my courses were taught by adjunct profs when I was a grad student, and it was painfully obvious they were being abused, and most of the time I had great sympathy for them (I still do), but it was very hard to maintain that sympathy when they turned around and behaved like the very tyrants that were making their lives miserable.
You were spot on about the impact commuting in traffic has on our mental health, and I don't think it's something that's being talked about enough. Also, having lived in the Austin area in the past, the idea of making that commute every day makes my stomach drop. That stretch of I-35 between Dallas and San Antonio is one of the most heavily travelled strips of freeway in the country I imagine, I don't think I've ever driven on it at any time of day when there wasn't at least moderate traffic, and even if you're going through late at night, that's when they are doing most of the construction work so it's still a mess.
Have a PhD in chemistry. Ran as far away from adjunct and postdoc positions as possible. Global educator’s union now, DO NOT teach or work for the worthless salary that university will pay you. Education has been destroyed.
I'm glad you mentioned the part where adjuncts are not paid for the breaks (which is summer but in a lot of cases also at least a month for winter break), which would require enough savings to tide over the break months. I don't think we talk about this enough. *But in addition*, let me add that adjuncts are not legally allowed to claim unemployment over those months like many other contract or seasonal workers because educational workers are not allowed unemployment as long as they have a "reasonable assurance" of comparable employment once the break is over. So, if you're an adjunct and the school tells you you have another course coming in the Fall, but you won't have income for 3 months, you are legally ineligible for unemployment benefits because you don't count as unemployed. ALSO you are legally not allowed to count any money you make at a school where you are also enrolled towards unemployment benefits. So even if you do get pushed out of the school where you were adjuncting, TAing, etc, you are still now allowed to get unemployment for the loss of that job/gig.
At my school (A CC in Washington state), the union has done a pretty good job advocating for pay equality and benefits for adjuncts. It's still not rosy and a lot of the issues you describe still exist, but much better than a lot of cases. The worst horror stories I've heard come from states with weaker unions. Also, there's something to be said for the culture of a two-year college where most of the full-time faculty have masters degrees, are there because they love teaching, and have worked as adjuncts themselves at some point.
Paying for the Party was generally supportive of community colleges for much the same reason. Turns out that focusing on education instead of sports, Greek life, and research is very beneficial for working-class or older adult students who just want to learn skills and enter their field. There is some concern in the education economics field about the high community college drop-out rate, but it’s ambiguous whether that rate is due to systemic failure on the part of the schools or if it’s an inherent tendency of the student demographic.
Yep. Did that. Had great observations and great student evals - the best in my department over adjunct and tenured profs for 10 years; and when it came time for an open full-time prof, they hired a friend of the chair who had little teaching experience and really wasn't too bright. He's still there.
One thing that enabled me to survive as an adjunct, was to make friends with the department secretary. She actually ran the department while all the TT folks pretended to run the department.
My message to department chairs is this: “Just say NO. And mean it. You have tenure. The worst upper admin can do is relieve you of that extra chair duty. And unless you're a little Hitler on a power trip, so what?” At the beginning of the first of my three years as a department chair at a mid-sized university in Georgia (and - YIPEE! - we were Division II national football champs several times), the dean asked me to hire adjuncts to cover more survey courses. This was the year after my department lost two full time positions to retirement, which were not replaced. I said, “Well, here's my standard. Our full-time faculty teach 4 courses per semester (yes, ridiculous load, but there it is). We now have one adjunct teaching two courses. I'll give him one more, but if we need more than that (which we did), then that means we need at least one more full-time position. I will not have more than three of our courses, upper or entry level, offered by adjuncts (for many of the same reasons you discuss).” By the end of that year, we had one of our full-time, tenure-track positions back. By the end of my third year, we had the other. In my experience, what it takes is department chairs with a little academic integrity, because you’ll certainly never get that from upper admin. Obviously, too much to hope for.
For some reason full time staff often act like the job could be pulled from them at any time and it is very strange. It may have something to do with the “academic career” not giving you a real job until your 40s.
Thank you for sticking up for your workers!!
@@acollierastro A lot of this comes from the assault on the academy by a certain major political party that shall remain nameless that wants to abolish tenure entirely and that thinks every currently tenured university professor is massively overpaid, lazy, underworked, and trying to indoctrinate and recruit students to vote for the other major political party.
Jordan Peterson says faculty have abdicated to administrators. The focus seems to be on paying for admins who do nothing rather than professors who teach actual courses. Milking the government for all its worth.
@@gracemember101 Not to detract from the info (maybe) but Jordan Peterson says some wild shit.
@@gracemember101who gives a shit Jordan Peterson says
This is why I made an effort to get out of academia. You're overworked and underpaid, but they dangle a carrot in front of you to keep you going. They'll say "If you put in your time now, you'll become full-time later." But that's a lie and it took me forever to realize it (because I'm gullible apparently). It took 8 years to realize the lie and another 4 to get out. It's a total garbage situation for everyone except the administration of the school.
Brain drain is the first big sign a nation is in a depressive collapse.
Yup. I did 12 years also. Good riddance.
I dropped out of academia immediately after getting my Ph.D. I could already see a string of pointless post-docs lying ahead of me, and I knew I hadn't published enough* to make it in that kind of world.
*I had published some high-quality work that I am proud of, as it was ready. As any modern academic can tell you, that's nowhere near enough.
University is optimized for administrators.
I wish it weren't like that. I wish you and so many weren't lead on. Our desire for the outcome we want clouds our judgement. Hope you're doing okay now ❤
As a STEM-lord BASc engineer with tons of "real world" work experience, it blew my mind when my English PhD partner explained how universities would waste so much money on a job search to hire the "best" professor, even though they have a fully qualified and tested VAP/adjunct. In the "real world," if someone has proof they can do the job, and do the job well, you KEEP THAT GUY FOREVER. Don't let them slip away, don't try to hire the hot new thing, grasp desperately on them. It costs so much time and energy for the high level employees doing the review, and there's no guarantee that even after you higher that "hot-shot engineer fresh from MIT" that people can stand being in the same room as them, or that they know the difference between writing code that works or writing code that's smart.
Unfortunately, teaching skills and research skills don't always coincide. An adjunct might be a great teacher and wonderful person, but they may or may not be able to contribute original research. Or their research specialty may not be in high demand. Or (most likely scenario), university departments knows that their adjuncts don't have any better offers on the table, and would prefer to keep around an exploited underclass to drudge for them while offering tenure to the hot-shot professors who bring in grant money and lend prestige to the university. It's a dirty business, made dirtier because it pretends not to be.
@@willjones8261 And bonus those same full Profs (and there are usually tenure track Assistants slaving to get tenure along with Associates) also know that they can't/won't teach the class, if only because in order to get tenure they need to have 20-30 grad students to pump out the needed research (and terrify they provost into giving them tenure or finding new spaces for all those supported grad students) so they NEEEED those Adjuncts teaching or they'll be stuck with the job. There really is no training for teaching at the elite schools so profs are thrown into the pool with a bunch of students for something they know (maybe too well) but no one else in the department wants to teach. Sometimes it's good, but it's a huge amount of work to create a curriculum (or even adapt someone eases) and learn how pedagogy works... time you don't have, if you want tenure.
This all came to a head when I was a grad student, because an adjunct who had been there 10 years had to take 2 terms off to prevent him from getting tenure (weird rule someone passed to deal with exactly his situation), but there were so many students who were paying for masters degrees just to take HIS course that would be so angry they would leave, if he wasn't teaching it. The department wanted him to teach it and give him tenure (his wife was tenured and in the same department), but the University was like... If we do this for him, we'll have to do it for everyone or we might get sued?!?! Well, he got the job, but only after lots of screaming and because he was in such a special situation where a bunch of people including his wife could speak up without fear.
Where does the money go? Administration. They are there for compliance. They make you (the student) and the professors lives hell, but reduce civil liability and bring in federal/state education$$.
