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Believing in Free Markets and Exploitation of Labor: A Conundrum
I am an adjunct history professor. I love my job. I love teaching. I love students. I love engaging with the material I try to help students understand. I have never minded the paltry sums I am paid because I also believe strongly in free markets and understand the invisible hand passes out checks to labor.
However, I’m starting to reconsider this position.
Yesterday I did a very unhealthy thing. I looked up the salaries of full-time faculty who teach many of the exact same classes that I teach at one of the colleges where I work and who have essentially the same course load that I do. I bothered to find out what some of the administrators make as well, and I noticed the delightful administrative assistant who works for the head of my department makes twice as much money as I do.
Now, I did not start teaching until after I had raised my family. The truth is that I do not have to make a lot of money because I am married, and my husband has carried that load for decades. The reality is that I could–and probably would–teach for free because I am that passionate about education. But I am in a unique position, and I am realizing more and more that all is not right in the ivory tower.
This bastion of progressive babble that houses professors who write screeds about the evils of corporations exploiting employees effectively exploits a large number of workers every semester by requiring them to have advanced degrees while paying them wages equivalent to those made by fast food workers.
For those of you who are not aware, adjunct faculty is contingent faculty. They are “part time” workers who exist on a semester-to-semester contract with absolutely no benefits or job security. They are sometimes uncertain about how many classes they will be able to teach in a term, which is directly tied to their compensation, until a week before that term starts. They also currently make up the majority of the teachers in higher education.
What does this mean?
For one, my free market self acknowledges that there are too many people in the United States with masters degrees and doctorates who saw Dead Poets Society in the eighties and thus want to mold young minds. I accept this, and I understand that I chose to toil away in graduate school so I could teach in college. No one forced me to read monographs or start using words like historiography and intersectionality in day-to-day conversations. If you asked my husband, he’d pay money to remove those words from my vocabulary.
I also understand that I choose to teach for less money now than I made when I was a wee lass in my twenties and working in the private sector because I am willing to accept the terms of my semester-to-semester contracts. But I also wonder about other things the invisible hand is doing in this particular marketplace in which I work.
One reason labor costs are kept low, it seems to me, is that the price of a product is kept low. But students have paid higher and higher tuition rates which have outpaced inflation for decades while adjunct pay has remained largely stagnant.
So what are students buying for this higher price-tag? A better education? How can this be true when they are taught more and more by adjuncts and/or graduate teaching assistants who are eating ramen and struggling to survive rather than giving students detailed feedback on their work? What exactly are students getting for their increased debt if it’s not more attentive instruction in the classroom?
I understand that state governments have subsidized many universities less and less. That could explain the rising costs, right?
Understanding this, I was okay with taking a hit in pay. I accepted that I would not earn much at the end of the day despite the fact that the “product” with which I am engaged keeps costing consumers more and more because of cut-backs. Sure I put in long hours for which I am not compensated, but I once felt that I was in the same boat as all of my colleagues working in the humanities.
After all, I have gone to faculty meetings and looked around at the people in Costco jeans who often seem to have shown up purely for the free sub sandwiches and professional development credit. (A certain bit of the second is required to get our contracts renewed each new term.)
Again, the majority of everyone teaching where I work is adjunct faculty, so it’s not hard to find folks who look a bit haggard. These are people who may not be married like I am, which means they are flying down the highway to jobs on multiple campuses so that colleges can say they are “part time” and still avoid paying for their healthcare or contributing to retirement. Perhaps they are waiting tables at night.
But this is the thing. This feeling I had was not true. Professors are not all in the same boat, and there are vast disparities in pay that are not based on workload, education level, experience, or quality of output.
I was shocked, in fact, when I found out that many of my colleagues who make up the minority of teachers on my main campus have benefits, retirement plans, and make as much as six times more than the rest of us who are doing very similar work. They often teach the exact same classes that adjuncts do, though they have offices and stay on one campus, whereas I keep files in the back of my jeep and travel between three. (This group of full-timers, by the way, does not seem to grow but shrinks when someone dies as they are then replaced by adjuncts.)
If one then turns away from the salaries of various faculty and starts looking at those people called “staff” or “administration,” the resentment really starts to build.
While I have never once thought that the argument about wage gaps between unskilled factory workers and CEOs has been very compelling because I am fully aware of the differences between these jobs, I don’t mind saying that when I look at the average pay of adjuncts and compare this to the average pay of college presidents, I find myself getting a little queasy. The disparities in higher education strike me as much starker than those found between unskilled labor and management as well because of the credentials that are required for any adjunct to have despite the fact that he/she will earn less than the custodians who work at the same institutions. These disparities are also weirdly uniform across academia.
