Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
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
If you want higher wages for adjunct professors the supply has to shrink. If you want to help you should quit.
I suspect most teachers will always be paid less than their value because there is always an ample supply of young teachers so motivated by passion that they will accept low pay. It’s perhaps the best example of a “social service” profession in which many people admirably want to serve.
Incidentally, have you noticed how rarely the word “servant” is used in regard to “service” jobs? This is no longer a society guided by Christian humility. I suspect the civil rights era killed that word by incessant references to slavery. Modern Americans associate “servants” with servitude.
I read here that there is never a scenario in which exploitation happens. This is not just a supply problem, though I’ll concede that too many teachers are in supply.
Many good teachers certainly do leave higher education because they are not paid a reasonable–much less a living–wage, but that makes no difference in this scenario.
Why?
Institutions of higher learning don’t care nearly as much as you might think they do about the quality of your children’s educations, and consumers are, apparently, equally ambivalent about the quality product they are buying. It’s just a sheet of paper, and that’s it.
You can think this is just an adjunct’s problem, but I would propose it has wider implications than this.
And if you think that your kids aren’t being taught by adjuncts and/or teaching assistants–whatever school they are attending–you would be wrong. They are.
While community college fees are much more modest, the university for which I work charges $40,828 per year in tuition. With living expenses, the projected cost to attend for one year per the 2016-2017 projection is $56,860.
What do you think parents/students think they are paying for when they lay out that kind of cash?
It is not the schools that are the problem, it is the government that makes rules for other entities that is the problem.
If it wasn’t for rules about how big companies and schools should require degrees and pay people more if they do ( standard wage schemes and firing practices in big organizations) then it would be easier for people to get good jobs without degrees. If government didn’t have so much play in accreditation and the affects on financial aid, then schools would become more competitive and that would force lowering cost, which would force schools to be more efficient at teaching what students need rather than what governments want (ie social justice).
Incentivizing being more efficient would create incentives to have less admin and more quality teachers.
So, when you actually look at it. Adjunct faculty are being paid a market rate under the current system, its the other professors who are likely being paid more than market rate. Admin are getting paid more than market rate due to schools getting too much money through student debt etc. and the fact that society has prioritized avoiding legal issues (admin issues like making sure teachers don’t grade unfairly which requires standardized courses and testing) over quality teaching.
Fundamentally, I think it is the government that has created the problems rather than any one group of people combined with a society that has allowed the government to do so and gone along for the ride.
I do view myself as a servant of sorts, Aaron, and in the very nice way in which I think you intended your comments to be framed. You’re right that many teachers are in education because they truly just want to serve kids.
However, Christian humility does not call for poverty, and if we are looking at this through the prism of morality, employers are obligated to treat their employees fairly, aren’t they?
If the conservative answer to a large number of workers who question why they are being treated like serfs is always to say something like, “You have the liberty to quit and make the supply of teachers smaller,” then it is no wonder at all to me why the vast majority of Americans are starting to abandon free market ideology.
I mean, I think the adjunct model should push conservatives to think a bit more about how compensation is perceived as working in this country.
After all, I’m not complaining here about people who teach Shakespeare not being able to make the same $ as engineers. I’m saying you have students going into massive debt in this country to take classes with people who are being paid less money than teenagers working at McDonalds, and no one wants to look closer at that model?
My job requires a minimum of 7 years of higher education to get.
The biggest problem in education and healthcare and even most big businesses these days is that these organizations are old and top heavy. The administrators and executives are taking money out of the organization coffers for themselves and pensions rather than putting money back in to develop new talent.
We are headed for a pension crisis in every organization in America–government at every level, nonprofits, and businesses. It was expedient to promise pensions and benefits ten and twenty years ago rather than wrestle with the reality of dwindling funds. Instead of haggling over raises, management promised pension and benefit increases.
This happened partly because of the labor relations laws that say that management must leave some offer on the table, lest they be found guilty of not bargaining in good faith. The philosophy worked its way into all salary negotiations. They saved cash for the moment in exchange for a promise in the future. It is now that future.
Many of these organizations–I include government, education, healthcare, business, and nonprofits–are essentially paying two salaries for every person who is working.
Then the only way management could further stretch its meager reserves was to hire freelance workers.
What needs to happen is for a group of freelancers or adjuncts or other underpaid employees to get together an offer to work for more money but perhaps without pensions in the future and benefits now and in the future. These organization simply don’t want any more financial commitments.
The best way for newer professionals to get around this is to find some new organization with a dream that is interested to hire excellent employees and for those employees to grow with these organizations, whether those are new schools, new hospitals, or new towns or cities.
