Discussion

99 responses to ‘Adjuncts: Highly Paid Per Hour’

1. Your assumptions are way too conservative!

   I am an adjunct in Canada at a Business School in economics. First of all, I teach the same class numerous time per semester. Hence, when I produce my slides, I produce them for two (or three) groups at once. Moreover, I’ve been teaching the same classes for two years now, I merely need to update. Hence, the “maintenance” of my slides is much smaller.

   In all, here is a better calculation (assuming that 3000$ is the correct figure – I am in fact paid 7900$ CAD per class which is way more in USD than 3000$).

   Year 1 : Classes for 90 hours with 20 hours of prepping total not overlapping with 45 hours of consultations over 15 weeks. Add 5 hours for correction when I teach mathematical classes and 10 when I teach non-mathematical classes (where the answers are open to interpretation).

   High wage rate = 37.5$/hour

   Low wage rate = 36.3$/hour

   Year 2: Prepping falls to 5 hours as I only need to update my slides

   High wage rate = 41.37$/hour

   Low wage rate = 40 $/hour

   The reality is that adjuncts tend to teach the same class many times over which entails high production costs in period 1 but very small ones in the future.

   Moreover, I work at a small business school which is very good, but by no means comparable to American business schools and my fee per class is actually 6534$ USD and I give two classes per semester. The worst case scenario in year one is that I earn 79$/hour and 90$ in year two. Basically, I earn more per hour that top law firms charge their clients for the work of first year associates!

   It is a joke to assert that adjuncts are exploited! By all standards, they are an underused labor inputs which could do research in helping professors yield papers faster!

   • To be fair, econ adjuncts get paid way more than other adjuncts. Yay, external options!

   • what sort of law firm were u talking about. many law firms charge 300+ an hour for first years

2. Here’s a happy point of agreement for me. The hourly wage argument is bogus. That is NOT a good reason to feel sorry for adjuncts.

   If anyone’s looking for a group to pity on that basis, allow me to suggest surgical residents. When it all shakes out, they make about $12 an hour averaging +70 hours a week.

   • Thank you Sean II. My thirteen years as professor and fifteen as administrator never once that I can remember provided qualitative or quantitative data supporting an hourly wage argument.

     • No probs, brother. I’ve always found that people who take Proudhon seriously are worth taking seriously.

   • The solution faculty should apply to adjunct teaching is: don’t. Adjuncts are a poor substitute for full time faculty and they primarily exist to free up money for unneeded administrators and, as has recently come out, largess to friends of the college.university boards. You don’t get clean by washing in a muddy stream, so don’t do it.

3. Considering that most professors do a pretty terrible job of actually teaching anything to students (See Arum and Roska’s “Academically Adrift” for example), I’m not sure we should be using the minimal effort put in by most TT faculty as a baseline for what a good professor should be doing. Yes, the average professor puts in an hour of prep for each class but the average professor also doesn’t increase the human capital of their students at all. If you think your obligation is to your employer then that’s fine. You can make pretty good money doing little work. If your obligation is to your students then it becomes problematic.

   I’m not saying that more prep time necessarily means more student learning but I don’t think you can say less prep time necessarily means better time management.

   • People have measured whether adjunct faculty do better, and they don’t really.

   • Josh – we should also be prepared to question the assumption though that more prep time means better lecture quality.

     The 1 hr/week for prepping is more of a rule of thumb. It may be more for some people, less for others. Some of those people may simply be more efficient lecturers, & others may simply be lazy. But if you’re in that ballpark of an hour a week and if you similarly keep your grading load manageable, there’s no possible way that you’re making an hourly wage equivalent in even TWICE the minimum wage territory.

     The people who make that claim would have to be spending outrageous lengths of time in the neighborhood of 10 or 20 hours a week to do what a typical prof can do in 1 or 2. That person is so awfully inefficient or inept that he or she probably shouldn’t be on an academic career path.

4. Problem is for too many people being an adjunt ends up being a career, because they continue to pray they’ll somehow get a tenured position.

   The debate thus resembles the one over minimum wages for fast food workers. Is adjunct teaching really something you expect people to stick with and raise a family on? Or is it supposed to be a temporary stepping stone or income supplementation for a post-doc researcher?

5. I am open to the idea that lots of teachers spend too long on preps and grading, but a ratio of one hour prep/grade per one hour class time strikes me as too low. With 45 contact hours, that is a budget of 45 hours of grade/prep time per course.

   Let’s say you have a class of 30 students and you assign a 5 page paper. Grading at a rate of 10 minutes a paper is very efficient, I would say. That’s 300 minutes — 5 hours — right there. Two such papers in the semester = 10 hours of paper grading. If you give a midterm and final exam, and grade at a rate of 8 minutes a test, then that is another 8 hours. So grading these four assignments is 18 hours. That’s 40% of the budget gone.

   A typical class will have more assignments than just 2 papers / 2 exams. Quizzes, say, or a class debate project, or student presentations, or whatever. Let’s suppose, optimistically, you can do the grading and data management of these in two hours.

   So you’ve got 23 hours left. That leaves you with around 30 minutes per class of time to review the material, adjust your notes / Powerpoint slides, etc.

   But wait, there is student email. Boy, is there student email.

   There is also making arrangements for the kid who got mono to make up the midterm, or deciding what to do about the group project in which one member was a no-show to his team’s prep sessions, etc. There is the call the counseling service on campus to inquire how to handle the student you fear is seriously depressed.

   And then there is the work before the start of term, revising the syllabus from the previous course (what worked? what didn’t?). Setting the deadlines, creating the course website on Blackboard, Sakai, or whatever software your college uses.

   A semester’s worth of that + class prep in 23 hours? I doubt it.

   I’d suggest 1 1/2 hours per contact hour as more reasonable, less superhuman. For two classes, that leads to $6000/270 hours = $22.22/hr. Not bad, but slightly below the mean, and 17% less than Jason’s original estimate.

   A couple of further points:

   Most adjuncts will not get 4 classes at one school; that would make them full-time, and then the school would have to pay benefits, so most schools limit adjuncts to two classes a term. 4 classes means teaching at two institutions, and thus, two sets of office hours. So I’d say the rate remains at $22/hr.

