Dopers, anyone out there with experience in adjunct professorship? I am considering pursuing a position as an adjunct professor of accounting. I have received many mixed reviews of the position in aggregate and was looking for an in-field analysis.
What is the average pay? Workload? Will a master’s degree suffice? Will adjuncting make a transition in later life to tenured professorship easier? Will it help in admittance to a doctoral program?
Thanks!
I can’t speak to accounting adjuncts, but I will answer from my point of view in another academic field. I should start out by saying that adjuncting tends to be a thankless job and some (but by no means all) schools treat their adjuncts like crap.
Negligible to low pay, and benefits may be non-existent. Adjuncts tend to get paid by the credit, and course load can wildly fluctuate each term depending on departmental need. In order to make a living off of adjuncting, you’ll probably need to pick up 5 or 6 courses, which is considerably more than any tenure track professor will generally be doing.
Usually. Adjuncts generally get the low level classes in the department, so there isn’t much need for a doctorate to cover them.
This is greatly dependent on school, field, and your individual situation. Spend too much time in adjunct positions and you’ll be considered untouchable for a number of tenure track positions. I’m not sure if it will help in admittance (probably not), but it could very well help you to pick up an assistantship for support while a student.
You will get crushed, beaten down lower and lower every term, until you can’t go on.
These depend on who hires you, and how much they hire you to do; but no one has ever gotten rich as an adjunct. It’s a part-time job; and, like other part-time jobs, some of the people who do it only want or need to work part time, while others would prefer a full-time job but are taking what they can get. You’d be hired by the semester, to teach one or more classes, and whether you get hired back for the next semester depends on the needs of the college or university and on whether they were satisfied with the job you did for them in the past.
It can be a good way to get teaching experience and to see whether that’s what you want to be doing. I started out teaching college part-time before being hired on full time; but it doesn’t always work out that way.
As others have pointed out, adjuncts don’t get paid very well and the only way to make a living at it is to teach in multiple schools/courses a term. Even then, it’s barely enough to get by.
However, adjuncts can be hired if they impress the people in their department. But you’ll probably need to get a Ph.D. to get a full-time teaching job.
I was an adjunct instructor at a local college for 16 years. I taught computer classes and most were database related. It was a nice second source of income and mostly fun.
I was paid about $40 for each contact hour. Contact hours were those in the classroom and not those grading papers and preparing for class. We had to develop our own lesson plans and other training materials which took a lot of time. When a newer version of the database came out or the school went to another text book, that $40 per contact hour was more like minimum wage the first time you taught the new class.
While the above posts are accurate for adjunct positions in general, accounting is one of the very few disciplines where (at least in the past few years) there are more tenure track positions than graduates to fill them. I wouldn’t place too much stock in any answer that doesn’t give specifics about positions in accounting departments.
Adjunct was a great job for me considering I was working towards a full professorship. After taking all the crap classes for two years I got very lucky and was offered a job a week before I had to move to Colorado. 
The pay was ok but since I was doing it as a second job I only took home about 50%of the pay so net an extra $7000/year for a full load of 9 credit hours.
Thanks for all the replies so far! A lot of the replies affirm what I have been reading - however herein lies the discrepency;
A local college, Ogeechee Technical College, has two professors listed in the accounting program. Both have ONLY MBA’s.
When I look at their salary (using Georgia Open Records) I note their salaries to be $68,000 and $57,000.
Is this considered bad money, are these positions rare to come by, in other words; am I missing something here? This is exactly the kind of job I am looking for.
Is this considered something different from adjunct? Are they non-tenure-track professors? If so…what is the “official” title of that job?
(I’m in English, so take that for what it’s worth.)
I was an adjunct for a year before being offered a full-time position at the CC where I currently work. It was tough, but if you work for a couple of schools and they give you several classes each, you can get by. No benefits of course. I was paid $1600 per class, plus mileage.
As far as the degree, most/all of the accrediting agencies only require you to have a Master’s to teach undergraduate classes, though with the glut of PhD’s out there, competition is heavy. I only have an M.A.
In your examples, while the money isn’t bad to me, it’s probably the case that those professors make quite a bit of their salary via their years of service. At my college, base pay for a full-timer with a Master’s (in any field) is $31,000 + benefits. However, you get an extra $750 per year for each year you’ve taught here. That amount goes up after ten years, and again at twenty years. Some of the old hands here are making $20k more than me because they’ve simply been here longer.
