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.