   I also fear Jason is approaching this with an R1 research school mentality. He says to adjuncts: your school does not expect you to prep so much. But adjuncts have very little security and often their job depends on getting those glowing student evals. That’s a problem for lots of reasons but it does mean that an adjunct who spends a good deal of time on prepping and grading is not necessarily irrational / “blameworthy.”

   • You make a great point about grading and email blowing up the prep time. So to be the most efficient adjunct, a person might redesign their course with no papers (too much grading) and perhaps tests in scantron format (again, easy grading!). Oh, and to ensure high teaching evals in order to be asked back, the course should be really easy. But, this style of teaching would seem to largely go against what most people interested in pedagogy and actual student learning are pushing for.

     Thus, perhaps the thing that should be triggering the most outrage here is the fact that universities don’t seem to really care about student learning, esp. in intro classes and at the undergrad level. Yes, supply, demand, blah, but many of us make choices based on other factors beside baseline price. We all understand that the cheapest option might not always be the best (we wouldn’t pick the cheapest Lasik eye doctor on price alone!); there are times where we are willing to pay more for high quality. Why isn’t this one of those times?

     • How many higher-level classes can accurately be assessed via a multiple choice test?

     • In addition, some courses can’t be redesigned to such extremes. I get paid $2,100 to teach writing. We have multiple papers to grade, and writing courses typically also involve meeting with students one-on-one at least once (and possibly twice) per paper. The writing director at my university actually wishes the university would pay writing instruction adjuncts and graduate assistants for four credit hours instead of three because of this, but that hasn’t happened and probably won’t.

       He is a tenured professor and does two half-hour conferences per paper per student, but encourages adjuncts to only do one shorter meeting because he calculated our estimated hourly pay based on various conference quantities and durations and found them depressing.

       I can cancel a class meeting for each round of draft conferences. With three major essays, that means I’m down to 42 class contact hours after those canceled classes. I meet for 20 minutes instead of 30, but I have to read the papers before the meetings, so with reading and meeting combined, I have about 30 minutes per student per paper. With 20 students in a class, that’s about ten additional contact hours per paper. I’m up to 72 contact hours now.

       If I can grade one paper, with feedback, in 15 minutes, then I can grade a batch of papers in five hours. This is a very fast pace for grading in a writing course, but I’ll estimate conservatively. I’m up to 87 working hours with three papers.

       We can’t really do multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank kinds of questions for quizzes, in-class writing practice activities, and other progress assessments, due to the nature of a writing course, so this adds to our out-of-class work time. I’d say that I could grade one class period of assignments in half an hour if I work fast. I won’t have something for every class, but there might be two activities on some days. Still, I’ll just say that half of the class periods have some kind of writing activity I need to read and grade. That adds about ten hours for a current total of 97 hours.

       Emails with students, advisors, and so on add at least an hour a week. That might be conservative in some weeks, but sometimes we’re blessed with a slow week, so that should even out. We’re up to 112 hours now.

       At least a monthly developmental meeting for the writing instructors to boost our pedagogy effectiveness and methods adds about three hours for a total of 115 hours.

       Finally, we haven’t factored in prep time. My tenured colleagues often cite two hours of prep per every hour of class. I find this to be generally true. Perhaps it’s more than an equal weighting because it’s writing; maybe it’s because our program has been updated to follow recent research on composition instruction, and it’s requiring more work to get everything ready; or maybe we’re all just a bit slow. But let me concede and say I should be getting everything prepped in one hour. That adds 42 hours for a grand total of 167 hours. I haven’t included office hours because, honestly, we use that time for grading and prep work if students don’t show up. But let’s round it up to 170 for inputting grades on the system, maintaining the course moodle (probably a conservative estimate), double-checking scores before submitting final grades, and other miscellaneous tasks.

       That’s a payment of $12.35 an hour.

       Anyone who teaches two such sections a semester, with the prep work and meetings subtracted for the second section (295 hours) would earn $14.23 an hour. That’s still not great but is somewhat decent, if you can work efficiently and without breaks. (I don’t know any writing instructor who can read essays for hours at a time without giving their brains a break, so I actually should add time to the work hours for that, but I won’t. If you’re lucky enough to get three sections at the same school (different schools would require a new set of office hours and separate prep time due to the likelihood of having a different program, set of objectives, textbook, etc.), then you could get an even $15 an hour.

       If I recall correctly, 60 or 70 students is around the most that a single writing instructor should have per semester if they are going to be a worthwhile instructor for their students and not overwork themselves. Let’s just bring it up to four sections, or eighty students, for $8,400 a semester. With two semesters and maybe two extra summer sections for an additional $4,200 (not guaranteed), that brings the yearly salary to about $21,000 *if you can get those ten sections a year.* (I can’t.)

       If we calculate the hourly pay of that based on the standard 2,087-hour divisor, we get an effective hourly wage of $10.06.

       “Well,” you might say, “those ten sections amount to only 1430 hours.” But the recommended maximum number of students I mentioned sets a kind of natural cap on those hours for writing instructors, and my estimates of out-of-class work hours have been somewhat conservative. Let’s say we add two more sections a year to bring both the salary and number of hours worked up. That’s $25,300, or a standardized $12.12 an hour.

6. The only alternative is for professors like Jason Brennan to be run from the universities w/ knives and whips. I fear, however, that most, like Brennan, would enjoy the bondage beyond their wildist child-like imaginations.

7. “Mean” is the kind of term I’d use because I’m a woman. Women like me speak that way. In case that term won’t garner much respect around here (the italics), let me be frank and put it the way men in my life have: those guys (you keep reading) are big d*cking it to….people who make 20,000 a year? Seriously?

   No one is so dumb that they don’t know their relative talents as well as what they are paid. I’ve never met anyone that dumb before. And if you are worried people need life coaching, there’s research on how that is done effectively. It’s not like this! Like a Danny McBride skit where he is telling a bunch of school bus drivers he’s paid more and they need to appreciate their midday hours off! People my age make a million a year in salary and have never bothered to help me by telling me I lack their talent. That would be needless. And it isn’t advice.