I agree with some of your assessment that this is partially a government created problem, but I don’t agree with the idea that the market is working when it comes to adjuncts. They are literally paid as little or less annually than substitute teachers in the lower grades who do not even have to have a college degree if working short term assignments throughout the year: an easy thing to do, btw, unless you’re truly incompetent because halfway decent subs are ALWAYS in demand, and there are NEVER enough of them because the pay REMAINS abysmally low regardless.
The current system that pays adjuncts on average $20-25,000 annually with no benefits or longterm contracts or sick days or vacations is definitely not concerned with quality, only low pay.
The system as a whole is clearly out of whack if one takes the time to put it under any scrutiny at all. Administrators who control salaries are definitely–often–overpaid.
You might consider branching out. Perhaps your state’s historical associations. The historical societies in New England are thriving.
Perhaps there’s a lecture circuit in your state that includes museums and such.
There’s a market for historians. Every time I watch television, I think, “Wow, look at the historical knowledge the producers have to have in order to produce this accurately.”
You could piece together with writing, consulting, editing, and lecturing, along with teaching a couple of courses, a very nice salary.
Adjuncts already work without benefits. The state in which I work requires the college for which I work to take money out of my check to go into a 401(a) retirement fund because they don’t pay into social security. This is not a system that is breaking anyone’s bank, and it certainly would not support a human being who eats food upon retirement.
Perhaps this is more what people who have to rely on their salaries to eat must do. I don’t know. I have, actually, done some writing/editing, but I am currently teaching purely because that’s what I want to do, and it doesn’t matter how much I make.
I posted this thread mostly because I believe I am not a typical adjunct who is financially secure outside of teaching but because I can see how this system is exploitive. As a person who has always believed in free markets, it has thrown me for a loop.
I mean, the issues for adjuncts are just so… glaring. And it seems to me as if conservatives in general feel as if labor exploitation just isn’t a real thing. Ever. Which seems a bit… absurd?
Right. I know that. :) What I’m saying is that when a group of adjuncts approaches the administration, perhaps you could at least get more cash if you skipped asking for benefits to go with them.
See, what I’m trying to get at is that they don’t even talk to the adjuncts because they think if they open the door, they will end up with some sort of long-term commitment. Maybe–it might be worth a shot–a group of you could get them to let you into their office to talk about this if you said, “We’re looking just for higher salary. We realize benefits are off the table.”
Who knows? They might listen. Especially if they are competing for the top adjunct professors in your area.
It’s was just an idea. It’s hard to get administrators to even listen on this subject.
Yes. In my experience, people will take advantage of others if they can. I hate to be that cynical, but it does seem to be reality. :)
Agreed. I think the ample supply of charitable teachers will always suppress wages. But in a less regulated, less unionized, and less credentialed system, there might be more good teachers being financially rewarded for quality instruction. As with writers and artists, it might be a hard road for most but with potential of excellent incomes for those who persevere and are rewarded by popularity among consumers. Currently, the industry is too formalized and restricted for the best to be rewarded directly by customers.
Perhaps illegals are doing us all a favor by promoting a shadow society. The many colluding systems are too rotten for reform. Informal teaching for informal jobs might be better paid and more rewarding in the future. I’m certainly glad my nephews are being home-schooled.
The irony here, MarciN, is that you are advocating unionizing, which is interesting. Many people on this thread view unions as the problem in education, but without a way for the adjuncts to have group clout, I don’t think they will ever secure better pay.
This is actually getting into why this is all more complicated than our typical ideological likes and dislikes, and I truly appreciate your trying to find a reasonable solution.
The hardest thing I see with organizing adjuncts is their lack of job security, which brings me back to the exploitation thing again.
I have always thought employers should be able to fire workers for any cause, but adjuncts become so dependent on getting assigned sections that they don’t want to rock any boats. The schools do not have to give them ANY reasons for not assigning new classes. Therefore, someone who is truly dependent on a teaching gig term-to-term to pay his/her rent is too vulnerable to speak out.
This is all true, but I do wonder how adjuncts push to raise wages in the current system if the never unionize. (See discussion with @marcin) I also wonder if teachers are really similar to writers and artists. I value the work of these guys, too, but didn’t Adam Smith advocate for public education? Didn’t he create a separate space for teachers?
I don’t know how they should be treated–what we’re doing clearly isn’t working–but I’m not sure the work of teachers can be monetized in the same way as that of writers and artists…. At least not in today’s world.
As I recall, back in Smith’s day, private tutors did hire guys like Smith to teach their kids in the ways I’d guess your nephews are being taught!!! But school was a fairly elite endeavor back in the 1700s, and I think Smith wanted to democratize it more, which meant it had to work differently from private markets….