@@qwerty4324ify Every times I wonder why American universities are such hell, I just have to look up how much an administrators get paid, vs how much an adjunct or assistant prof make to get why
The truth is: most people in the real world don't have an engineering mindset.
And I really struggle with that.
That wouldn't create as much administration.
I've even had 400-level classes where the professors had to run, literally run, after class to get to their car to drive to their next class at a different university.
Lol
What a shame! Criminal.
I did it. And was told by campus police head that adjuncts shouldn’t have faculty parking.
I was an adjunct for my local community college for about four years. I mainly did it to get teaching experience. They only paid me after the semester was over just one time. It was about $1,900 before taxes for each course. I tried to get two separate full-time jobs at the school with either teaching or an education specialist. They already had their pick of course, so I didn’t get either job.
I'm one of those weird students that reads the minutes and the documents from salary meetings to find out what my teacher's make, and that's about on par with what my professors earned per class this year. Absolutely unacceptable as a practice. 2 student's tuition goes to the teacher and then everyone else in the class are 100% profit for the school? Wtf? @@ManofGod04
In my undergrad the university I studied at (University of Auckland) was adamant that when someone was teaching you they were always a current researching academic. I never realised why they were so proud of it at the time - like wouldn't that be the default, bare minimum?
Now I understand!
Although, I was just a kid, there could have been scammy employer behaviour going on and I'd have had no idea. This is not an endorsement of University of Auckland 😅
The UoA Academic Staff Collective Agreement is available online. There are levels called like "Senior Tutor" and "Professional Teaching Fellow" who don't typically do research, but they do get paid at least $90k. There is also a "Tutor" level which is lower, but I don't remember any of my classes (in engineering) being taught by someone who wasn't at least a "Senior Tutor".
Not all staff are union members so they're not all on the collective contract but I think most are
@@rakino4418 In the US, most employers have no shame, and get legislators to change the law, rather than be decent employers.
Yes, but not always. They're also taught by professors who are part of faculty but who aren't running a funded research lab
How else is the basketball coach going to feed his wife, three kids, two purebred dogs, and nanny with less than $5 million? He's out there telling people how to play basketball, what are you doing? Educating the next generation of humanity so that we don't go extinct? Pshh, get a real job
*so that we don't go extinct as quickly
Most schools have separate funding for their sports programs, so no your tuition isn't going towards the football team or anything.
We don't need you. We are not going extinct
@@blib3786It’s kind of embarrassing most people miss this point. Yeah it’s a bad look that universities pay their coaches so much, but that money comes directly from the revenue the sports bring in. No Division 1 coach is being paid by tuition, they’re all being paid by the TV deals football/basketball generate
You're forgetting that thw basketball coach doesn't just have his wife, four kids, three dogs, and two nannies, he also needs the money to pay his mistress' rent!
The big problem is the number of well-paid full time with benefits administrators. This includes coordinators and directors who administer "programs" (most of which do little or nothing for real student success). And of course each administrator must have multiple full-time employees working for their department which helps justify their existence. There are all manner of made up reports, data collection, meetings, required training, etc. which are portrayed as "essential" and contributing to "student success". The accrediting bodies are complicit in this GRIFT. Eliminate all this and you can easily hire all full time instructors. The worst part is the student and parents do not understand that only a small part of their money is going directly for instruction.
The big problem is that the administrators actually do important work, mostly with regards to dealing with legal requirements of the institution. The legal requirements are often with dealing with issues of revenues, observing rules regarding discrimination, etc. With the former, an easy way to smooth over this is probably making the funding all public and making the students dealing less with collecting tuition, and seeking out donations. With regards to discimination, a centralised body to deal with the litigation might help. Like maybe a government body.For the etc., maybe government helping out might help.
@@phillipsiebold8351 Do they? Last time I checked, the Science of Administration was laughably nonexistent and is more of a bureaucracy that hinders innovation by restricting how and who can have ownership of the relationship between the student and the course’s content. There needs to be a scientific revamp of this entire process, specifically dealing with inefficient bureaucratic processes. There is a body of research that shows this to be precisely the problem and has been coined as “bureasclerosis” since it slowly degrades and rots any organization that has the symptoms
@@zwitterion2910 Sure, there are significant problems and I'm sure the politicians who are writing the rules truly care about the problem. =/
The reality is that when it comes to heirarchies, as any bureaucracy is, there can be the problem of downloading responsibilities to lower members (local institutions), so as to avoid having the decisions on important matters being done on a more strategic and political level. Instead, it is your university administration who has to come up with their own policy as to how they are going to abide by things like discrimination laws, have their own means of litigating the issues as they crop up. It's all very piecemeal and too often duplicates the work that many are doing, and gets them all tangled up in disputes which refuse to be resolved at a higher level.
When it comes to institutional bloat, it is best to look at what is being duplicated across the many institutions and see if it can be removed. The downloading, and consequent duplication, was a political choice. Often at the state level or the federal level. The task ahead is to ask why was the downloading done and how can it be reversed, pointing specifically at the bloat, lack of resolution, and lack of product by the burdened institutions.
@@phillipsiebold8351 In a complex environment, hierarchies do seem inevitable, but how much money and political value these institutions have is the motivational force that exacerbates hierarchies creating environments that tax human development and achievement. There is piles of evidence that show self-managing micro-teams/organizations that are unhindered by “upper management” perform markedly better since the reward is focusing on their deliverables, and not being taxed by what needs to be “downloaded” to motivate people to behave within certain parameters. This method removes human autonomy which reduces creativity and problem solving skills. For example, the candle problem experiment, in short: two subject participants are “high drive” and “low drive;” high drive were told the faster they solve the problem, the more they get paid, low drive participants were not given an option. The results are consistent, having a competitive, compensated environment significantly reduced problem solving, whereas low drive participants solved it the fastest. The high drive condition creates stress and sometimes a sympathetic nervous system.
Doing an audit or diagnoses of money efficiency may just lead to more problems because that’s the main motivational factor. ‘You get a degree here, you make more money,’ which makes it more competitive requiring them to increase their budget and their staff.
The reality is we don’t apply scientific evidence to institutions because it would disrupt the flow of money and political value.
@@zwitterion2910 The only problem is I have a dim view on the applicability of these experiments to demonstrate what in general needs to happen. It is likely less fruitful to concern ourselves over individuals than it is to look at what are the powers and responsibilities of each position and how they are distributed.
To take your candle experiment example, what is the actual scope of the experiment? It seems to try to identify low drive and high drive people exist. Well, what does low drive and high drive have to do with it other than your hope that high drive people break the rules to deliver superior service? That reminds me of the Dirty Harry story, which tells us that a man doesn't really solve the problem just so that they can have a little catharsis.
I think one of the most concerning issues is that nobody seems to talk about this? I had never even heard the WORD "adjunct" until I was a senior in undergrad and thinking about getting into teaching myself. It was only after I went out of my way to do my own research that I discovered all my favorite "professors" weren't actually technically professors and were hovering around the poverty line.
It actually kinda steered me away from getting a PHD too, since it seemed like a waste of time and money. The only reason I was considering it was because I liked academia and wanted to teach. But then I learned I could make more money pushing boxes at a warehouse. (And get health insurance too!)
At least with K-12 you will almost always get health insurance and will have a stable job, especially once you get through the first couple of years.
You will never have heard this one either: Freeway Flyer - some one working as adjunct at more than one institution, possibly carrying a larger load than a tenured prof but making 1/3.
@@judychurley6623 Yeah I've never heard that term but I definitely knew some of them. I had a philisophy prof who taught at 2-3 different universities in the area. I also had a music prof who actually drove back and forth between Boston, MA and New Haven, CT (about a 3-4 hour drive) to teach at two different universities.
"7 of 9, tertiary adjunct to Unimatrix 01"
The sad thing is if more undergrad students knew this is what they were paying tens of thousands of dollars for, for their instructors to be treated like this and get paid jack, to hell with the consequences to the quality of instruction a lot of them would be absolutely outraged. But because of the abusive situation of precariousness the adjuncts are in, they'll never say a word about it to their students for fear of blacklisting.
