Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

Adjunct/non-tenure faculty should be kept in mind. Depending on the school, somewhere between 40% and 70% is quite typical for instructors that are not paid a salaried wage. Instead, they typically received a certain amount per course taught.

The overall average for this is about $3,000/course, but I believe this is brought down by small private & for-profit schools. At a typical public school $4000/course is a good rule of thumb. Teaching more than 4 courses is a significant load, and some schools limit it to 3 or 4 courses/semester, but let's assume 4 courses in the spring, 4 in the fall, 2 in the summer. That puts the yearly gross at $40,000/year. That's probably a livable wage in many parts of the country, but keep in mind this does not include things like sick or vacation pay, health insurance, retirement plans, or other benefits.

EDIT: I should point out that the above is, for the most part, a best-case scenario for adjuncts. It often isn't possible to get full teaching loads, or doing so requires piecing together a course here or there at multiple schools. Income in the $25,000 range is not uncommon.

I was an adjunct for one semester, many years ago. I mentioned my experiences to my mom, who is a retired high school teacher. Her response: "Now you know why teachers have a union."

>It's even worse than you paint it, for a lot of adjuncts.

Yes, I specifically showed an optimistic picture of adjunct work so it didn't seem like I was tanking the numbers, but I should have said as much. I've gone back and edited it to reflect that my presentation is more of a best-case scenario.

I think you meant to reply to ska's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20206480

Oh, thanks. I can no longer edit/delete this, but I reposted to their comment.

Because the price determined by the market is wrong. Wrong!

I wish taxpayers had a union.

Most adjuncts are in the business of selling their services to effective monopsonies. Oligopolies, at best. Free market economics don’t exonerate the result.

I don’t agree with the parent but calling the educational system a monopsony sounds even less believable, there are tens of thousands of educational institutions in America alone

Most adjuncts - heck, most people - are not capable of moving around the country chasing low-paying, often part-time jobs.

When you’re geographically locked, the universities become effective monopsonies everywhere but NY, Boston, etc

Tax payers sort of do have a union where the collective bargaining takes place in the form of electing official to work on their behalf. Often enough though, those elected end up working against the intersts of voters, sometimes explicitly advocating for policies that voters don't realize are not in their interests.

Not unlike unions that hire a negotiator to work on their behalf, if the negotiator ignored the contractual priorities given to them by the unions.

Except suffrage is not limited to taxpayers.

Not sure what you mean. Everyone doesn't pay all types of taxes, but everyone pays some types. Payroll tax, sales tax, etc.

Taxpayers do have a union. The taxpayer's union in my state outlawed the teacher's union.

We got that Howard Jarvis thing that brought us so much wonderful stuff... like Prop 13.

Yes, I had the same experience. I work in higher ed, and occasionally teach a course, maybe once a year. It's good to pickup a little extra $$ with little inconvenience since I can just walk over to the classroom at the end of my workday. It also keeps me in touch with the on-the-ground reality of both faculty and student life, a perspective that gives me great context for my normal job. But the amount of work it takes for even a single course really illustrates just how low the pay is for the time required. And where I work the adjuncts actually DO have a union, but all it's been able to accomplish are modest increases in pay and the ability to buy into the health benefits plan. Not that they get health benefits, they still have to pay the full price for the premiums, they simply have access to do so. And if it's a family plan, the premium could actually come close to costing a majority of their pay. So I'm not sure how much of a "win" that was for the union.

It's even worse than you paint it, for a lot of adjuncts. Besides the lack of benefits and insurance, often they do not actually know their course allocations in advance, and can suddenly end up losing 1/2 their income or whatever, with a week or so's notice.

For comparison if you are full time faculty at a research (i.e. R1) oriented department, a 1-1 or 1-2 (e.g. 2 - 3 courses a year) is typically considered a full time teaching load on top of your research, although you often have a graduate seminar or two on top of that. If your department focuses on teaching, a 4-4 load is typical. "Teaching relief" is given to new and productive research faculty. Summer courses are often taught for extra income, and/or can be applied to soft salary. Similar things mutatis mutandi if you aren't on a semester system.

>It's even worse than you paint it, for a lot of adjuncts.

Yes, I specifically showed an optimistic picture of adjunct work so it didn't seem like I was tanking the numbers, but I should have said as much. I've gone back and edited it to reflect that my presentation is more of a best-case scenario.

Adjuncts are the glue that keeps our university system from shattering—they keep departments alive even as the number of tenure jobs dwindle and administration swells.

Ask yourself: how does one pay off six figures of accumulated undergraduate and graduate debt on 25 grand a year? Answer: you never do. Now imagine that you get to compete with hundreds of other PhDs entering the workforce for this "privilege."

Adjuncting is a silent scandal and the entire university system deserves to burn for it.

Isn’t that more of a signal that so many people shouldn’t be chasing PHDs?

> Adjunct/non-tenure faculty should be kept in mind.

Absolutely. Most adjuncts and non-tenured professors are paid surprisingly low wages, and many colleges are relying more and more on them (probably because they're so much cheaper).

It's hard to blame the schools too much, at least for public college's and universities. In most states Higher Ed budgets are first on the chopping block for cuts. Even when they're not cut, they frequently remain flat for years, and with inflation that amounts to a Dr facto budget cut.

This dynamic places a downward pressure on what institutions are able to spend of human resources. Adjuncts proliferate, and so do certain types of part time hourly jobs (little/no benefits) that are typical administrative tasks. I'm familiar with an example where fully half of their professional academic advising staff were hourly non-benefit. And quality advising is actually a revenue center, keeping students on track, helping when problems arise that might otherwise prevent a student from continuing their education.

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