Today almost two-thirds of faculty at all accredited colleges and universities in the United States are nontenured, according to the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University. That wasn’t always the case. Nontenured faculty made up less than half of faculty employed at degree-granting institutions in 1975, according to the American Association of University Professors. (AAUP)
At the same time, the cost of college has been rising. Over a 10 year period ending in 2012, average tuition, including room, board and fees for full-time undergraduate students at all degree-granting institutions, increased 33 percent, to $19,339, after adjusting for inflation, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
Most nontenured faculty positions are part time and pay a few thousand dollars per course, without any health or retirement benefits. Pay for nontenured faculty can vary widely, but a full-time instructor, who is typically on a non tenure track, earns on average 40 percent of the average pay of a full professor, according to the AAUP.
More Breaking News.
On one hand, it's no wonder Newsweek is perpetually on the verge of death. It's bad enough in these modern-electronic-a-go-go times to deliver the news a week late; it's worse to report on trends that are decades old as news.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, this IS news to most people who read Newsweek. Remember the discussion just before Thanksgiving, about what to say to relatives about your career? Most non-academics think we get our Ph.D.s four years after our bachelors, and then get tenure-track faculty jobs immediately after this. That is the way it worked, before 1969.
Newsweek still exists? They must have a strong presence on Myspace.
ReplyDeleteand AOL.
DeleteI still remember AOL Time-Warner.
DeleteA former colleague of mine still uses aol.com mail.
DeleteThe same guy predicted that the internet would be pretty big one day....he made this prediction in about 2004, though.
The "Center for the Study of Academic Labor" doesn't seem to have much of a presence apart from this Newsweek article. It's listed as a center on the CSU department of economic website, but there's no information about it. It appears to have been created in March 2014, but apart from that -- most of the 8 hits on Google are to the content-free website or the Newsweek article -- it seems to be in hibernation.
ReplyDeleteI bring this up because I have been a tad suspicious of the leap from the possibility that 66% of faculty titles in the U.S. are adjunct titles to the less plausible claim that adjuncts teach 66% of courses or 66% of our students. At my university, our internal study found hundreds of adjunct faculty who are "volunteer" faculty, for example in our medical school, full-time researchers who get paid well (typically on soft money) and don't teach, graduate students who get an instructor title to teach their own course, etc. The stereotypical "adjunct" -- low paid, precarious, over-worked -- was rare, except in the local community colleges. No one seems to be parsing these statistics very carefully.
At the same time, let me acknowledge the real plight of the precarious adjunct; nothing I write here should be taken as a lack of sympathy for exploited adjuncts....