I'm super late to this discussion (hi, binge watching your content) but I really wanted to add that the little undergrad students really just don't know what their adjunct profs are going through unless the adjunts speak out, but we absolutely care, at least my classes did. My FAVORITE professor was an adjunct who frequently vocalized how shitty her treatment was and how she had to work at both colleges across the street to feed her child. My classmates and I had her back, cut her slack often and comforted her as best we could, reassuring her she was GOOD and that it wasn't fair. She taught me a love for a field I didn't care about in the slightest before signing up for the "easy credit class" yet I have no idea where she is now. She's still in a big photo for the department site but her name is traceless. I hope now she's doing something better in every sense of the word, she deserves it. Abolish adjuncts!!
Me too, Johnny-come-lately here. I don't even know how I found this channel but I'm damn glad I did.
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I think your "vanity" argument is extremely valid, and there's also some kind of sunk cost fallacy to it. It makes adjuncts so easy to exploit.
Maybe also a little bit of inertia.
"Vanity"... more like "we taught at this Institution so we can place the name down for maybe better opportunities further down the line" which... I don't even know if that works or not =/ there's definitely the sunken cost fallacy in there though
@@aniellodimeglio8369
Absolutely. I can't speak for every university everywhere but where I got my bachelor's and master's, it was a few new/young Ph.D.'s sprinkled among a bunch of old guys. Seriously, we're talking boomers in their 70s and 80s. These guys are WAY behind the power curve. I'm 50 and I'm a spring chicken compared to them. One prof I had in my master's program (2013) got his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1965 and worked on the Mariner 10 space probe. This guy is so old he's petrified. I just looked him up, he's still there!
True. Many won’t leave and have no present world experience or dynamic energy
Also, they may not be employable otherwise.
I've been watching your videos all day and my takeaway is: don't do a postdoc, don't become an adjunct, don't study string theory, and it's ok that you don't know anyone who did graduate school. As a first-gen student who wants to pursue advanced physics education, genuinely, thank you for the insight.
Hi, currently finishing up my phd in physics here, i mean fair. I'd say probably don't do grad school just in the hopes of teaching at a university. I'm lucky in that my field has decent paying scientist roles at major public facilities and also at some private companies, so i'm doing that first, and if a tenure track role comes along I'd consider it. It's not all a nightmare, but please nobody ever do a phd unless you HAVE to for your career. Phd's are just poeple with 4-10 years of higher education getting paid less than you can make starting at a Target. If anything sign up for a phd, get paid to get your masters, and then bail with it once you're done with classes. That might help you out in some fields. Definitely avoid a post doc position if it's at all possible.
Seriously though, if you really want to do physics, going into condenced matter physics (solid-state physics, transistors, electronics, quantum computing, etc) is a very well-selling career outside of academia.You could also probably do well with fluid dynamics, although you'd probably end up working for the military industrial complex, which is a moral issue for me and some people. Computational physics of most types can be leveraged for a job at a major tech company, if that's what you're going for. Again though, for a lot of these non-academic jobs, just bail with a masters probably, they don't care if you worked as a servant for a professor for a few years after.
Great video! We actually live in Austin, and my GF teaches at the very school mentioned. Some of this was so spot on. Thank you for doing it!
Teachers deserve an order of magnitude better treatment and compensation than they are given.
I have a friend who was 'kept on her toes' by her university about whether or not she would have classes to teach. It was actively harmful to her health. It is in a small way comforting (at least she wasn't being singled out??) and in a large way disgusting to hear of how widespread the practice is. It needs to stop.
The examples you chose were vibrantly illustrative of the problems with the current situation. Thanks for making this video. I hope it helps.
When i was studying to be a nuclear physicist in Sweden this wasn't the case maybe this is an American thing.
@@IamdeaththedestroyerofWorlds Yeah I'm in Britain and my cousin works at Cambridge, I think it's just America. Still it's appalling that anyone should have to go through something like this.
This is a common experience. My BSc physics lab partner got a scholarship to Cambridge, co-wrote a quantum phys textbook and after surveying her prospects... quit physics and went to business school. My bff at Venturers got into Oxford for her Chem Eng PhD then lasted a year as a postdoc. The money vs hours again was the problem. She went into her uncle's dressage coaching business. Neither have touched STEM professionally since or have any intention to in the future.
It seems like exploiting a worker's passion and love for a field has become a thing. Starting pay for pilots is apparently absurdly low these days, and aviation is one of those fields that people fall in love with. K-12 teachers get paid less and less. And grad students and adjuncts.
I feel like this must be something that's taught in business school. It's sick.
Same thing in the video game industry.
it's always been a thing, everything just got amplified over the years until now it is frankly absurd. "sexy is poor'. want to make money, pick the most boring and tedious sounding profession imaginable. the kind that will make everyone's eyes glaze over if you mention it at a dinner party. "refrigerant salesman" or "geologist at a cement factory" will always make far more than you expect and "nasa engineer" and "trendy restaurant manager" will make far less.
@@Yura135 not always, people weren't taught to love their job, and hobbies were just hobbies, it took a lot of propaganda to make people think you must love what you do and do what you love
I think it's that the more pro-social and useful your job is, the more they think you don't deserve to get paid. And the more anti-social (in the clinical sense, as in, DESTRUCTIVE of social bonds, not avoidance of them), the more they get paid.
@@yan-amar yeah the games industry is infamous for being exploitative I'm continually surprised there isn't more push within it to unionize, but it's more than just one industry, its everywhere. even stuff that on average pays pretty well like boring-ass business software development will absolutely short-change you if they think they can.
I think pitchforks are gonna have to come out before shit turns around.
So... _all_ of American higher education is now completely hollowed out? It's all just huge tuitions going to pay endless administrators (full-time, great-benefits-having administrators)?
It’s dependent on your school and the specific program you’re going for. I went for graphic design and had a pretty strong core of full time professors with adjuncts maybe making up 30% of my courses max.
America is just a hollow tree made out of gig workers
Yep.
More accurately, to pay the sports team coaches.
Bingo
When I was an adjunct, I once taught 7 courses face-to-face in one semester at four different schools in one semester with every single one of those courses being an entirely different course. Despite publishing more and getting better reviews than the full-time professors, I had to leave the US to get a full-time job in academia and that was 7 years after receiving my PhD.. It took me an additional three years to become an Assistant Professor at a U.S. university but within 6 years of hiring I was promoted to full professor. That was 17 years ago and since then I have become a department chair and I have hired two different adjuncts into full-time positions, one as a full-time lecturer and the other, just last year, as an assistant professor.
I encourage my adjuncts to take advantage of every opportunity we offer our full-time professors for extra money such as training programs and professional development funding, I invite them to all of our department functions, and I back them up when the administration or students try to take advantage of them. As department chair, I might not have any power over their salaries but I do whatever I can do to treat them with respect and my department colleagues treat them like they are one of us, because they are, and we could not do our jobs without them.
I taught 8 during my last semester, 13 years ago. Two different departments (math + soc.sci), so I was surreptitious. Glad to read your post, and to know that I was not the only one, and as the son of a Dean, not the only one to _care_ about outcomes. Thanks for your post.
Above situation is rare.
Yes, I say that’s rare, too. I’ve applied to 20 full-time instructor/professor jobs in the four years teaching as an adjunct, and I never got hired. I’m having to work at Walmart full-time to get my other benefits. Also, I worked at Walmart while I was an undergraduate and graduate before I became an adjunct professor. 😅
@@ManofGod04 It is definitely rare but it is also the right thing for departments to do for their adjunct pool. Adjuncts are taken advantage of and we need to recognize that they are often our best instructors and provide them with opportunities to become full-time faculty,
Adjuncts need their own union. Universities can't exist without them, so adjuncts do have the power to fix this, but only by striking or threatening a strike. ETA: dang, some good strategery to go with that, too. This is a textbook case where worker power can make a huge difference in a very short amount of time.
