Five years ago, Margaret Hanzimanolis was fed up with working as an adjunct professor in Vermont, teaching six courses for about $24,000 a year, without health insurance. So she moved across the country to Northern California, where at least 20 colleges were within a 90-minute drive, to begin her life as an adjunct anew.Within days of her arrival, Ms. Hanzimanolis was hired to teach basic writing courses at De Anza College. Then she landed adjunct positions at Cañada College, City College of San Francisco, and Evergreen Valley College. She taught 13 classes year-round and earned $88,000 a year, she says. More important, after 18 months of teaching she was eligible for health benefits.
The rest of the misery.
This project is getting some good, and very useful, data. It still needs to be taken with a grain of salt, since individual adjuncts often don't know exactly how their particular classes and salaries fit into larger institutional structures/scales, but it's a lot more than we had to work with 2 years ago.
ReplyDeleteIt's also a handy resource to which to send parents who were told on a college tour that their children would not be taught by adjuncts at the institution they're touring (they nearly always are, unless, of course, they're being taught entirely in giant sections with graduate TAs; anecdotally, I'm getting the impression that institutions that rely heavily on TAs emphasize their relatively low use of adjuncts, while institutions that rely heavily on adjuncts -- often undergrad-focused colleges -- emphasize that they don't have TAs. There are few if any schools that can honestly say "you'll have regular individual contact with TT faculty in most of your intro/gen ed classes").
There are few if any schools that can honestly say "you'll have regular individual contact with TT faculty in most of your intro/gen ed classes").
DeleteIt's actually true at my SLAC. But that's because we have a high student-faculty ratio, perhaps unsustainably high.
Most places cannot afford anything other than adjuncts. We are approaching 70% (or more) of classes system-wide being taught by non TT faculty (and it's shameful). Non-renewing tenure lines, among other things, when almost 1300 faculty (system-wide) have jumped ship in the last 2 years.
DeleteIn a somewhat-related note, I recently found a pay stub from my time at Large Urban Catholic University with a Nationally-Ranked Basketball Team (month of October). Gross pay: $1333.33 (two courses). Net pay: $1017.45
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much the pay has gone up in the last 10 years, if at all. Tuition at this school is $17,000 a semester.