5 ms·

Not trying to offend... but why do these teachers work for so little? This seems like an oversupply scenario. There has to be some other factor present.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
1) Sunk cost fallacy. 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?
- therobot24 11y ago
  Not always. My wife is an adjunct at two different colleges. She would love to be full time, not just for pay or benefits, but because it would mean that her opinions and class proposals would actually be taken seriously by the department. As for why she does it? >> Sunk cost fallacy I'm assuming this is based on the phrase "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". That all of her time has been teaching, so she might as well keep teaching. I'm also assuming you've never met someone who is actually passionate about their work. Is willing to work at 70% salary because funding is tight, or will take a pay cut to do something they love versus something they have little emotional investment in. >> 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic? I'm assuming here that you've never talked to anyone concerning their experience in getting a PhD. While many go on to academia, very little do it specifically to teach, many enjoy the prestige, pure research communities, and subject matter they study.
  - jrs235 11y ago
    I've heard it said that it's suppose to be "those who can, teach; those who can't, do". Doing something is often easier than teaching it to others.
    - victorhn 11y ago
      You would be surprised how many teachers don't know how to do practical tasks or be competitive enough to be employed on the public sector.
  - nowarninglabel 11y ago
    I think you are mis understanding "Sunk cost fallacy". What the parent comment was saying, and something I'm quite familiar with, is that when you have invested a lot of time and money in getting a Phd, and then find the job prospects slim to none, you are likely not to just give up and take a different job outside your field because you have "sunk costs" into becoming an academic. Thus, you may take a job as an adjunct in hopes of getting to be a professor someday, even if your economic position may be better to just get a job in industry somewhere.
    - rconti 11y ago
      Well, you need to pay the massive student loan bills somehow, and you've been studying something you are interested in and enjoy. What's the alternative? Flipping burgers for the same pay? Or do you imagine there are tons of industry jobs out there for folks without experience.. who will probably be considered overeducated but underqualified?
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    I presume what eli_gottlieb meant by "sunk cost fallacy" is more like this: "I've spent X years chasing tenure; if I bail on academia now, I'll never get it (and therefore waste those X years), but if I keep trying, I might make it."
- pcurve 11y ago
  Yep, and hope of securing a tenure track position, which is next to impossible these days. At least for those in STEM, there are post-doc positions that pay more than adjunct.
imgabe 11y ago
Some are chasing tenure-track positions of which there are fewer and fewer, but to get one requires staying active in academia. Some are industry professionals who may teach on the side for extra income or because they really want to teach. Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. This is a disservice to the students who are paying a fortune in tuition only to be taught by someone who, despite their best efforts, isn't given the resources to teach to the best of their ability.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  > Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. I'd argue that the latter is a result of the former. The oversupply, enables universities to confidently eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track positions. The jobs will be filled despite being less attractive because there are just. so. many. newly minted PhDs all fighting over the same scraps. The only limiting factor is that you do need to have a few tenured professors to get your name out there by publishing high profile papers. But there is only so much room in the high profile journals, so you really don't need that many of them. A sprinkle of graduates from one of the 2 or 3 top-ranked schools in their field will suffice. To that end, I think the deeper problem is twofold: First, in order to support their own careers professors need graduate students. Many times as many graduate students as there are open positions that the professor will create by retiring. Second, schools aren't being honest with their students about this fact, and non-top-ranked schools in particular aren't being forthright about admitting, "We probably wouldn't hire one of our own graduates for a full time position, not when we can easily snap up one of the surplus doctors that Yale keeps churning out."
  - bunderbunder 11y ago
    "Eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track position" Eesh, right there in the 2nd sentence. WTH, people, why are you upvoting? I'm never going to learn to proofread if you'll even give me karma for a train wreck like that.
cafard 11y ago