The union needs to be the recognized bargaining unit or it is just a collection of malcontents and there's a lot of other unemployed degree holders waiting for those openings. I was both a classified employee and 'adjunct' faculty overhearing tenured Prof having a discussion of the contract negotiations at our college: "If the adjunct pay and seniority in class assignment are all that is holding this up, then let's settle!"
In Texas, the law forbids trade unions of educators. Punishment: prison.
@@ik7584 Trade unions for educators are not illegal in Texas. There is a draconian law that prevents public employees from striking or performing other work stoppages; the punishment is removal of several benefits, not prison. Adjunct professors are almost certainly not public employees, especially since they're not even employees.
@@oasntet My post is about all educators, not just adjuncts. I am saying what I heard from an educator who taught in Texas for 30+ years. Now, I teach in Texas. They cut our salaries below what our salaries were in 2019 (even without adjusting to inflation), and faculty can do nothing about it. IIn the country without universal healthcare, jobs are slavery.
Unions are money sucking scams also preying on adjuncts. They are useless - do not spearhead any improvement.
I left my adjunct job several years ago after listening to work friends who were 10 to 20 years older talk about how they couldn't afford to replace their car or considering applying for food stamps. A number of them died way too early. All were very smart and very dedicated instructors. Many would say I'm underemployed at my current job but I have benefits and savings now.
Thank you for this. I’m a single dad, writing a dissertation, and teach 4 courses at 2 universities, tutor a middle school privately, and I take on other tutoring jobs while I can.
Barely alive here.
I studied maths in the 90s at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. All classes were taught by tenured professors, except for two graduate courses in applied mathematics (Mathematical models for computer graphics and insurance maths), where they brought in external specialists, adjuncts, which somehow made sense, because of their special real world expertise. Unfortunately, by what I hear, nowadays, it's becoming more and more common to have adjunct teachers with limited time contracts and on ridiculously low salaries for regular courses, also in Germany.
This is not a good development. In the overall cost of running a university, the amount spent on salaries of adjuncts is a ridiculous small fraction. Whilst the whole concept is questionable, at least the pay should be good.
Under the pretext of "improving teaching", some German states introduced student fees in the 2000s. Of course, the money ended up in the general pot and nothing actually changed, so they were abolished again state by state over the following years. As of now, there's not a single state with fees left.
Note: I would have loved to work in academia. I worked 4 years as TA during my graduate studies (which was actually good money for a student, and I loved the job), but unfortunately, I wasn't good enough. Got into software development instead.
Oh no ... I was about to comment: "Come to Germany, all good here, we need the bright minds".
I'm in the UK. I wish we had followed the German route but our country is highly centralised so we don't have state or county level governments with the power to do that. Only central government can and they're hopelessly neoliberal and haven't changed at all. In fact even the left wing parties now push for fees and with the economic crisis there's no way they'd agree to spend more on universities through direct government funding.
You are missing key point here: in Germany healthcare is free, there are workers' unions, there are mandatory holidays paid by the state, there are paid mandatory maternity leave, and there are no university debts.
@@VirtuelleWeltenMitKhan Well at least in Germany healthcare is free, there are workers' unions, there are mandatory holidays paid by the state, there are paid mandatory maternity leave, and there are no university debts.
I think the easy way to explain adjunct professors to people outside of the hellscape of academia is to ask them to imagine if your entire education from kindergarten to high school was taught by supply teachers. No hate against supply teachers, but that's just how universities treat their educational obligations.
For me, one big reason I quit was because I didn't want to do the "grind" in the hopes of getting a job somewhere. I liked teaching, but after 6 years of being a grad student and living in poverty, another god knows how many years doing that just seemed terrible. The fact that being a sessional is basically an end goal for a lot of PhDs is pretty sad and another sign that you basically need to be independently wealthy to go through this process. That and the story of Margaret Vojtko, who was an adjunct for 25 years, was a real eye-opener.
That story was devastating.
Adjunct are usually recent grads who may be as well-versed in the course content as a tenured prof. They just aren't paid as well.
@@judychurley6623 The problem stems from the fact that a lot of institutions have no incentive to get people out of the adjunct bubble. You're getting people who are desperate for the equivalent of 'exposure' in hopes of becoming tenure track there (if you're really lucky and they love you) or somewhere else, but for the people who can't make it and who can't fathom a career outside of academia, they get stuck in the adjunct trap forever, driving around different university campuses teaching 8 courses trying to make a living.
In many ways young adjuncts are at the cutting edge, both of pedagogical techniques (everyone knows the old prof who doesn't like to use technology) and of subject matter expertise, but universities know they can underpay these people because there are always going to be new meat for the grinder.
@@firehawk128 I know. I did it for 10 years. I finally got a job teaching high school.
Adjuncts and TAs are obviously limited by an implicit pay ceiling. There is no market incentive to create the best teaching environment through pay. Accidentally an adjunct could be much smarter than the professor. But There is no connection to school revenue resources and its teacher quality. The administration has huge subsidies in grants scientific or otherwise, and financial aid for students. The university or college can get away with inefficiency and incompetence. There is not an actual market for education that is not affected by the rush for government grants. They are not getting the market rate as the universities and colleges and students are being subsidized by government funds. This causes exorbitant tuition rates too. It’s run as a religious order, but secular, does it have dedicated administrators?
I appreciate the problem that students can't get recommendations from adjunct professors because that's exactly what happened to one of my daughters. Nobody told her that the adviser for her honour's thesis was an adjunct. Two years later when she wanted to go to graduate school, the "professor" was no longer at that university, and when my daughter tracked her down, her response was that writing letters of recommendation for students was no longer her job. When I did a bit of contract teaching as a favor to a friend, I told the students in my first lecture that I was a full-time researcher at a government research institute and not on the faculty at the university because it's only fair that the students know who is teaching them.
I am attending classes specifically because there is no faculty left at my alma mater to write recommendations for me. I didn't know adjuncts could not write letters of recommendation
@@marymegrant1130 Adjunct's can write letters of recommendation--anyone can--but often they won't. It takes time to compose a decent letter and someone trying to live off her earnings for contract teaching is already working like a rented mule, trying to teach as many classes as possible just to afford food and rent. As well, they likely have so many students in so many different classed that they would get asked to write far more letters than tenured professors. And they usually don't know enough about their students to say more than that the student is passing their course. One trick in getting aletter of reference is to write it yourself, be honest, and see if the professor will take a minute to read it and sigh it. Though it ought to be typed on the university letterhead.
@@marymegrant1130 It's not that they can't, it's that they often move on and may be unwilling. It never hurts to ask, but you have to be aware that they may refuse.
Pay the professor under the table to write a recommendation letter for your daughter. Nobody would find out and it wouldn't be a lie.
Not only are adjuncts considered subhuman, they are also the first to fall when budgetary shortages crop up (see DePaul University). Universities exploit and underpay so many positions, from the 'contracted' custodial crews, undergrad work studies and UGTAs to graduates and adjuncts. The only people who receive consistent and high salaries reside in the Deans' Offices and business departments of each school. :/
I'm not in academia, but it's so very interesting to hear about how corporations(very many universities are corporations) abuse their teachers. I think this is a broader issue, that stems from the fact that universities ARE corporations, and therefore have the same motive to treat their 'employees' like this because at the end of the day, someone you don't have to pay money is profit. I hope your video helps people understand we need to have better school systems with pay more equitably, and maybe this helps create a better society for us all.
As an associate professor (permanent position) at a Danish university, it is interesting for me to see how big the differences are between the Danish and the American university systems, and how the same words can mean very different things. Before I got my permanent contract, I was an "adjunkt" for 4 years at the same university. It was a time-limit contract, limited to 4 years, but it was a full-time position with an office, paid vacation (6 weeks per year) and pension and all that. The position came with the official requirement that I had to teach, which I did for about 3 months per year. The rest of the time, I did research (which was mostly sitting in more or less pointless meetings for the various research projectrs rather than doing the actual research, but that is another discussion). I don't remember my exact salary, but it was plenty to live comfortably in Copenhagen and also save up money for buying a house.