Do people really believe competent educators are so easily found? Can this system really be sustained?
While I believe I am a good teacher, and I often work sixty hour+ weeks grading papers and changing my courses to make them better for a good deal less than thirty thousand dollars a year in a city where the average rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1245, I do not have to worry about putting groceries in my refrigerator.
How many adjuncts look like me? If I’m to go by the anecdotal experience, the answer is not as many as you think.
So I believe it is only reasonable to think there must be a degradation in the product of education if the people delivering that product are so ill paid that they cannot spend the time that I do on delivering that product, which is getting more and more expensive for the buyers of that product.
I suppose that the invisible hand will eventually make graduate schools pump out fewer teachers, or teachers will refuse to be adjuncts, or students will stop going to college or… what?
I do not want to be a hypocrite. In theory, I do not even believe in minimum wages. But I find myself asking questions about what exploitation even is in the free market. How do we define this term? Does it ever exist in a free market system? If it does, how are adjuncts not exploited? How can exploitation be rectified? How is this current system impacting education outcomes?
Should I just shut up and accept the iron law of wages is what Adam Smith would have envisioned for adjunct professors? Should consumers be fine with paying the people who are actually interacting with them on campuses a fraction of what is paid to the administrators they never see who are busy doing… something?
Where does it all end up?
It’s a conundrum for me that I can’t solve in my own mind.
Published in Education
Ah, we finally have someone to represent the admins!
@thewhetherman has made a good case the tenured professors do additional work that justifies additional compensation. Care to make a similar case for why admins add more value than has been recognized so far?
The counter-argument would be that the market value of a diploma depends on the reputation and standards of the institution that grants it. An employer is going to judge a degree from Harvard Law differently than one from the University of American Samoa. A university that gets overly lax with standards hurts its own reputation, diminishing the market value of the credentials it issues, and thus the rate of tuition it can charge for them.
Alas. I don’t know the answers to some of these–folded in grants, for instance–and I’m not going to ask at any cocktail parties.
I don’t want them to be underpaid either! :D I just want us all to be reasonably compensated. (Of course, we’ve gone over why I’m not.)
As I can’t supply all the details, I’ll say ‘thank you’ for saying you’d be a ‘little bitter’ about it if certain conditions did not explain their rates. I mean, I believe in free markets, but I know how hard I work, too. My reaction to the salaries was knee-jerk bitter, but I think pretty human. ;)
How would that information be transmitted? It is well known that the US News and World Report rankings are a joke, we use them anyway. Harvard openly brags that they could send their students on a 2 year cruise and they would still get great jobs due to the 400 year history of the institution -who cares what it currently does? Yes, eventualy shredding standards will catch up, but that could be decades from now before anyone figures it out. Would the top administrators care? They will move on in a few years -long before it catches up to them. Would the legislatures laying the pressure care? They aren’t even attached to the institution.
And remember, those reputations were built under a shared governance system with much less regulation than we have today.
It has been decades. It is catching up to them.
Seawriter
Too whom?
My list begins and ends with University of Missouri, which set itself on fire in rather startling fashion.
Has Yale suffered for the Chistakises? Has Middleburry suffered for Murray? Berkeley for Milo? Anyone anywhere else?
Don’t misunderstand me -higher ed is a mess from top to bottom, from the desire to chase being Harvard to the gaming of USN&WR rankings, to Department of Education’s edicts and dictats, to the self-destructive lunacy of the faculty itself.
But at present the evidence that their sins are catching up to them now, rather than a reckoning still in the future, is mostly wishful. Students are not staying away, businesses complain, but they keep hiring based on credentials, not education. I believe the day is coming, but we can Jeremiah to our hearts’ mutual content, the presidents of the university aren’t going to believe it until Nebuchadnezzar is knocking down the walls of the Ivy Tower. (And do recall that I consider Trump to be that Babylonian King, so maybe the day or reckoning is at hand.)
I have a friend who is in finance – the type of finance that puts together big money packages for oil and gas. He is in Austin, but was in NYC for a while. When he was first hired out of college one of the people who hired him stated one reason my friend got hired was his degree was not from an Ivy League school. They found MBAs from Ivys to be unproductive and had stopped hiring them with few exceptions. (The exceptions being interns who busted their humps during the internship. There were few of those, because the Ivy League students were riding on the reputations of their schools.) And this was a banking firm in NYC.