   But I know advice isn’t really the point here. There’s no possible way to come to terms with adjunct pay by looking to it in isolation like this. And it’s a complex issue with a whole lot of relevance to far more than adjuncts. It’s worth being looked at seriously!

   (I love Danny McBride in case that tempers these comments.)

   • Jennifer – Have you considered that at least a part of the message here is not intended as career advice, but rather a point of illustration that a growing political movement that seeks to unionize adjuncts is based on a number of faulty and empirically wrong claims?

     I’ll readily predict that if that movement succeeds, the primary effects will be (1) significantly fewer adjunct job opportunities for newly minted PhDs and (2) greater difficulty in firing or replacing long-term existing adjuncts who have low opportunity costs of time and few skills that would be marketable outside of niche corners of academia. I believe that such effects would be detrimental to more people than they benefit, and that the main beneficiaries would actually be the least deserving – the under-performing “career adjuncts” who never advanced beyond adjuncting and who now have a lock on their positions to the exclusion of other newly minted and potentially better PhDs.

     If you care about adjuncts too, it would seem to follow that stalling the worse elements of the adjunct unionization movement is a worthy cause. And part of that entails dispelling the main myths that are being used to promote unionization.

     • Well yes, I’d love to consider that. I feel like I am begging for the terrible psychologizing and life-advice aspects to be left out of this. So yes, I would love it if you could reframe the way this issue is being handled here.

     • Right now the “myths” you are trying to explode (adjuncts have some free time?) will do nothing to change the opinion of serious people who look at the terms of their deals. I don’t what is obscuring the fact that adjuncts have very poor deals *given*
       how much Universities make from them. Who in business could be recruited to point this out? Who could we ask? I’ll do it.

       I talk to some person or another about asking for a raise or
       negotiating a bonus on a regular basis. To make their case they talk about fairness. I know for sure that something-million bonus can be determined on the basis of “fairness.” That is sometimes the gist of it. So the focus on the verbiage of adjuncts who are trying to represent what they find unappealing about their very poor deals makes no sense to me, then. The concerns are not generalizable. Adjuncts get to act like everyone else.

       If you and Jason are only worried about unionization cite the data on that vast subject. But then it’s not just about “adjuncts,” and I’d suggest that focus on them as if they are unique is *so strange.* Like the idea that there is some set of adjuncts to “care” about? Improved general welfare would be nice, encouraging people to make good deals for themselves is nice, and we can worry about that without pretending to have some certitude about futures (of some pre-chosen set of adjuncts???) and acting like this is some kind of board game with pieces that get moved around.

       • “I don’t what is obscuring the fact that adjuncts have very poor deals *given* how much Universities make from them.”

     • Calling adjuncting a job opportunity is just stupid.

8. This topic sure brings out the angry trolls with ad hominems and no actual counterarguments. You’d think people educated enough to be an adjunct would also understand basic argumentation. Alas, smart people are very impressive at compartmentalizing and not critically examining their beliefs or the beliefs of others when they think they have MORAL RIGHT on their side.

   • You would think that, but no.

     I’ve done my best to argue the case for extending sympathy to adjuncts, on the grounds that they were lured into their key mistakes by grossly distorted prices in the education market.

     The greatest single factor arguing against that sympathy: the adjuncts themselves.

     I mean…shit, just look at these clowns! I’m ashamed to speak on their behalf.

     • Ah, yes, older but wiser. As I was saying, these clowns are no more worthy of sympathy than the folks who believe that if you buy two, the third one really is free.

       • Some day, when all this dust has settled, you’ll have to tell me how you happened to pick the name “Tiffany” for your tattoo example. Because you gotta be psyched about how perfectly that worked out.

         • My karma is very strong, grasshopper.

         • Mark, out of all the supremacists on this blog, blah, blah, you are the 1 who has shown conscience. Karma has nothing to do with it. I’m convinced you’re the reasonable one in this debacle. I credit your wife and kids.

         • Boomerang.

     • Tiffany, I’m not the world’s sweetest person, but I’m also not a sociopath. I made a clear argument about why your situation is not like that of sweatshop workers, and why adjuncts don’t merit sympathy the way many exploited people do. No one has yet produced a plausible counterargument, and instead have mostly resorted to smears or changing the subject.

       • Agreed, and the vitriol is absurd. Though I am perhaps too sympathetic when it comes to understanding why adjuncts are complicit in the structural economic violence, through silence, anonymity, denial, or ignorance, it concerns me that a generation of students are largely taught by instructors who work in fear, without the decency of academic freedom, and do so for poverty wages. Georgetown, as you know, has raised the bar by paying their adjuncts well and providing securities that allow for the education of freedom in the classroom. We need more debate, and more structural support that keeps the core mission of the university alive.

         • Hey guys, I guess I just have too much empathy, so let’s tone the vitriol. Okay, I gotta go insult some people I disagree with, bye!

         • I could have answered better, anonymous urstoff dudebro, no doubt. I disagree with cowardice.

         • And one last comment, before I give your 94% white man fraternity up for good: are 6% Hispanics? Or is that an even split with white women and others? Conscience: have you heard of it?

         • Tiffany, if you’re going to make racist comments, please do so on another blog.

         • Did I say or write that, Jason? There’s global consensus that you’re offensive: evidence enough for me. Delete and desist.

       • Jason, If the deals adjuncts get are “bad deals” (and you’d let me know who you’d count as an authority on that, but there are lots of experts who work on this type of thing day in day out) why isn’t that a response to your argument? I said that early on, and had a business analyst on hand to review the numbers in my own particular case. Even if it doesn’t take up the idea that adjuncts are some discrete group and that we should or should not have feeling (like sympathy) about that group, it’s a response. Maybe others are like me and just can’t think of ethics in terms of requirements of sympathy or in terms of feelings towards amorphous groups. That’s a really unfamiliar line of thought for me, and I see no reason for thinking of ethics like that. I also tried to argue that what ethics requires is the test of being able generalize a critique about any group. But you’d think even with different ethical theories, a response is still constituted by: adjuncts are given demonstrably bad deals.