That sounds like the equivalent of a tenure track assistant professorship in the US
Can Denmark please adopt me 😅
I have a relative who worked high in administration at large state schools. They view students as product, and teaching staff as a cost to be minimized in producing that product. Educational outcome means less to the growth of the school than success of the sportsball teams. I hadn't realized they were managing to pay adjuncts less than groundskeepers. This cannot end well for the country.
in the 80s everyone started thinking that everything has to be run like a business
very strange
I dropped out of my PhD program after passing quals because I saw no future as a post-doc. That and I was able to get paid a heck of a lot more in industry plus get great health insurance for my family. I have absolutely zero regrets.
You're really awesome, congrats. I can hardly understand why so little people talk about this. I notice there is an angle left unexplored, this issue is post 80s, when there has been a surge in PHDs from asian, south american, african and former communist coutries. There also is some PHD inflation from inside the US, but in no small part from americans born to immigrant parents, or blacks. These people for lack of transgenerational wealth have a lot less family support and hence more easily fall into these traps. In the end of the day the whole game is just racism with another name.
Good point. We know that community stature is more easily inherited, hence why more higher-level academics and admins come from more affluent families.
Not racism, just exploitation in this case.
Hm, in my old country (Russia) it's customary to have "101-level", 200-person lecture hall courses be taught exclusively by professors from the top of the internal food chain, and the more advanced the courses get, the younger the teachers are. To me, this makes sense from all angles: on one hand, you can give the elderly nomenclatura easy stuff to teach while still collecting salary (there's no such things as tenure or pension plans in USSR), on the other, the most fundamental courses seem to be a reasonable high priority when best teaching talent is allocated. You always see a bit of both.
I have a PhD in engineering (I work in industry and don't teach), and during undergrad I had a lot of adjunct professors teaching the more basic engineering courses. As far as I could tell all these adjuncts were either a) working engineers who mainly were adjunct professors just because they liked teaching, and would typically only teach one course per semester, or b) were retired engineers who taught just because they enjoy it and maybe to bring in some extra cash to supplement their retirement income. Prior to watching this video I never realized that there are people who try to make a living doing nothing but being an adjunct, which seems crazy.
There are many adjuncts in humanities where leaving academia (even a bad adjunct position) is a career death sentence, and for many of us there is no “industry” for us to which we can turn. Working as an independent scholar can be done in certain cases but is difficult even under the best conditions, and without some kind of official university affiliation many avenues for funding are closed. What’s worse is that administrators force departments to hire more and more adjuncts instead of creating full time positions.
@@sams3046 Great points! This is an unfortunate situation, and probably not great for these fields as a whole to have fewer practitioners who are able to make a living doing research.
My husband is a retired engineer too and teaches one adjunct course at a local tech college. He does it because he enjoys it. We couldn’t live on the salary. As someone who has worked in industry, he can make the content more relatable to any future job these students may have. He also has relationships with employers and can recommend students to them.
It’s like entry level fast food workers complaining they don’t get a “living wage “
@@MuzixMakerYeah except these are highly specialized people with PhD's, not a job that literally anyone off the street can do like fast food work.
If you're charging each student $3000 to attend classes, a teacher should get--- at minimum--- two students' fees. I said what I said.
the rule of thumb for students was 2-3 hours outside for every hour in class, therefore I suggest 3-4 students' fees as fair compensation.
@@tissuepaper9962 Completely agree.
That's still low, do a percentage of all course fees instead. 100 students at $3000 each? That's $30,000 per course. Sounds high? I mean... good, lol. I'm fine with valued teachers getting $120k for teaching 4 courses a year. If that sounds too high, consider lowering the price per credit, because $3000 per course is insane to begin with.
Really, we need to nationally ban or severely limit academic funds from going to sports. No more than like, 2% of tuition fees should go to sports facilities or coaches.
@@KingBobXVI I would be completely fine with teachers getting paid more. Even $120k per year. It's such a shame that students pay bucketloads of money and teachers barely get to taste a drop of it.
@@KingBobXVImy high school history teacher gets 120 thousand a year. Thats the average. But I also dont live in the US, so thats that
So easily my favorite channel these days. Not in academia at all it’s all just fascinating coming from corporate sales (soulless)
I love this channel. You are amazing and i cant wait to hear what you have to say.... everytime.... the effort you put in is appreciated.
I got my geology degree, and the single most useful class i took was taught by an adjunct. He is the owner of a large geoscience company, and taught a class on industrial applications. He really used it to recruit young and hungry people into his company and didn't care about the pay.
It was one of the few classes that I actually use daily at work. Geophysics? Not one time have i needed to measure the tensile stress on a slip plate 😅
And litterally had the old research professor that hated teaching situation.
The point is: adjuncts are not (necessarily) inferior teachers, they have inferior pay and job security.
that sounds like a good example of what adjuncts should be- passionate experts who don't rely on teaching for their livelihood
@caseyjones4 I hear what you're saying, but to me, your argument implies, "I don't use this knowledge every day, so it wasn't worth learning." I'm wary of that way of thinking. There's probably someone out there who didn't care about the industrial applications class but did need to know how to measure the tensile stress on a slip plate. So they could use your exact argument, but in reverse. Does either argument help prove a point? I'm not sure...
@treeleaf7808 I can see how you got there, but that wasn't what I meant. I think if you're going to have a degree in something, you should be a subject matter expert on that. I also feel that there are degrees of usefulness. Learning something practical is way more useful than learning something something that you'll refer back to on occasion.
Both should be learned, both are useful. But the practical class has led to me being way ahead of my peers entering the work force. I think that is much more useful to me. 1 in 100 gradutes will go into acadamia. But the majority of what they learn is only useful there
Thank you very much for making this video. The fact that this type of practice is so common is completly unacceptable. It really needs more attention !
My spouse was an adjunct for several years. She'd graduated from the school with a Masters but was really on the fence about getting her PhD (her heart wasn't in it.) The school she'd just graduated from hired her to teach a couple of courses a semester and while it did pay crap, she got to be on the health insurance plan--as a type 1 diabetic, she was mostly doing it for the insurance while she figured out her next steps. Ultimately, working as an adjunct is what convinced her not to get her doctorate and get out of academia altogether. I didn't realize until much later how rare it was that she did actually get insurance out of the deal and how good that was (compared to the average). She also did have an office space. I assume they did that because she'd been a grad student in their department and they liked her. I thought it was exploitative enough as it was, I can't even believe how much some adjuncts put up with.
I recently was recommended one of your videos, and ended up binging most of your videos! This one lingered in my head, mainly because an adjuct I had during my undergrad actually did get hired. I just graduated with a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, and had the best adjuct ever for Thermo I and Thermal System Design. During my senior year, one of the professors had to leave and we made a petition so the adjunct has a better chance of being hired. In one of the last weeks of the semester, it was announced he would be full-time in the following year. I know these situations don't happen often, but I thought it would be nice to share! Keep up the good work with these videos!
What does full-time mean, tenure track? Or full time adjunct? It would be the first time I've heard of an adjunct getting a tenure track position. And then even so, when he comes up for tenure, would he be respected enough to have a fair shot at it? The stigma might stick.
I misread the title, came here expecting to talk about matrices, then learned something new about academia and why it's SO damn important for teachers and academics to unionise. Thanks, Dr Collier.
This was the most entertaining video I’ve seen in ages! Very well thought out scenarios, entertainingly presented. The selection of classic music between chapters was . I’m so glad TH-cam suggested your channel to me.
I was an adjunct for a year back in 1994. The inflation-adjusted pay per physics course was $4000 in 2023 dollars per semester. The community college would have limited my yearly salary to $24k according to how many courses they allowed me to teach. For me it was only temporary but freeway flyers took slides to college and drove to other colleges to teach more courses in order to make ends meet.