Possibly because one enjoys it and finds one class per semester or year not to burdensome. Or one may be trying to break into the tenured world. I taught briefly as a resume-builder. My wife did so to help out a friend who was taking over a class but not prepared to teach all of it; she later taught a restructured version by herself. Neither of us depended on it for a serious contribution to income. But a friend of my wife's did the business of four classes at three colleges for a good while before she manage to catch on at a school prepared to offer her a tenure-track position. There is only so much work out there for an anthropologist.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  How likely is one to land a tenure track position based on teaching, though? I mean, most professors have to teach if they aren't buying out their teaching load, but 90% of the tenure decision is publications and grants, no?
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    Depends on the school and the field. Some fields don't have grants. Some schools (a smaller number than in the past) have minimal research requirements, and teaching, working with students, and service are a much bigger part (even 100%) of the tenure decision.
  - cafard 11y ago
    I am confident that my wife's friend published, and I expect that those adjuncts who are trying to make it onto the tenure track are publishing or trying hard to do so.
bachmeier 11y ago
You have to be careful when interpreting the numbers. Although the adjunct numbers are large, the number that are paid really low wages is considerably less. Adjunct faculty in business, law, etc. are often paid well. You can live pretty well on a full-time, non-tenure track wage if you are an economist. $80K and up is common. In addition, you have a lot of adjunct faculty teaching for low compensation because they want to teach. Some work full time and want to keep their ties to the academic world. Some don't have a PhD so adjunct work is their only alternative if they want to teach at a research university. Some are taking time off to raise children, and with a well-paid spouse, they are in a position to teach for $4000 a class. Some are grad students trying to make enough to support themselves while writing a dissertation. As for the others...good question. Many are holding out hope that one day they will get the magical tenure-track offer. It's wishful thinking in many humanities fields, to be honest.
giaour 11y ago
Once you leave academia for an unrelated job, you're out for good. There's no way to get a tenure-track job when you've spent a couple years working in a different field, but that possibility still exists if you're teaching at a University, even as an adjunct. They work for peanuts and a lottery ticket, not just peanuts.
busyant 11y ago
I am just one data point, but here's how I ended up in a position similar to that described in the article. I went to a "HYPS" school for grad school and postdoc (molecular biology). I wanted the typical tenure-track research position. At the end of my postdoc I had two interviews, one at at an ivy and the other at a very good state research university. Both jobs fell through for financial reasons (basically, both schools decided to withdraw funding for the position). At the time, my postdoc funding was running out and my sponsor suggested working at a startup in Cambridge. I took the startup job. It was a great job doing great research. However, after about 6 years, I decided that I needed to take care of aging parents and be closer to family. I quit the startup and moved to a place where there is essentially no biotech industry. There are some good schools in the area, but it's difficult to get back into the tenure-track research world as you get older (you can transition from industry to academia as an older person if you're "great", but I'm not great...I'm what I would call, "pretty good"...and a pretty good mid-to-late-40-year-old isn't getting tenure-track jobs at quality research universities). So, I'm geographically tied (by my choice). I work as an adjunct at a local university and as a full-time non-tenured faculty member at a local college (not a fancy school and no research). I also run a small consulting business. So, with 3 different jobs, I have cobbled together a salary that is similar to what I had in the biotech world (probably a little less than the biotech job). A lot of the details in the Atlantic story rang true. I meet students from my adjunct position at the library (not by my car!). I keep almost everything in electronic format (including electronic scanning of student labs) so that I minimize lugging papers from school to school. The full-time faculty where I am an adjunct are quite nice, but you still get that vibe that you're a 2nd class citizen. If I want to write a student a recommendation, it's not a trivial endeavor to go to the adjunct school to get the proper letterhead paper. However, I've just downloaded the school's logo and made my own electronic version of their letterhead. I think I'm in a better position than many of my colleagues. I'm still making decent money in aggregate. I think some of the adjuncts have very difficult lives, living check to check. And the ones who aren't very good at teaching (or who don't get along with the full-timers) feel like they're under constant threat of getting fired.
ja27 11y ago
I don't know. My wife taught as an adjunct briefly but we finally had to set the rule that she couldn't accept an adjunct contract that would lose money for us. That's right, they pay music adjuncts so little that gas for a 20-mile round trip, parking, etc. cost more than her pay. They could have made it work if they'd move classes so she was only on campus Tue/Thurs but they insisted on MWF and TueThur classes the same semester. Even when she taught an on-line class, she had to be on campus 2 days a week which we didn't factor into the cost.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