9. One more thought. Suppose that a person teaches 8 classes a year and that Jason’s hourly calculations are exactly right, so this amounts to 810 hours / year at a rate of nearly $30/hr. Sounds pretty good. But note that more than half of these hours (the class times + office hours) will have to be conducted at a certain time and place and this can put a crimp on other earning possibilities, so there can be a significant opportunity cost that is not reflected in the $30 figure.

   An analogy. I’m a biography writer for hire. McBigshot hires me at a rate of $30/hr for a total of 810 hours a year, but stipulates that from September to December I have to spend at least 12 hours a week writing in room Y at location X according to the following schedule (say, MWF 10-11am and 12-1pm, and Tues/Thurs 10:50-12:05pm and 1:10-2:25pm). Then January to May I am to write MWF 1-3pm and Tues/Thurs 9:25am-12:05pm). If I am struggling to get by on my biography-writer wages, that will make it tricky to supplement my wages with a second part-time job, since few jobs can be fitted around those time commitments.

   Now, one reply to this is: No one is forcing you to be a biography-writer. And that is a true claim and Jason has made this point before. But Jason in THIS post is focusing on the compensation adjuncts receive, not the choice to be an adjunct. And my point is that even if this hourly rate is above average, it may mask opportunity costs that shouldn’t be ignored.

   (Note too that my example assumes a best case scenario of work at a single institution with nearly back-to-back class sections, when the reality for many adjuncts is work at more than one institution with last pick of class times.)

10. There you go with those hate facts again Jason.

11. testing 123

    • Maybe everyone is out gathering facts and crafting arguments. lol jk

12. Hi, Professor Brennan. My name is Tiffany. Somewhere in the thread I read earlier today, a suggestion was made: tattoo TIFFANY on your chest. Glaucon may have said it. I know a great tattoo artist in PDX, btw.

    • Are you seriously an example of what the modern doctorate programs produce?

      • She can’t even read building sign names

    • Um, is that a mental hospital behind you?

      • That’s actually not Healy Hall. That’s White Gravenor. If you’re going to take the trouble to make a meme, at least be good at it.

      • Let me be more direct. You are acting like…a…nutter.

        • Thanks, Mark. I’m writing something about old-white guys and misogyny. This helps. Do you have granddaughters? And a conscience?

      • No, Mark. That’s White Gravenor. See your boy, below. Nice of you to subtly suggest I’m mad, and that’s a madhouse behind me. Subtly sexist? Misogynist?

    • What’s the over-under for the amount of time until the BHL comment section is indistinguishable from YouTube’s?

    • So like… stalking Jason?

      • So, like anonymous? And where/how/why do you figure in here? Follow the bread …

13. This post is egregiously flawed. The typical Adjunct, by the very nature of being an Adjunct, must rely on community colleges to get consistent work. Community colleges on average pay MUCH lower than $3000 per course. In North Carolina for instance, community colleges pay adjuncts from $1200 to $1700 per course. Moreover, quality professors spend A LOT more time prepping and grading assignments (exams, papers, projects) than you allow for.

    • No, quality professors spend less time. Here’s how I know that: I work with much higher quality professors than almost anyone, and they all spend less time prepping than that.

      The “I need to prep more” thing is an excuse. It’s self-handicapping. Skilled people do well with less prep time.

      • I’m willing to agree that your colleagues are, on average, higher quality professors taking research and teaching into account. But are they higher quality TEACHERS than the average adjunct? Maybe. What’s the evidence? I’m open to it, but I would like to see it.

        And even if Georgetown profs are better teachers of Georgetown-level students, how would they fare with students at institutions much lower down the prestige totem pole? Maybe they’d still be great, teachers of those students, but what’s the argument for that conclusion?

      • I do more than work with high quality professors, I am one. At least I am according to evaluations from my department, colleagues and students. There is only less prep time once you are in your 4th or 5th iteration of teaching a specific course if you are committed to producing the best course possible. Adjuncts are routinely given courses that are “new” to them so the issue of prep time is more pronounced for them. Again, I know because I have been an adjunct. But more importantly my comment mentioned grading and that is where time never lessens if one is giving quality, extensive feedback to students. There is no short cut for that.

        • 1. Adjuncts are routinely given lower level courses. A PhD in a given field should be able to teach a lower level course in that field with minimal prep time – even off the cuff if in an emergency. Granted there will be exceptions, but as a general rule an adjunct is far more likely to be asked to teach “American Government 101” rather than “Advanced Game Theory.” Such courses should not take extensive amounts of preparation.

          2. If you aren’t realizing any improvements in your prep time until the 4th or 5th iteration of a class (esp. an intro level class), I’d argue that you’re probably behind the curve.

          3. Increasing your prep time does not yield infinite returns. They will almost certainly diminish beyond a certain point, though that point varies based on your skill level. What this likely means though is that people who insist they cannot teach a class without abnormally lengthy prep periods are almost certainly overdoing it.

          4. Quality teachers are a dime a dozen in academia. There are also lots of crappy ones out there, but being a highly rated teacher simply isn’t all that scarce of a commodity. If it takes you 20 hours of prep time to get a teaching eval of 4.99 out of 5, and your colleague can get 4.7 out of 5 on an hour of prep time, nobody is going to notice any substantive differences between the two when it comes to making decisions. You will have therefore wasted several hours for a very marginal gain that counts for practically nothing.