As a former full-time adjunct (being at three schools at once), you are preaching to the choir here. Oh my goodness, five courses, three schools, you totally described my life for three years! Hope lots of people watch this video! I love teaching, but even non-adjunct full time lecturers don't make enough, IMO. If you have PhD, you can be a lecturer or "clinical professor" (misnomer but term used in some depts for teaching onlly) or "teaching professor", but I don't think even those positions are tenure-track, nor do they have the potential income increase of FT teacher+research tenure-track professor positions. Teaching AND writing grants AND managing a lab AND possibily doing research is just ridiculous, few can do all of that very well.
Former adjunct and “visiting professor” here. You killed me with the description of the full professor who comes in saying, “I hate freshman, I hate this course” and only teaches the 400-level invitation-only seminar. 😂 That was perfect.
Fellas and felles, it sounds like we need a revolution.
Thanks. I worked in a hospital for almost 20 years, in and out of patient care. Physical Therapists used to call this "continuity of care", meaning the same therapist treats you the whole time (as much as possible). So they know that patient, and the patient knows them. I'd be surprised if any such thing still exists today. Nurses back then had become more administrative than anything else. It was the "patient care technician" who did all the actual daily patient care. The nurse only came into the patient's room to identify themselves, or to give medication. Otherwise, they were doing paperwork. And they earned a helluva lot more than the PCTs who did all the work with the patients. Today, I can't even seem to keep the same doctor. I've had 2 retire, and a third who moved to another practice. Now, I've had to change doctor's offices entirely. That'll be 5 in the last 5 years. Yeah for capitalism, I guess... *_NOT_*. tavi.
medicine is the exact opposite of a free market, this is not a "capitalism" issue. if medicine were a free market then insulin would be $3.75/dose and it wouldn't take fifteen years to become a doctor. the medical industry is literally the textbook example of "regulatory capture".
@@tissuepaper9962Capitalism by means of maximizing profits. Probably not the 'free market' aspect as much. Not sure exactly how integral the concept of the 'free market' is to the idea of capitalism since I'm just an uneducated bumkin that doesn't deal with more technical definitions for these types of subjects
@@gaerekxenos well, "regulatory capture" is a good search term for you. It's basically when a company or small group of companies advocate for a law that makes their product more expensive to produce by requiring tests and certifications, requiring a specific type of equipment, etc. The trick is, they either were already doing things that way, or they have enough money to retrofit all their production to a new standard without much of a financial hit. What this does is make it economically infeasible to start a new company in that industry, because a small business can't afford the lawyers and lab testing necessary to comply with those new laws.
The One and Done post gave me a lot of perspective because I’ve been taking online classes & it frustrates me to no end that for some classes, there is nothing in the portal up until like a day before the class starts. I assumed it was always the teachers waiting until the last minute, but it could very well be teachers literally unable to log in and upload things or they don’t know they even have the class until the last minute…absolutely ridiculous.
These videos are so incredible important...
You're a source of advocacy, which desperately needed, in academia right now. A livable wage, health insurance and retirement packages shouldn't be a question for our educators, unbelievably disappointing...
I would love to see an in depth discussion of sports at college pushing back at the "ummm aksually sports fund themselves and make money for the university" narrative, ignoring *who* it makes money for and all the collateral damage it seems to cause in the process. I think it does actual damage to the education system of a given college.
The University I went to decided to forego all sports in order to avoid that problem. Pity it didn't resolve much =_=;; Said University also had an adjunct abuse problem. Also had a bunch of rather fraudulent sounding awards such as... "Green Campus" when they had tons of grass all around, used paper plates and plastic throwaway utensils, didn't have composting, and also had water fountains that were running - and this was the Southwest US area where we deal with drought =_=;; some local paper gave it the "Great Place to Work" title too =-=;; very yucky when you actually knew what was going on there
Back in 2016 Real Sports did a segment on Universities funding football out of the general fund.
At my school, during a round of threatening to cut swimming and a few other smaller sports teams, it came out that most of the smaller programs were at least break-even financially while football was one of the biggest losers. And this was before NIL so I can't imagine it's gotten any better.
I had an adjunct professor for one of my electrical engineering courses, but he is very much an exception. He’s a retired senior executive from Northrop Grumman who just likes teaching electrical engineering so he’s adjunct because he doesn’t care about tenure or the pay. He’s definitely not hurting financially though like many other adjunct professors. The guy is the American dream incarnate. Grew up poor in Egypt, came the the US, became an electrical engineer and worked his way up in Northrop Grumman.
This is precisely why I changed fields late in my academic career. While pursuing a PhD in history I saw the writing on the wall and went to medicine. Not that I don't want to be a medical doctor, I always found medicine exhilarating, but I was writing my thesis on millenarian anabaptism of the early reformation with this nagging thought in my mind that my future would be consigned to adjunct purgatory with no chance at tenure. It's a travesty that this is the direction we've permitted higher education to devolve
So much of this was vexingly like my experience, but one of them -- lack of communication where you're the scapegoat -- really hit home. Nobody told me the textbook wasn't available at the start of the term -- I had my instructor copy, they didn't have theirs. Then the textbooks came in -- different edition from mine, of course. But then weeks after the textbooks came in, nobody told me the students weren't actually using them -- apparently in that course it was traditional for them to skip them in favor of prof notes, although I saw in class that *some* of the students had the book -- and I got blamed for giving them assignments they didn't "get" because they referenced the textbook. I got fired for making one course too hard, and in the other I missed a class because they told me the wrong room, and the department head took over.
I never went through academia myself, but I have been a college student for many years (before dropping out), so I have been around faculty, and I have a relative who's in academia and who I talk to somewhat often. This video helped me see what faculty go through. Some of my instructions and professors were going through this, and my relative, who's now a tenured professor, might have gone through this at some point.
This is a great video.
The tone and message of this video is on point, and the problems and then goals you lay out to solve the problem are grounded in material reality: it's refreshing to see someone address issues like this who knows both why they are happening and also has a solution that isn't just "hope for something better"
Capitalism is the root of this problem, and disrupting it, or getting rid of it altogether, is the only way things will get better for us little people, from walmart workers to part-time professors
If we want a better world, we have to get unionized, get organized, and fight back
Thank you!
When I was younger I thought my teacher lived at school. By the time I got old enough to take a college course, the adjuncts were living in the dorm. $30,000 a year is what undergrads should be paid to take classes. Building more houses and roads is not going to fix the wage crisis, look at what happened in the Soviet Union in 1923. If they get paid in sneaker money, they will buy a pair of sneakers.
This is the best video you have ever made in my opinion Dr.Collier. I’m surprised it has only 88K views. Some profound food for thought. We need to fix this.
You've done this so, so well. FWIW, at one point in time, I taught 4 math classes, 4 econ classes, and 1 pol.sci. course, in one semester. Four classes made you the oxymoronic "full-time adjunct." Yeah. Five was easy to garner. Six, and you had to have permission of the Dean. But with Math and social science, I reported to two departments, and escaped the scrutiny. What was my record? For standardized classes (given transfer credit throughout the state of Indiana), I had above-average completion, and above-average grades. "Great job, Tom!" Yeah. And what did that get me? Nada-Zip-Naught-Zed-Nothin'. *I'd had quite enough, and went back to financial trading, as it was less stressful.* I kid you not.
You just summarized clearly the 10years surrounding my phd... In France. These adjuncts agents are called *vacataires* and the contract is called *vacation* (it means to fill blanks in a schedule, but sounds like holidays). 70% of the teaching job in universities is done by such agents with precarious situations. And same reasons to not quit until you find a real job!
Thanks addressing this topic and for your hectic emotions about it!
I think the spirit of the adjunct professor has been lost over time. Now, I'm probably wrong (usually am). That out of the way, my gut says that an adjunct ought to be someone outside of the institution and is a tenured professor or public/private professional that has some semi-formal affiliation with some university they are adjunct to. Perhaps they're sharing knowledge or resources and this professional chooses to teach a course in some auxiliary capacity. I think that through a twist of unfortunate events "adjunct" has come to mean subordinate and not auxiliary. It's my estimate that this switch from auxiliary to subordinate is where the modern incarnation of "research affiliates" or "affiliate associate professors" emerged from. It seems like the adjunct role has become a tool to transform tenure-track into a selling point on job offerings from universities. When in reality, tenure-track ought to be a given. Anecdotally, I have never met a professor that started as an adjunct. I hardly know any that even started as assistant professors.