1) Sunk cost fallacy. 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic?

therobot24 11y ago
Not always. My wife is an adjunct at two different colleges. She would love to be full time, not just for pay or benefits, but because it would mean that her opinions and class proposals would actually be taken seriously by the department. As for why she does it? >> Sunk cost fallacy I'm assuming this is based on the phrase "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". That all of her time has been teaching, so she might as well keep teaching. I'm also assuming you've never met someone who is actually passionate about their work. Is willing to work at 70% salary because funding is tight, or will take a pay cut to do something they love versus something they have little emotional investment in. >> 2) What else are you going to do when all your training is academic? I'm assuming here that you've never talked to anyone concerning their experience in getting a PhD. While many go on to academia, very little do it specifically to teach, many enjoy the prestige, pure research communities, and subject matter they study.
- jrs235 11y ago
  I've heard it said that it's suppose to be "those who can, teach; those who can't, do". Doing something is often easier than teaching it to others.
  - victorhn 11y ago
    You would be surprised how many teachers don't know how to do practical tasks or be competitive enough to be employed on the public sector.
- nowarninglabel 11y ago
  I think you are mis understanding "Sunk cost fallacy". What the parent comment was saying, and something I'm quite familiar with, is that when you have invested a lot of time and money in getting a Phd, and then find the job prospects slim to none, you are likely not to just give up and take a different job outside your field because you have "sunk costs" into becoming an academic. Thus, you may take a job as an adjunct in hopes of getting to be a professor someday, even if your economic position may be better to just get a job in industry somewhere.
  - rconti 11y ago
    Well, you need to pay the massive student loan bills somehow, and you've been studying something you are interested in and enjoy. What's the alternative? Flipping burgers for the same pay? Or do you imagine there are tons of industry jobs out there for folks without experience.. who will probably be considered overeducated but underqualified?
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  I presume what eli_gottlieb meant by "sunk cost fallacy" is more like this: "I've spent X years chasing tenure; if I bail on academia now, I'll never get it (and therefore waste those X years), but if I keep trying, I might make it."
pcurve 11y ago
Yep, and hope of securing a tenure track position, which is next to impossible these days. At least for those in STEM, there are post-doc positions that pay more than adjunct.

imgabe 11y ago

Some are chasing tenure-track positions of which there are fewer and fewer, but to get one requires staying active in academia. Some are industry professionals who may teach on the side for extra income or because they really want to teach. Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. This is a disservice to the students who are paying a fortune in tuition only to be taught by someone who, despite their best efforts, isn't given the resources to teach to the best of their ability.

bunderbunder 11y ago
> Oversupply is part of it, but there's also the issue of Universities offering fewer and fewer full-time tenure track positions. I'd argue that the latter is a result of the former. The oversupply, enables universities to confidently eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track positions. The jobs will be filled despite being less attractive because there are just. so. many. newly minted PhDs all fighting over the same scraps. The only limiting factor is that you do need to have a few tenured professors to get your name out there by publishing high profile papers. But there is only so much room in the high profile journals, so you really don't need that many of them. A sprinkle of graduates from one of the 2 or 3 top-ranked schools in their field will suffice. To that end, I think the deeper problem is twofold: First, in order to support their own careers professors need graduate students. Many times as many graduate students as there are open positions that the professor will create by retiring. Second, schools aren't being honest with their students about this fact, and non-top-ranked schools in particular aren't being forthright about admitting, "We probably wouldn't hire one of our own graduates for a full time position, not when we can easily snap up one of the surplus doctors that Yale keeps churning out."
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  "Eliminate tenure track positions and replace them with tenure track position" Eesh, right there in the 2nd sentence. WTH, people, why are you upvoting? I'm never going to learn to proofread if you'll even give me karma for a train wreck like that.

cafard 11y ago

Possibly because one enjoys it and finds one class per semester or year not to burdensome. Or one may be trying to break into the tenured world. I taught briefly as a resume-builder. My wife did so to help out a friend who was taking over a class but not prepared to teach all of it; she later taught a restructured version by herself. Neither of us depended on it for a serious contribution to income. But a friend of my wife's did the business of four classes at three colleges for a good while before she manage to catch on at a school prepared to offer her a tenure-track position. There is only so much work out there for an anthropologist.