          • Your response as with the author’s post reflect you are not directly acquainted with the realities of college/university teaching. Or if you are you are too distanced from the adjunct world. First, I have not concentrated on prep time. The notion of $3000 a course as an average is fallacious and a recalibration of that figure destroys the math. Second, it is the GRADING and FEEDBACK to students that is where the bulk of the time lies that Brennan failed to understand and account for. Now in terms of prep in response to your specific comment, it is only a “crappy” professor as you state that would actually teach a course “off the cuff” if that could be avoided. I am talking only in the realm of QUALITY professors (as I have already indicated).
            You reference a 20 to 1 (in hours) difference in prep time. Not sure what you mean. Per class? Per course? No one spends 20 hrs prepping per class and no one spends 1 hour prepping per course. It is a meaningless number and discrepancy. And of course there is essentially no difference in any evaluations between a 4.7 and 4.99 so no one would disagree with what appears to be your point there.
            I said it would take 4 to 5 teachings of a course to “produce the best course possible” NOT “to improve in your prep time”. Of course there will be improvement in prep time from the first time teaching a course to the second, even more so after 4 to 5. But the goal is the “best course possible” for your specific audience. Again, most adjuncts have to fill in their time with community college instruction. That audience is entirely different from the homogenous audience of the undergrad population at a typical university and it WILL take a few classes to get those courses at their optimum. Also, this has zero to do with being “behind the curve”.
            I used to teach at community colleges on a regular basis. I teach in that environment occasionally now just to help out and serve that population of students. The pay for time is so low I view it as community service. In the undergrad courses I teach every semester at the large state university where I work some of those courses I have taught so often I can do a quality job in my sleep. Prep time is very minimal. BUT, as I have been pressing here, the time is in the grading. For instance, I am in the process of grading final papers as the semester comes to a close. The papers are 7 too 9 pages. On average I have 26 students per class. I will read each paper thoroughly (some sections more than once) and give detailed feedback that will serve to correct grammar, correct exceptionally flawed reasoning, allow for but softly challenge reasoning I think is partially flawed, encourage and praise particularly strong points, acknowledge unusually insightful points where I learn something, and tie each student’s work to his or her specific life passions and goals (which I know those because of more time Brennan failed to account for). I will spend 90 minutes or so PER paper. And this is just ONE assignment. This is exactly what I did/do as an adjunct as well. Again, for quality professors (and there are a lot who are not as you rightly note) Brennan’s math is grossly wanting.

          • And you’re a pence, Phil. Stop pretending.

          • Gotta hand it to the cat lady brigade – they make an art form out of being consistently unpleasant and boorish personalities.

          • I recall hearing once that Robert Nozick never taught the same course more than once. Very peripatetic, it seems. I wonder how much prep time he needed?

14. This post is egregiously flawed. The typical Adjunct, by the very nature of being an Adjunct, must rely on community colleges to get consistent work. Community colleges on average pay MUCH lower than $3000 per course. In North Carolina for instance, community colleges pay adjuncts from $1200 to $1700 per course. Moreover, quality professors spend A LOT more time prepping and grading assignments (exams, papers, projects) than you allow for.

    • Yes, you’ll get paid less per hour at a school with below average pay, by definition. (My first adjunct job in MA was $1200 per class in 1999, or about $1600 per class, but I taught high school as my day job. You cite low pay in NC but rent/cost of living will also be lower there, so BLS can tell you how that compares to median/mean hourly wage in NC) .

      It will definitely be a lot more prep time your first year teaching and your first time teaching a particular course, but generally most worker get paid less per hour in any line of work when just starting out – not just adjunct professors. If you can teach two sections of the same class or people don’t show up to office hours (very common except in paper or test season), your prep time also becomes much more efficient.

15. Tiffany, I refuse to be violated by your microaggressions against autosexuality.

16. Ouch, that really hurts. No PhD, true, but a JD (Georgetown) and an MBA (Columbia), that made me em-ploy-a-ble. And, despite the absence of a doctorate, I have somehow managed to publish two philosophy books. So rather than “envy,” my actual attitude about the decision not to pursue a PhD is gratitude that I didn’t walk down the same miserable path that so many adjuncts have trod.

    • Get in here, Mark. I’m envious of your JD. Books, some are even good. I raise children. I envy your JD. So now that we’re friends, …

    • I really hate deleted comments. Now I just have to sit here and wonder who said what to make you give your resume like that.

      • Don’t waste too much time. It was just Tiffany insulting Jason, and suggesting I was his toddy, afflicted with “PhD envy” (clever, no?).

        • Yeah, much less exciting than I imagined. Also, “genius envy” would have been funnier.

          For what’s it’s worth, I too regard the decision not to go PhD place hunting as one of my better moves.

          It had nothing to do with any realistic understanding of the job market, because I didn’t have that when I was 23. It’s just that I saw how small the overlap really is between academic success and intellectual value in the humanities. One can build a career, and many have, by saying things that are interesting but untrue, or true but uninteresting.

          Maybe this is why Heidegger Guy is so upset. What he writes is clumsier, less artful, and above all out of step with current fashion, but its truth value (< or = 0) is no worse than a lot of respected academic product. Small wonder he feels cheated. He's like the quack doctor who gets charged with fraud in a town that allows faith healers to practice without complaint.

          • Perhaps, Sean zwei, u should remove that wig and drink Durkheim at your next tea. Might help. Conscience is slow to come to those who don’t get it.

        • Sorry, Mark. Sean II is the insult to this brotherhood. Genius envy really discounts your intelligence. And I appreciate your credentials.

        • I’ve missed you, just Mark.

17. Prof Brennan:

    As you are back on this general topic of grad school, I’m reposting the following from a month ago (“Should you go to grad school?”). You never replied to (or more likely, never saw) my comment/questions.

    Colin

    Prof. Brennan:

    I’m just seeing this great post, which rings true in my limited (mostly vicarious) experience. I have one general question, and two personal ones, and would love your advice (or that of others). I dearly hope you see this.

    1. Isn’t this post really written for white men considering doctoral work?

    Everything I’ve heard or encountered suggests that it’s much easier for women and nonwhites to obtain professorial positions, even in the humanities where they [women and minorities] are already plentiful (as compared to the hard sciences).

    Indeed, a corollary query is why are so many professors so intellectually unimpressive? I attend lectures by professors, including philosophers, social scientists, historians, and economists, all the time, and even granting that the fora are often non-academic, their presentations and answers to post-lecture questions are rarely cognitively intimidating (I’m sure my experience would be different if I were listening to logicians or ‘hard’ scientists). Your post almost suggests that anyone actually getting a tenure track academic position is close to brilliant. At the Ivy League, surely, but at Cal State Fullerton and the University of South Dakota, too?