Thank you for doing these videos. I have dropped off of the tenure track application process because I am wasting years doing that instead of doing research. The pandemic cemented that for me. I have never wanted to adjunct because of the sill amount of work to pay ratio, and this video really articulates all the problems I've been wary of.
I worked as an adjunct for 12 years. Finally was hired full time when I let them know I was going to have to find a "real" job to afford my health insurance. Most adjuncts will never be hired full time.
Wow. You are really a good person. Glad I found your channel. I also saw your related Postdoc video. I'm not in STEM, but I could tell you horror stories about paying a ton of money to get an MBA from an elite Ivy, going into deep debt (lower middle class person) with the expectation that I would have a commensurate career. Whoops, didn't factor in I'm Black. So, I found myself living like a pauper for years, post grad school, with a "regular" job, paying back tons of student loans, while my peers were going on ski trips to Europe and were buying their second (vacation) homes.
Yeah it's the same in Australia. Bloody depressing. If you're in the arts you're also setting up / organising / promoting / creating work for / "volunteering" at exhibitions a few times a year as well. If you are trying to impress people, you'll also be doing all this for conferences, which you then have to pay to attend, or writing articles, which you then have to pay to submit to journals. Absolutely nuts.
I had listened everything you said in this video even if I never been to school..
.. I hope you understand how much respect I have for you !
I'm listening because I want to understand why some people around me have so much difficulty to make their way into what they decided to put lots of energy in.
Like I said, I never been to school.. I don't have any degrees in anything.. I did messed up my life because I took bad decision instead of doing sacrifice, or personal efforts for having a better living situation..
I'm 44 and for the last 10 years, I did find people like you who were teaching or explaining how things works in our world.. our society.. our universe.
I know I already said that in many videos from you but once again, thank you very much for everything you did inside the communication world ! 😊 People like you makes me believe that I can learn more and more everyday.✔️ Full respect sister 🤘😎💯 (I hope my English is okay) 🙏 thanks
I did a few semesters of adjunct work at UPitt back when my wife was getting her masters at CMU. I didn't mind it at all and the pay was fair for how many hours I put in. I was offered enrollment in the UPMC health/dental plan even though I was part-time faculty (I guess that kind of thing varies wildly by university). Maybe the example of the English prof is just a lot of extra work vs teaching engineering. Grading essays seems like it would take way longer than grading some statics homework sets and grading blue book exams also seem way more daunting than a multiple choice exam.
My wife and I have a few million in savings and are looking at retiring early in our mid 40s. I've thought about being an adjunct again just to help train the next generation of engineers and earn some extra money to pay for hobbies. I never really thought of it being such a problem until watching this and hearing more about what others have experienced.
This is an excellent video, with a very accurate commentary. Solution: Get a job in the private or public sector with a nice salary and benefits, then do adjunct work part time, in the evening, once or twice a year. Make adjunct work just an avocation, not a vocation. Your elder years will arrive, at which time you'll need savings, a pension, and adequate Social Security benefits (based on your 30 years employment history). Also, your home or condo should be paid off before your retirement so you don't see endless years of rent increases. Bottom line: There is a massive surplus of USA academic professors, so adjunct wages will remain very low except for upper level tenured scholars. Best wishes to all of you. mark o. Seattle age 70
10 years ago, my college has a few deans only. Now almost 100 deans. Just a STEM dean has two assistant deans, and their own secretary. A dean has salary 10 times of an adjunct. The system is controlled by these deans. Of course, their jobs are to find way to cut down the payroll for adjuncts, otherwise what resource could afford their big fat checks. It is not about the fairness; it is about the power. Those deans always told me they are really bad in Math, but they are the ones in charge of STEM.
Thank you for highlighting this. It's a travesty and more people should know about it. I'm lucky that I left after I finished my post-doc instead of playing the academic lottery for another year or two, because the hiring situation in my new career got a lot worse not long after I entered it.
Glad you called out Reagan. He cut aid I received to attend school in the 80s (CU in fact, they had a shitty over-paid football program back then too). He set so many aspects of our nation on a downward spiral that continues today. I appreciate you noting such things in your vids. Gives me a glimmer of hope!
Glad you posted the Reagan article. I remember his statement: the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity”. That infuriated me when I was a student (and still does). And yet Reagan is today paid homage in lofty tones by Republicans and, more paradoxically, by Democrats. Incidentally, it would also be good to make a video on the exploitation of graduate student teaching assistants by universities. I'm sure you would get a lot of comments on that one!
I think the part you're missing is "Why don't you pay to take this course a second time?" works out GREAT for the owners. Yeah, if you think about it, EVERYTHING about adjuncts works out better for the owners. It's just the gigification of University jobs. Soon every teacher will be a part time professor.
This is such an important issue, I am sharing this with everyone I know. I've had so many people who don't understand this industry try to tell me I'm just "paying my dues". I've been "paying my dues" for 7 years across three different colleges with no real hope for tenure anytime soon.
FWIW, I'm an adjunct at a private uni in Georgia in the US. I'm a saxophonist. However bad the problem is for engineers, please know that it is even worse for the degrees deemed "unnecessary". And, we have even less power to change anything.
The fact that the full time staff only coffee was put in the ADJUNCT LOUNGE is CRAZY. It’s like the university is purposely taunting and disrespecting them
Universities have caste systems.
As someone considering a software -> education career change, I’m really enjoying your videos and perspective. Thank you, subscribed!
Excellent job. Valuable content.
Playlist:
Dropkick Murphys : Worker's Song
Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town
Working Class Hero: John Lennon
Billy Bragg: Power in a Union
Tom Morello: Union Town
Johnny Paycheck: Take This Job and Shove It
Judy Collins: Bread and Roses
Pete Seeger: Solidarity Forever
Woody Guthrie: Union Burying Ground
Greg MacPherson: Company Store
Florence Reece: Which Side Are You On?
Woody Guthrie : 1913 Massacre
"Working class" marked by jobs that provide low pay, limited opportunities.
The only thing that is different, academia never thought it would come for them.
No joking, this video, along with the post-docs-are-a-scam one, was one of the things that made me reconsider applying to grad school. I’m now happily employed as a welder, and only a few years in, I’m already making much more than I would’ve ever made as a grad student (or an adjunct, for that matter).
Thank you so much, Angela :)
The dropout scenario about the dad dying is literally me. I just lie and say I finished because I cant even be bothered to explain everything
I ended up dropping out after going to talk to a professor that I had thought I had a fairly close relationship about how during that semester my grandfather had passed away and my mother was about to die of cancer and what I could do to make up whatever work I needed to. It was meant to be my final semester, and was the week before final exams, and her reply was to simply say that it was not possible for me to pass the class no matter how well I did on the final because she "didn't remember seeing me in class enough", and therefore my attendance was too low, despite her not actually taking any formal attendance for that class. And I had shown up nearly every week.
I was so offput by that and stressed by everything else that I couldn't even be bothered to file a complaint against her, either for failing me over attendance despite having no record, or for refusing to consider my personal circumstances. And I wasn't going to take a whole extra semester for a single class (and it would have to be a full year later because it was the fall semester and so spring applications were already filled), so I ended up just skipping exams and leaving the university and never going back.
A few years later, after all my personal circumstances had been taken care of, I started looking in to see if I could finish the degree somehow but was told that it wouldn't really be possible due to my gpa (which had dropped considerably due to giving up that full semester of courses).
@@-tera-3345 Jesus that's horrible. I do not want to be presumptuous, but if you think you can get away with it, do what I do and lie. Just make sure you can back it up with the know-how and you will be fine, by the time the job or whatever it is figure it out (if they ever do) I doubt they will want the fuss of replacing a knowledgeable person over a technicality. (only exception would be ironically enough, academia, which you can be sure will probably check).
