I completely sympathize with the idea that PhD’s cannot be described as victims when they choose to make ~24K (3 classes in Fall, 2 in Summer, 3 in Spring @3000 per 3 credit class) a year with no health insurance and minimal benefits otherwise. By virtue of the fact that somebody holds a PhD it can mean they are truly very intelligent, truly very tenacious, or ideally, both. After all, a PhD is typically 5-8 years of being overworked and underpaid.
There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to learn to do something useful like software engineering, nursing, electrician or finance. There’s no reason why they can’t get jobs as secondary school teachers and out-compete the inferior talent pool in those institutions.
But for whatever reason, they don’t. So $24,000/year sucks? Get a second job. Do what everyone else does who doesn’t make enough money to get by. What happens to a person who works 2 - 3 jobs? They get tired, they get odd hours of sleep, and when they are a teacher they don’t put the time into preparing classes that they should. Worse still for that last observation, adjuncts get little choice in what class they teach. When offered a class they know they have no business teaching (which happens a lot) or when offered a class they have the skill for but have never taught before, they cannot as easily meet the cost of preparing those classes. What suffers when this is the case are the students, the adjuncts and nobody else. Now I’m not saying that all adjuncts are necessarily bad teachers, but they are more likely to be under-performing because of their economic situation.
Meanwhile, many full-time faculty teach exactly the same number of classes per year, meaning they teach the same number of courses per year, work less than 40 hours/week, have 4 months off a year, and provide a minor amount of added value. They teach the same classes over and over, and have ample opportunity and support in improving their course content. They start at twice the rate of an adjunct, get retirement and health benefits, and later earn other ludicrous benefits such as sabbaticals. In other words, if you can become a tenured faculty member - do it! You will certainly not die of stress. Despite this, many faculty prove to be complete slackers after earning their tenure, or tenure was never really much of a test, and a noticeable percent of these faculty are passably good at such a pathetically easy job.
So now your kid is going off to school at University of 50% Adjuncts. It’s quite possible your kid could only rarely see a full-time instructor the entire time they are at school. Maybe they get nothing but adjuncts and the worst of the full-times. Or they get some percentage of all these groups I listed. Regardless, from taking classes with the best teacher in the department to taking classes with the worst prepared and untalented temp your kid pays the exact same price. They go into the exact same amount of debt for a complete waste of their time as they would for an enriching and memorable experience.
The only winners are the schools. They make more money off each student that goes through an adjunct’s class than a full-time professor’s class.
Now what if adjuncts were always paid at the same rate as visiting faculty or first-year tenure track professors? They’d make 40-50K a year. Easily enough to live on. Still no benefits, no time off, and that is the typical deal for a contract worker. A friend of mine just got his first software engineering job. It’s a 3 month contract. He’s paid more than most starting software engineers. More. No benefits. I think that is probably typical. They probably pay this well because they want a devoted and skilled worker sitting in the cubicle. At many colleges and universities it seems that they just want a cheap body to fill the lecture slot. They get what they pay for, but your kid gets half of what he or she paid for.