    PERSONAL BACKGROUND:

    I’m 50, and a 1986 ‘cum laude’ graduate of Williams College (incidentally, I had also been accepted undergrad to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service). Four of my professors had encouraged me to pursue a PhD. I did not do so, and regret my decision (per my comment above, I recall several mediocre classmates who now have their PhDs).

    Worse, unlike nearly all my friends, I never earned a grad degree. This is tremendously embarrassing to me, especially as I have always been intensely intellectual (I’m also a libertarian in the Rothbard Austrian and Ron Paul Constitutionalist traditions, though closer to classical and modern conservatism – Burke, Calhoun, Carl Schmitt – than “bleeding heart libertarianism”; I believe in liberty and individual rights rooted in self-ownership, but not in any form of coercive “social justice”, nor in “social libertarianism” where the latter conflicts with traditionalist Catholicism [eg, marriage, family, etc]).

    I’m too old to go back for a doctorate, and the presumably horrendous monetary investment (quite apart from opportunity costs) would never be recouped. However, I am single; free of “dependents”; very unlikely, for medically diagnosed reasons, to live longer than 80 (and, alas, likely not that long); and, though far from wealthy, am able and willing to spend up to $50,000 to obtain some type of Master’s degree.

    I lost my unfulfilling marketing job last year, and am at a crossroads in life. I want to work and feel useful to the world for 15-20 more years (health permitting). I want to do something in the remainder of my working life at least tangentially related to my intellectual knowledge and talents (eg, teaching high school or community college; doing research for a think tank or a magazine or even a pro-liberty politician; perhaps writing professionally, maybe in journalism). I have deep interests at the intersection of political philosophy (the libertarian / conservative debate), political theory, ethics, and Catholic moral theology, and, however I earn my future living, want to publish serious work (books and articles) in these areas “extra-professionally” (and in retirement).

    I would like to return to grad school to obtain an MA in Catholic theology. The MA I have in mind would only cost me about $30k total in tuition and fees, and that expenditure would be worth it on a personal level (and might aid me in obtaining a more interesting career than my previous one).

    2. What types of intellectually oriented careers can one obtain with just an MA (from a respectable program, as is the one I’m considering)? I’m fishing for advice here.

    3. What are the general degree requirements for academic publication?

    Assume I write an article, say for the journal ETHICS, which is of an intellectual quality such that, if written by a professor like you, it would be accepted for publication. Would it be accepted for publication now? If not, would it be accepted for publication if I possessed an MA?

    What about books? Suppose I produced a book on some aspect of political theory that, if presented to a university press by you, would in fact be published. Would they publish now, or if I possessed an MA?

    I have been working for years on several books which, once finished, might be of publishable quality. Getting them published is perhaps my major remaining goal in life. So I would greatly appreciate any insights you might have on all this.

    Thank you, Prof. Brennan, and to any others who might care to reply.

    Colin

    • Hi Colin,

      Thanks for your questions. I’ll do my best to answer them, but I don’t have high credence in my answers to 1 and 2.

      Regarding 1: Many schools give preference to women and minorities, even when they don’t have a proper affirmative action program. For example, one of our past executive administrators, who no longer works for us, routinely violated the civil rights act. A provost at a university that offered me a TT job once tried to block me because I was white and male. There’s a recent study showing that about women are favored over men in a 2:1 ratio in STEM fields for TT hiring.

      Regarding 2: I doubt it will do much for you, frankly. I’d treat it as a consumption good. If it’s worth $50,000 for its own sake, then any payoff beyond that is a bonus. But I doubt there will be much of payoff. Maybe it could help you get an admin gig at a university. Not sure.

      Regarding 3: Properly run journals use a blind review system, and some journals are in fact properly run. (Many aren’t.) An “independent scholar” can in principle publish in any journal if he passes review, and sometimes people do. However, it’s basically impossible for an unaffiliated scholar to get a book with a top academic press nowadays. Indeed, it’s really difficult for a person with a good TT job to get his or her first book contract.

      • Prof. Brennan:

        Thanks for the reply. A couple of follow-ups, if you don’t mind.

        Re: 2: I thought an MA is good enough to teach at the community college level (it’s certainly enough to teach high school). Of course, in my narrow situation, it would have to be at some Catholic institution. Am I wrong? Community college teachers don’t all have doctorates, do they?

        Re: 3: suppose I were able to get my first book published by a non-academic press (say, a small Catholic one, or even something like the Mises Institute or the Independent Institute [the work I have in mind will be at the intersection of Catholic theology and Austrianism]). Would I then be able to get my next book published by an academic press (assuming it to be of academic quality)?

        Thank you for your advice.

        Colin

        • Hi Colin:

          I honestly don’t know much about how community colleges work. My understanding is that you’re right that an MA is good enough, but with the glut of PhDs, it’s easy for them to get a Ph.D. in lieu of an MA.

          Regarding the book: No, I don’t think so. I suspect CUP or OUP won’t think anything of the Mises Institute or Independent Institute. That’s not a criticism of Mises, but just a claim about how editors tend to think.

          There’s a kind of catch-22 with academic publishing at the high level, when getting your first book with a top academic press. They tend to think that if you were good enough to have a book with them, you’d already have a book with them. So, to break out of that, you’ve got to get a TT job at a top 5 school, or publish a bunch of articles on a topic in top journals which can then be used as a foundation for a book, or catch an editor’s eye with something interesting. The later worked for me. I published one paper on voting with a top journal, and then an editor contacted me about turning it into a book.

18. This whole discussion, from an authentic libertarian standpoint, is moot. The modern university system is not remotely a free market creation, nor a free one even in a non-commercial sense. American universities are among the most socialist enterprises in the world, quite apart from the modal ideology of their faculties. The proper libertarian position is simply to advocate a total separation of school and state – no publicly owned or subsidized schools, no taxpayer provided scholarships or financial aid, no research grants (truly necessary military research should be conducted “in-house” at the Pentagon), no special “codes of conduct” (apart from the general laws of the land), nothing. In a pure libertarian society, there would probably be very few colleges and universities as recognized today, though there likely would be many more vocational schools providing the kind of training, some of it highly skilled and “g”-centric, that the economy and nation really need.