Remember the fall of the Soviet Union? There, seemingly invulnerable. Then suddenly no Warsaw Pact. Germany is reunited. Then suddenly no Soviet Union. You will see the same type of collapse in Academia. Seemingly immortal and unbeatable, and then suddenly . . . gone. I am seeing the cracks in the wall.
Seawriter
I think Sabre touched on this when he mentioned that when he asked professors how much more money he’d have to pay them to take on some administrative work, they would balk and say not enough.
So… I think, at least for those who would prefer teaching, Admin workers are sufficiently low in supply and high in demand that they get more money for the work they do. I don’t mind admin work for the most part. I think I’d be better at it than teaching, that’s for sure. Sometimes the rote mindlessness helps me KEEP my sanity. Odd, that. I also enjoy coming up with methods of efficiency.
Its positions like administrator of special snowflake diversity that get me (I kid… mostly…)
It is entirely human and understandable — which is why socialism continues to beat capitalism at the polling booth.
Take for instance farm workers or coal miners — they work hard, too, at unpleasant jobs none of us would want. They work harder than, say, professional baseball players, so why do they get paid so much less?
Market salaries aren’t based on how hard someone works.
Is that different than any other industry?
How does a consumer know which auto makers build reliable cars? Are Car and Driver rankings any more reliable than US News and World Report?
Decades ago, import cars had a poor reputation compared to Detroit automakers. Now that perception is reversed. Detroit is struggling to improve their image, meanwhile Tesla has just surpassed their market cap despite making only a fraction of the cars (and no profits).
So yeah, reputations don’t change overnight, and consumers seldom have perfect information, but over time the market will adjust based on millions of happy or unhappy customers.
Or on how much education and training it took to qualify for the job.
Sure, in a world populated by Homo Economicus, it would. No one would spend money to qualify for a job that wouldn’t allow them to easily pay it back. But people factor things like satisfaction and prestige into their career plans. From a strict economist viewpoint, the fact that there are so many people willing to work as adjuncts shows that in fact they are overpaid. Perhaps not in straight monetary terms, but when one factors in the pleasure of teaching and the prestige of being in academia. The actual market wage should be low enough that almost no one would want to be an adjunct or even a professor to discourage the glut of PhDs with no better way of earning a living.
Not to mention a favorite grievance of feminists: stay-at-home mothers work really hard and get paid $0 an hour.
Heh… but I don’t have to buy fancy clothes, wear a onesie, or put on make up if I don’t want to. But yeah… it is hard work… but my mother says my husband’s salary is our family’s money. Not his or mine. Ours.
Whoa now, nelly.
I created the group here: http://ricochet.com/groups/ricochetti-in-the-academy/
I don’t have any friends, so I can’t invite people directly. I think. But @postmodernhoplite seems like another candidate, with @lois-lane and @sabrdance
When supply outstrips demand, prices go down. We can accept that if there are 100 houses on the market for every buyer, housing prices are too high for the market and should go down; I’m not sure why folks can’t accept that if there are 100 qualified applicants for every position, the position pays too much for the market. And that’s with demand being artificially propped up with course requirements for degrees and degree requirements for jobs.
Does anyone use the career outlook handbook in planning a career course anymore?
Seems like a lot of this could be avoided with proper aptitude evaluation and the outlook handbook. This was offered to me my freshman year of high school in a 1/2 semester course. It could be better handled with your guidance counselor jr or sr year as you do your college planning meetings.
Just heard this song on the radio and it seemed relevant to this conversation.
It seems like most of the advice given to kids these days is to pick your dream job and go for it, if you work hard and refuse to give up, you can do anything you want. Couple that with the fact they’ve been given a participation trophy for every competition they’ve ever participated in, why shouldn’t they expect life to reward them with whatever job their heart desires?
Ahhh, that’s the saddest thing I’ve read all day. I’ll be your friend!
Fine, but you can also accept that there is a price at which people simply won’t sell their house or their labor.
If we are to believe that the market is working in every right way in the case of the adjunct, we must assume that the wage and supply has at some point been balanced by the invisible hand.
Since you are committed to looking at supply and demand only, you cannot make any better case for cutting these wages than I can make for raising these wages. The rate has either been set by the market or it hasn’t.
Hah! Thanks. I don’t really understand the Rico friends thing – I’m not even friends on here with the members I know in real life. And I’m not at all clear why I should be, except that I couldn’t directly invite anyone to join the group that I wasn’t already friends with.