santaclaus 11y ago
How likely is one to land a tenure track position based on teaching, though? I mean, most professors have to teach if they aren't buying out their teaching load, but 90% of the tenure decision is publications and grants, no?
- bachmeier 11y ago
  Depends on the school and the field. Some fields don't have grants. Some schools (a smaller number than in the past) have minimal research requirements, and teaching, working with students, and service are a much bigger part (even 100%) of the tenure decision.
- cafard 11y ago
  I am confident that my wife's friend published, and I expect that those adjuncts who are trying to make it onto the tenure track are publishing or trying hard to do so.

bachmeier 11y ago

You have to be careful when interpreting the numbers. Although the adjunct numbers are large, the number that are paid really low wages is considerably less. Adjunct faculty in business, law, etc. are often paid well. You can live pretty well on a full-time, non-tenure track wage if you are an economist. $80K and up is common. In addition, you have a lot of adjunct faculty teaching for low compensation because they want to teach. Some work full time and want to keep their ties to the academic world. Some don't have a PhD so adjunct work is their only alternative if they want to teach at a research university. Some are taking time off to raise children, and with a well-paid spouse, they are in a position to teach for $4000 a class. Some are grad students trying to make enough to support themselves while writing a dissertation. As for the others...good question. Many are holding out hope that one day they will get the magical tenure-track offer. It's wishful thinking in many humanities fields, to be honest.

giaour 11y ago

Once you leave academia for an unrelated job, you're out for good. There's no way to get a tenure-track job when you've spent a couple years working in a different field, but that possibility still exists if you're teaching at a University, even as an adjunct. They work for peanuts and a lottery ticket, not just peanuts.

busyant 11y ago

I am just one data point, but here's how I ended up in a position similar to that described in the article. I went to a "HYPS" school for grad school and postdoc (molecular biology). I wanted the typical tenure-track research position. At the end of my postdoc I had two interviews, one at at an ivy and the other at a very good state research university. Both jobs fell through for financial reasons (basically, both schools decided to withdraw funding for the position). At the time, my postdoc funding was running out and my sponsor suggested working at a startup in Cambridge. I took the startup job. It was a great job doing great research. However, after about 6 years, I decided that I needed to take care of aging parents and be closer to family. I quit the startup and moved to a place where there is essentially no biotech industry. There are some good schools in the area, but it's difficult to get back into the tenure-track research world as you get older (you can transition from industry to academia as an older person if you're "great", but I'm not great...I'm what I would call, "pretty good"...and a pretty good mid-to-late-40-year-old isn't getting tenure-track jobs at quality research universities). So, I'm geographically tied (by my choice). I work as an adjunct at a local university and as a full-time non-tenured faculty member at a local college (not a fancy school and no research). I also run a small consulting business. So, with 3 different jobs, I have cobbled together a salary that is similar to what I had in the biotech world (probably a little less than the biotech job). A lot of the details in the Atlantic story rang true. I meet students from my adjunct position at the library (not by my car!). I keep almost everything in electronic format (including electronic scanning of student labs) so that I minimize lugging papers from school to school. The full-time faculty where I am an adjunct are quite nice, but you still get that vibe that you're a 2nd class citizen. If I want to write a student a recommendation, it's not a trivial endeavor to go to the adjunct school to get the proper letterhead paper. However, I've just downloaded the school's logo and made my own electronic version of their letterhead. I think I'm in a better position than many of my colleagues. I'm still making decent money in aggregate. I think some of the adjuncts have very difficult lives, living check to check. And the ones who aren't very good at teaching (or who don't get along with the full-timers) feel like they're under constant threat of getting fired.

ja27 11y ago

I don't know. My wife taught as an adjunct briefly but we finally had to set the rule that she couldn't accept an adjunct contract that would lose money for us. That's right, they pay music adjuncts so little that gas for a 20-mile round trip, parking, etc. cost more than her pay. They could have made it work if they'd move classes so she was only on campus Tue/Thurs but they insisted on MWF and TueThur classes the same semester. Even when she taught an on-line class, she had to be on campus 2 days a week which we didn't factor into the cost.