    Higher education for most persons today is a fantastic waste of time, as well as a very bad public “investment” for the general citizenry (why should our hard-earned taxes go to subsidize postmodernist and/or Marxist-leftist-multiculturalist propagandizing, not to mention weekend orgies?). The postwar education model needs to be destroyed, and it likely will be, as ever more persons come to realize that the reason college was once a good investment (even if the educations actually provided were, from a classical/hierarchical perspective, always rather poor, even at the best schools) was because of the upward mobility it offered to genuinely talented persons from modest backgrounds, who could perform well and thereby “get themselves known” by similarly ambitious employers. That meritocratic aspect had nothing to do with the act of attending classes itself. College basically functioned as an IQ test within a risibly egalitarian society that has a hard time forthrightly admitting genetic inequality. Top firms recruit from top schools not because they want “[intellectually] well-rounded students”, but simply intelligent ones. The nation could save trillions in wasted tuitions and bored student-hours by reestablishing the lawfulness of employer-administered IQ tests (even if such tests are not perfectly predictive of future performance; they are, however, more than “good enough”).

    • I’ll add no taxpayer guaranteed student loans and no exemption from bankruptcy for creditors financing education.

      I didn’t realize that employer-administered IQ tests were unlawful, but I don’t know how useful these tests would be. The most intelligent people I know are not the most productive in an economic sense. I do well on these tests, and I include myself in this observation.

      The conventional, brick and mortar academy looks increasingly like a bubble of historic proportions. I live in a university town, and the endless investment in ever more luxurious student accomodations and services amazes me. All of this investment occurs as Borders closes for reasons that seem on the face of it every bit as perilous for the established academic business model.

      I doubt that many adjuncts earn $3000/course teaching computer science or electrical engineering, not least because persons competent to teach these courses are also competent to offer them outside of a conventional academy and because independent certification procedures are well established. For a professional software developer, an MCSD (a certification offered by Microsoft) may be more valuable than a graduate degree from a university and also less expensive to obtain.

      • No disagreements, my point was merely that “higher education” is a massive bubble and has been for a very long time, but now that time seems nearly up. Also, that from a national or social perspective, sending vast numbers of otherwise indifferent students to post-secondary education is a poor investment for taxpayers.

      • It is not unlawful because the police actually use above average IQ scores to deny employment, and their right to do this has been upheld by the courts!

19. Flying from Minneapolis to Atlanta on Friday, I sat beside a young woman apparently studying a textbook in women’s studies. Chapter headings were like “Anorexia and Bulimia”, “Rape Culture” and “Becoming Bisexual”. As she read the book, she marked passages with a yellow highlighter.

    The textbook stood in odd contrast to the woman’s iPhone. She was very proficient with the latter. I’m writing this post with my Galaxy Note, but I’m using a bluetooth keyboard. Being over 50, I may never master the two thumbs method, but this woman typed with two thumbs almost as fast as I can manage with a keyboard, and she switched from app to app as quickly as her thumbs could move. By comparison, her study of the textbook seemed archaic, and it presumably contains little more information on bulimia or bisexuality that she could find in Wikipedia or elsewhere on the web.

    The information in her textbook hardly seems useful outside of an academic pyramid scheme akin to Scientology, but this woman was going out of her way, using costly tools inferior to tools that she has clearly mastered, to study it, and she possibly borrows the cost from creditors with no skin in her game without even the prospect of bankruptcy when the negligible value of her studies finally dawns on her.

    How long can something like that go on?

    • And it never crossed your mind that she was a DV/SA survivor? Extend an olive branch?! Jason will likely delete this before you read, but come on.

      • I don’t know what being a DV/SA survivor has to do with anything here. If you’re suggesting that she wasn’t highlighting the textbook as a student, I suppose that’s possible. I didn’t ask her, and I’m no more clairvoyant than you, but she appeared to be a student, so I make this assumption here. What do anorexia, bulimia and bisexuality have to do with being a DV/SA survivor anyway? She was reading the chapter on bisexuality most of the time I say beside her. I wouldn’t think of striking up a conversation with a woman on this subject for fear of stimulating her sense of harassment.

    • Wow, you are really smart. I wish I had known this before going to the university. I remember a Cultural Anthropology class where the class was lectured to accept the practice of the Etoro. They are a group of people who practice ritualistic child molestation. The whole class was in agreement that different cultures are equally great. I felt sick to my stomach wondering why nobody was offended by what we were reading. The old men in the village get blow jobs from small children basically because the spirits tell them its a rite of passage. And they are primitive and sickly people who are going extinct.

20. Jason,

    Your result is pretty surprising, but I wonder if there is a better way to figure out how much time it really takes to teach a class. One thing I’m always surprised by is how things tend to take more time than you would ever estimate, so maybe it is best to use some empirical starting point for determining how much total time each course takes to teach.

    First assume that a 5/5 teaching load requires someone working 40 hrs a week to devote all their time to teaching. I’ve only seen a few jobs like this, but my understanding is that pretty much all of the jobs with this load have no research requirements for tenure. I suspect many (most?) people working 4/4 or 4/5 loads devote little time to research during the school year, writing mostly during breaks. But this (I think) will only make my point stronger later.

    If we assume that each course requires 18 weeks of instruction — this is what courses here at UMD require at least (with 1 week for prep before the semester and 1 week for exams after) — then a person working a 5/5 load will teach:

    18wks *2 semesters * 40hrs/wk = 1440 hrs.
    1440hrs / 10 classes = 144hrs/class.