Makes sense to me, thank you for that insight!
In your experience in full time CC is the idea of Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall break a joke, or is that pretty accurate? How many hours on average (aside from those vacations) would you say you work per week?
There is no particularly direct relationship between whether someone is an adjunct or is tenure track (or something else again, like in a temporary, fixed term but fill time position) and whether they have a PhD. Most adjuncts have PhDs, as to most tenure track people, but, especially in times (long ago for most fields) when there were more teaching jobs going than PhDs to fill them, people with master’s degrees would still sometimes be hired to permanent, tenure track positions. From what ultrafilter says, that may still be the case for accounting. The people you are asking about making that kind of money, are almost certainly not adjuncts. As an adjunct, you will probably not make enough to live on, not for long, anyway. And you will almost certainly be treated like shit, and your prospects of advancing your academic career will not be advanced. For teh vast majority, adjuncting is a trap.
If ultrafilter is right though, you might have a decent chance at getting a tenure track position (without having been an adjunct first), especially if you get the PhD. That is something worth going for. (Note that, in most academic subjects these days, only a tiny proportion of PhDs will have a shot at a tenure track position. It is not a sensible career goal. The market is extremely tight and has been for a long time, and is likely to continue so for a long time. However, the field of accounting may be an exception to this.)
I can’t find any more recent numbers, but here’s an article from 2007 titled “The Shortage of Accounting Professors”. The second paragraph is telling:
This bodes well for the employability of adjuncts.
I work full time as an electrical engineer. I have an MSEE degree, and do the adjunct prof thing part-time for a local private college. This semester I am teaching two classes: MAT 115 on Wednesday evenings and SCI 101 on Thursday evenings. The semesters last 17 weeks, and I am paid $1100 per class. So this semester I earned $2200.
I do it because I enjoy it, and not for the money, obviously. 
The classes are usually small, and I am in full control of almost all aspects of it; the university never hassles me about anything.
Honestly, once you’ve prepped your classes and have the lessons and activities ready, it’s a pretty cushy job. I work 30 hours per week, and I still get the month off for X-mas, a week for Spring Break, 3 months for summer…and lots of schools are moving to being closed on Fridays (I personally do my Friday office hours from home.)
My field is a bit different because I grade a shitton of essays, but I’m able to do that during office hours/on campus time, and rarely bring my work home.
If I’m looking at the same ones, one has an MBA and one has an M.Acc. But both have master’s degrees as their latest completed degree (I can’t speak to whether they might be working on the PhD or not.
Background so you know where I’m coming from: I’m a librarian at a public research university in Atlanta, with a background as a business librarian, working closely with faculty in the CoB where I’ve worked.
At a technical/community college you’ll need a master’s and yes, that is *generally *the degree you’ll need to get full time teaching positions there. My workplace hires adjuncts as instructors, but you won’t know until 2 weeks or less before the semester starts whether you’re going to be teaching that semester.
Will it help you get into a doctoral program? Eh, maybe, but maybe not. It really depends upon the programs you apply to.
It depends upon their workload, honestly. If they’re teaching 4/4, the curriculum doesn’t change often and they’re not required to do research on top of that…it’s not bad. I know that beginning salaries for tenure track assistant profs in accounting at my workplace start in the low $100k range - and that comes with obligations toward research and service as well.
Yep, they’re not adjuncts - but I can’t tell from that site whether they’re faculty or some other designation (they might be instructors on a year to year contract, which, in GA is a full time gig, but there’s always the possibility that your contract might not be renewed). With all your questions, it might be helpful if you contact one or both of them (since you said it’s local) and see if you can make an appointment to talk with them - explain that you’re interested in teaching accounting and see what suggestions they have for you.
Thank you all so much for the replies…that really would be the dream job for me - I value free time much more than a huge paycheck, and of course more importantly I always felt most fulfilled when I was tutoring. There is just something about seeing that AHA! moment that thrills me. And I love the challenge of attacking a subject at different angles until it finally yields its secrets.
I was able to obtain a full-time permanent instructor position teaching computer science with a master degree, after being laid off my programming job of 28 years. It is a nice second career, and is a different “feeling” (time off, student contact, self-direction).
Look at forums at Chronicle of Higher Education; it’s a board similar in quality to SMDB, and they have a section devoted to Adjuncts and temporary instructors. They’re at http://www.chronicle.com