You can send individual Ricochet members invitations via private messages. If you do not know how to do that (it is not obvious) here is how:
Seawriter
Of course. When prices drop low enough, supply shrinks to match the demand.
Except that one of my central points in this thread is that education is not a free market. Demand for education has been artificially increased with regulations that require education to enter a profession, that require employers to use proxies like education to determine aptitude for work, and that require students to take unwanted classes in order to get the degree that is needed for a job. (e.g. requiring Registered Nurses to get BS instead of AS degrees, with the ensuing requirements for history surveys, foreign language, and literature classes)
Adjuncts’ wages are probably far closer to the market than those of professors or administrators, I’ll freely grant. But the university teaching labor market is distorted on the one side by government funding and requirements for education on the one side and universities churning out far more grad students than needed to fill the few open positions on the other.
PhDs aren’t the only one with this problem, after all — for years, law schools have been graduating far more lawyers than the market could handle. The year I graduated law school, only 64% managed to get a “JD preferred/required” job — and that number is almost certainly inflated by unemployed graduates not wanting to admit their current straits.
We even have our own version of “adjuncting” — it’s called document review. It’s short term (sometimes as little as two weeks), no benefit, no hope-of-moving-upward, work for extremely low wages for the education necessary to do it. (In New York, the going rate is $15-20/hr.)
As the truth about the legal job market is getting out, however, potential students are responding. Enrollment is down 30% nationwide; LSAT entrance exam scores and bar passage scores are also down enormously as the smartest students look for success in other fields. Quite frankly, the fact that PhD students aren’t responding the same way suggests some rather interesting things about the relative intelligence (or at least wisdom) of potential PhDs vs. JDs.
But, @amyschley, I already said the number of history majors has been contracting by 9% every year since 2008 (American Historical Association).
You should realize a history doctorate takes on average 6 years to earn, so if a student is a JD’s worth into the program, it’s hard to pull react quickly.
Conversely, lawyers who are thousands and thousands of dollars into debt, its harder for you to simply walk away from that degree. It’s easy for you to tell others to not enter law school in the first place.
You see a shift in lawyers per the fact that the cycle is faster.
Also, while I understand the idea that some classes are stupid to require students to take–I hated, hated, hated that class about diversity in the workforce that I was required to finish–one should ask , “What is gratuitous?”
I’m fine, I guess, with removing US History from core curriculums if we deliver this better in the lower grades. However, as it stands, I think it’s an essential class for all college educations *as long as we have a democratic republic.*.
It is conservatives who freak out when people remove history requirements because we understand how complete ignorance of the past impacts any electorate.
But maybe that’s a different discussion.
i don’t think adjuncts would work for any less.
(Typing on a phone so forgive the grammatical errors…)
I’m not absolutely certain, but I don’t think there’s much difference in debt loads between PhD and JD students. They’re both atrocious and cannot be walked away from.
Well, let’s back up a bit further — what’s the point of college? I suggest to you that almost no one goes to college for a liberal arts education. Most people go to get their ticket punched, and the few that actually want to learn primarily want to learn the material for their career.
Sidestepping the issue of degrees as value signaling, why should getting a liberal arts education be necessary for a professional degree such as nurse, engineer, doctor, or lawyer? My university actually recognizes that many of these classes are unwanted and unnecessary for professional success, and as such offers 6 year MD and PharmD degrees. My mom managed to be a successful nurse for 20 years before getting her bachelor’s degree — why should nursing students be forced into taking classes they neither can afford nor use?
And I should clarify, I believe in the importance of studying history. I have a history BA with a Classics minor, and the massive historical ignorance of even my educated peers does appall me. I just don’t think college history requirements do much to help the situation. Heck, I don’t think college history electives do much either; as of my graduation date, I had the highest score on the department’s exit knowledge survey. However, I knew almost all the answers I knew before I matriculated.
When I can get a more thorough, better structured, and more engaging history course from The Great Courses than my local college, I don’t see how requiring more ticket punching is going to help.
A PhD student who graduates in debt is a poor PhD. The standard advice I was given, and pass on, was not to go to any program that doesn’t offer full funding for 4 years. That is the minimum vote of confidence you need from the program to make this career choice.
I refer to my earlier comment about how universities built their reputations in the era when people who went to school did not do so to get their tickets punched. And how they are now rapidly burning those reputations to the point where the whole institution will come down -I hope we didn’t need it…