    That is an average, which includes any efficiencies due to teaching multiple sections of the same course, etc. You can only deny this if you think a “good” instructor (meaning efficient) working a 5/5 load doesn’t work at least 40hrs a week on instruction during the school year (from what I hear most people who teach such a load work more than that). You might think that using 18wks is unfair, but I find it implausible that you would not spend a full week prepping for 5 classes and a full week grading finals for 5 classes (just from my experience working for a number of years in a phil. dept.). This makes the per hour pay (assuming $3000/class):

    $3000/144hrs = $20.83/hr

    Not so bad, but from what I have heard a 5/5 load actually requires people to work more than a 40 hrs/week during a semester (I guess the deal is that you get summers off but work more than full-time during the year). We might think that a 4/4 load better reflects 40hrs/week devoted to teaching. A 4/4 load is usually considered a lot of teaching in academia, and from what I have been told it requires people to either do most of their writing during summer or work more than 40hrs/week. So let us just assume that a 4/4 typically requires 40hrs of instruction work each week. Then:

    1440 hrs / 8 classes = 180 hrs/class
    $3000/180hrs = $16.67/hr

    This result is less surprising than your result. And given that adjuncts have rather unreliable income streams, have to travel to several institutions to get more than a couple classes, and have no benefits, I think that the above method is pretty consistent with our general impression that the adjunct life isn’t so great…

21. “That’s too little time to spend teaching. I love teaching, and I plan to
    spend 10 hours of prep for each class. Response: Then that’s your
    choice, and you’re blameworthy for making that choice. Your university
    doesn’t expect you to do that. You’ll never get anywhere doing that.
    You’re either working past the point of diminishing returns, or you’re
    taking that long to prep because you are incompetent. In the first case,
    you should spend less time prepping. In the latter, you should quit and
    do something you’re good at.”
    Reading this makes me realize that were I still teaching philosophy in the U.S., I wouldn’t want this guy anywhere near any committee I had to answer to.

    While I don’t know anyone who spent “10 hours” prepping (hyperbole, anyone?), I usually spent 1 to 2 hrs reviewing PP slides, etc., per hour in class, & the time was well spent (imho). If anyone had called me “incompetent” because I chose to do this & told to “quit & do something [I’m] good at,” I would been angry & probably told them something along the lines of, “You do your job your way & let me do mine my way”! I knew of tenured professors who thought they could “wing it,” & most of them sucked.

    Disclosure: I walked away from adjuncting three years ago & moved overseas. It is clear, or should be: American academia, like much of the rest of the culture & country, is in terminal decline. One of my few regrets is an inability to participate meaningfully in helping adjuncts organize & fight for decent wages & working conditions, which I maintain would be possible by getting rid of all the administrative sloth, the rise of which directly parallels the adjunctification of academia. I don’t know that the fight will make any difference, since said adjunctification is just a symptom of a much deeper problem.

22. So…what about labs? One credit hour is 2 contact hours. One lab report and one lab quiz per student (25+ students) amount to another 1.5 hours if I put minimal effort into it. Add a few minutes to read over the lab (to remind myself what lab we’re doing this week) and 15 minutes to get things set up. Add a few minutes for student email, to update grades, to collate attendance sheets and answer student questions. Let’s call it 4 hours a week. Fifteen weeks a semester brings me to 40 hours. And that doesn’t count the time it takes to fill in progress reports for students whose progress is being monitored because they’re on TANF or some other program, or dealing with the students who missed a lab, and want to know how they can make them up. (They can’t; too bad. But you still have to listen to the genuinely terrible thing that happened in their life that made them miss the lab. And you’re still going to care, even though you can’t do anything to help them.)

    Now what do I get paid for this? $600. That amounts to $15 an hour (at best). The first time I taught the lab I had to meet with the lead instructor before each lab and have him explain everything to me. While the actual work load in the lab was lower, the time commitment was higher. Let’s say an extra 10 hours. That brings the rate down to $12/hr.

    No one forced me to teach that class. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it. But $12-15 per hour (for a class that requires at least a Masters) is a bit light, and a nowhere near the $22-30/hr you’re talking about here.

23. An hour of prep/grading per hour of class sounds about right at top tier institutions where professors can count on students having all the right study skills and ample motivation. But these are not the conditions under which most adjuncts teach.

    If we are happy with the dismal graduation rates at community colleges, then I suppose we can rest content with adjuncts (who teach 75% of the classes at my institution) teaching to the well prepared minority among their students and letting the rest flunk out of college at taxpayer expense and with loads of debt.

    As chair, I’ll continue to press my adjuncts to do better for their students and regret that I can’t pay them in a manner more commensurate with the value they add to their student’s lives or the added value those students will bring to the economy we all share.

    • You could always ask students to make voluntary financial contributions to those who are adding value to their lives…

24. I think what you’ve fundamentally ignored here is the fact that what academic departments claim to expect of their instructors (i.e. what they pay them for) and what they actually expect are different. Departments may, indeed, pay instructors to give lectures and grade a couple exams per course, and the work for such activity could potentially take very little time outside of the classroom. But what academic departments actually expect of adjuncts is
    that they help students learn. As a great deal of research has shown, learning
    is an active, personalized process. Adjuncts have to facilitate that process,
    and that facilitation involves the translation of raw information into learning
    media that are meaningful for and actively involve students. The translation
    process takes a lot of time outside of the classroom, both in preparation and
    in provision of feedback*.

    The point here is that there’s a disconnect between what
    university and college departments expect of adjuncts and what they pay them
    for. It’s that disconnect that’s at the heart of the adjunct pay crisis.

    *The amount of time required differs according to discipline. Some disciplines lend themselves to less personalized learning practice and assessment than do others. A physics or economics instructor might get by lecturing and basing a grade on a couple exams. A writing or speech instructor never could because those disciplines inherently involve active participation and the giving of personalized feedback.

25. One hour of prep per class? If you count grading, responding to emails, and developing the course from the beginning, creating AV content, online resources, etc… i don’t see how this is possible. Call me inefficient, but have you ever met a real, live professor who does that?

26. This is the most ignorant analysis I’ve ever read. Why anyone would compare professors to the rest of the developing world and yourself working at Geico, I have no idea. Perhaps that’s the problem… you think too highly of yourself and too low of professors. These are people with Ph.Ds and M.A.s and you are comparing then to most of the world that the UN reports needs more equitable education and accessible education. Wow. Why go to grad school? This attitude and we wonder why the American educational system continues to get worse. This is disgusting. I won’t even share this garbage. Why infect the universe with this type of insult to hardworking professors who teach the bulk of the schedule at every public institution and many privates, yet are the invisible poor. They have the same student loans and families that everyone else does who pursued higher education.

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