On the other hand, that prof. Sounds like a complete menace. I would have told her to go fuck herself, and I understand completely the feeling of just not wanting the aggro, after something like that you just realise you don't care about things like that anymore. But even so - she sounds puny. She deserved to hear it
I will never understand how anybody could possibly justify a school having large sports ball budgets.
This might be another problem for adjuncts: They are not in the same union as the full-time faculty, which can become a problem when the union is taking action.
When I was going to university, the professors went on strike. I was in full support of them, but I had to cross the picket line because one of the courses I was taking was taught by someone who was not a member of the union. I am not sure if he was an adjunct or just a "low-level" lecturer. But it is a similar situation. He had to continue teaching the course during a strike and the students were required to cross the picket lines to attend the course. The professors on strike were sympathetic and didn't hold anything against the people in this situation, but it was a pretty sh*tty situation to be in.
that just seems like oversight or outright corruption at the union leadership. the whole point of unions is to unify the working class (defined as someone who has to work to make ends meet). if anything, the strike should include truckers, baristas and everyone else in the community, see how long the university can hold out once the garbage men get in on the action.
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@@Yura135 eeen Father America, the unions strike each other.
@@Yura135 Unfortunately revolutionary industrial unionism has been out for a century and replaced with unions that collaborate with the exploiters
This is my favorite video I think I’ve ever scene. The over saturation of graduate students was never, ever meant to meet demand in terms of the number of PhDs needed as professor retire-the number of graduate students is determined by the number of incoming freshman and returning sophomores that need to be taught! Grad school at large state schools is a racket to get highly qualified instructors for pennies on the dollar.
An some snooty tenured professor is writing books and columns about raising the minimum wage to a 'living wage', while exploiting this system. I spent 2 years as a TA in grad school. The ubiquitous hypocrisy is mind-numbing.
I am a current undergrad about to graduate and have only had one adjunct professor. This made me lookup stats on my university's hiring practice and I found out ~13% of their teachers are adjunct/part-time. Just based off your description and scenarios, I feel EXTREMELY lucky that this is the case. I had no idea about this issue or how it might impact me when I applied as an undergrad but it would have. I got a lot out of my undergrad experience and a BIG part of that was meeting professors with research experience who could vouch for me and this started early on. No idea where I would be if instead of real professors I could rely on I instead was taught by adjuncts who were eventually pushed out. I also found out that the average for all universities is ~50%. That is CRAZY! That means , on average, universities inly fully employ HALF of their teachers. That is nuts!!! Great video!
I'm a software engineer. I'm not in academia. I still watched this whole video because you're just great at talking.
the state I live in pays for 2 year school, but because of the demand spike, most of the classes are taught by adjuncts that have never taught before and don't seem to have ever so much as watched a youtube video on it, but they take anyone they can get. the classes are a nightmare and even though the people work in the field they're teaching and have years of experience, they really don't understand how to actually *teach* it. Reallly grateful for your video, it makes a lot of great points
Hell yes. You f*****ng rock, thank you for calling out this problem and actually tying it to the things political institutions can do about it if and when we force them to. My one note is that doomerism about the ability of adjuncts to get organized is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. We need two feelings above all others to win: anger, to move us through our fear; and hope, to move us through our helplessness. Believe me, I get it if you're feeling hopeless yourself. But that's why we all need to practice dreaming of better worlds. So we can one day build them. Much love, keep up the fire.
You are such an amazing storyteller. Funny without trying, detailed to the perfect amount, sincere and off the cuff - learning DM physics from you would be a great class.
And this is exactly why I chose a university (in 1979) where 98% of all classes were taught by full time professors, not temp staff.
I'd heard stories from others about taking classes from adjuncts, grad students, and temporary staff.
It’s really frustrating how nearly every system eventually evolves to exploit the many for the benefit of few.
First of: Love your passion for the topic, its healthy (for me) to see how someone else is as frustrated as me with some of the current systems. It is also weird to see because im from germany and everything works so much different here. Like university is almost free, healthcare is taken care of by the employer for every single job etc. And all these systems have been implemented after the war where the us, russia, france and gb got together to figure out how we should set up a goverment. So fast forward to today where we are way ahead in that regard here and everything went downhill in the states.. i just cant compute..
10/10. Thank you so so so much for putting my pain into words. I've wanted to be a uni teacher for the longest time, yet I've kept myself away from it because I've seen first (as a specialty TA) and second hand, how little respect unis have for their teachers. Thank you. I hope you are well 🫶🏼
My understanding is that in "the good old days" over 90% of the employees at a typical college or university were teachers. Now I believe it is around 50% or less. That plus all the new accommodations for students like pools, luxury dorms, etc. means the universities don't just have the money to pay teachers. So many administrative positions that add questionable value to the university need to be reconsidered.
oh no they dont have luxury dorms. they stuff as many kids in as possible and overcharge for food
Those "safe spaces" and adult coloring books don't grow on trees !
which youtuber told you to get mad about that@@RedfishESQ
I'm just going to call it out: In the endless pursuit of efficiency, the society has started to lean out many resources, and one of those resources is the humans themselves.
Most of my courses were taught by adjunct profs when I was a grad student, and it was painfully obvious they were being abused, and most of the time I had great sympathy for them (I still do), but it was very hard to maintain that sympathy when they turned around and behaved like the very tyrants that were making their lives miserable.
You were spot on about the impact commuting in traffic has on our mental health, and I don't think it's something that's being talked about enough. Also, having lived in the Austin area in the past, the idea of making that commute every day makes my stomach drop. That stretch of I-35 between Dallas and San Antonio is one of the most heavily travelled strips of freeway in the country I imagine, I don't think I've ever driven on it at any time of day when there wasn't at least moderate traffic, and even if you're going through late at night, that's when they are doing most of the construction work so it's still a mess.
Have a PhD in chemistry. Ran as far away from adjunct and postdoc positions as possible. Global educator’s union now, DO NOT teach or work for the worthless salary that university will pay you. Education has been destroyed.
I'm glad you mentioned the part where adjuncts are not paid for the breaks (which is summer but in a lot of cases also at least a month for winter break), which would require enough savings to tide over the break months. I don't think we talk about this enough.
*But in addition*, let me add that adjuncts are not legally allowed to claim unemployment over those months like many other contract or seasonal workers because educational workers are not allowed unemployment as long as they have a "reasonable assurance" of comparable employment once the break is over. So, if you're an adjunct and the school tells you you have another course coming in the Fall, but you won't have income for 3 months, you are legally ineligible for unemployment benefits because you don't count as unemployed.
ALSO you are legally not allowed to count any money you make at a school where you are also enrolled towards unemployment benefits. So even if you do get pushed out of the school where you were adjuncting, TAing, etc, you are still now allowed to get unemployment for the loss of that job/gig.
At my school (A CC in Washington state), the union has done a pretty good job advocating for pay equality and benefits for adjuncts. It's still not rosy and a lot of the issues you describe still exist, but much better than a lot of cases. The worst horror stories I've heard come from states with weaker unions.
Also, there's something to be said for the culture of a two-year college where most of the full-time faculty have masters degrees, are there because they love teaching, and have worked as adjuncts themselves at some point.
Paying for the Party was generally supportive of community colleges for much the same reason. Turns out that focusing on education instead of sports, Greek life, and research is very beneficial for working-class or older adult students who just want to learn skills and enter their field. There is some concern in the education economics field about the high community college drop-out rate, but it’s ambiguous whether that rate is due to systemic failure on the part of the schools or if it’s an inherent tendency of the student demographic.
Yep. Did that. Had great observations and great student evals - the best in my department over adjunct and tenured profs for 10 years; and when it came time for an open full-time prof, they hired a friend of the chair who had little teaching experience and really wasn't too bright. He's still there.
One thing that enabled me to survive as an adjunct, was to make friends with the department secretary. She actually ran the department while all the TT folks pretended to run the department.
You seem to be describing my Mom's life. Thanks for having so much awareness of what people in a number of different fields go through.