Am I not remembering that correctly?
I agree, it’s a very interesting question.
It’s not just the government, certainly if any private individual or corporation forced you to work for them, either explicit slavery, or they blackmail you, or you do the work but they pay you less than you were promised, those would be clear-cut cases of exploitation.
I think the stock libertarian response would be: if you agreed of your own free will to take the job of adjunct history professor, at the salary that was offered, and if the university has held up its end of the bargain and paid out the salary and benefits that you freely agreed to, then how are you being exploited? Justice consists in the university fulfilling its end of the bargain, nothing more. If you consent to the terms of the bargain, you aren’t being exploited.
I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with that response, but I put it on the table for discussion.
You said it yourself:
Why are designer jeans so much more expensive than store-brand jeans? The name on the tag.
If the name on the diploma is “Harvard” or “Stanford,” you can charge an outrageous price for it, and find willing buyers. People with money to spend will pay a premium for the reputation and prestige associated with elite universities, and people w/o money will go into debt to compete.
Presumably because the job of administrators includes deciding how much everyone should get paid…
In a for-profit corporation, the shareholders put pressure on the board to control costs in order to maximize shareholder value, and companies that fail to do so eventually get acquired in hostile takeovers. This market pressure is missing in universities, which are nearly all either government or non-profit entities. Indeed, most operate with huge subsidies from either the state or alumni and other donations, plus they can charge enormous tuitions (see my previous comment), and the money has to go somewhere, it’s certainly not being paid out in shareholder dividends, so a big chunk goes to the people in charge i.e. the administration.
Yes, but to do this you have to take a look at the whole model. One way to look at it is to take a look at how much revenue each class you teach produces for the school where you teach. So what is (on the books) charged to the student * the quantity of students in your class.?
Like Seawriter said earlier, you are not working in a free market, you are working for a cartel and the $s they pay you aren’t a patch on the revenue your class brings in.
Were it not for government subsidies, you would actually be paid more.
The truth about unions though is that the one time they are appropriate is when there is exploitation. Most people who believe unions are bad think so because they also believe that there is no longer significant exploitation.
So, if you claim that there is exploitation in adjunct teaching, then arguing for unionization is not wrong. A union could, if done properly, be done in such a way as to avoid the usual problems of the modern union. No political actions, no admin, no negotiating or striking except on approval of a majority, no limits on who gets hired and who doesn’t, no use of force to prevent an organization from hiring non union, etc.
I have argued against the current unions but have also maintained that union are not fundamentally bad. If the schools are exploiting adjuncts, then unionizing temporarily until the issue is addressed might be appropriate.
Or we could just fix the other issues (which are needed anyways) and avoid unions which is probably better :)
How exactly is higher education a cartel? I’m not sure I follow that argument. Is this because accreditation requirements present a barrier to entry?
I’ve never really understood how conservatives can be against unions in principle. On freedom of association grounds, if people want to get together and form a union, they should be allowed to do so.
I’m against any laws that compel people to join a union, so I’m in favor of “right to work” laws, but if people choose to form a union, seems to me they have a right to do so.
Argh. You all are well-meaning, but there are two problems at hand:
One: universities exist to make money, not teach. That includes “public” unis. They all cancel unpopular classes, no matter how “important” they are. Any class that doesn’t attract enough students is toast.
Two: Despite the huge Federal subsidy of education, universities are in huge competition with each other. It’s a closed market, but it’s still a market. No matter how you feel about the OP, she’s still in that market, stratified as it is. If she teaches or TAs a class that isn’t popular enough to have enough demand to move her wage and there are outside sources of supply, then other suppliers are available.
I’m sorry for the OP. But I won’t get sympathy for anyone anywhere complaining that I can’t make enough money to feed my three children an an Informatica consultant because there are 20 million people in India willing to take my job for less.
Make money for whom? Who pockets the profits?
@seawriter called it a cartel, referring to the collusion between colleges to keep costs high. Perhaps a better model is Mercantilism.
Higher education, particularly the NFP section relies on Government subsidy in order to function. Accreditation requirements, while not the beginning are a good place to start. Accreditation requirements are co-opted by the Department of Education as the basic standard in order for a college to receive federal funds (Student loans – almost all are now federal, pell grants, VA benefits, among others) once a college begins receiving these monies they are then obligated to comply with ever increasing DOE mandates (often promulgated via a “Dear Colleague” letter) – compliance comes with a cost. By erecting barriers to entry (compliance, accreditation) the system acts as either (both) mercantilism or cartel.
The two key stakeholders in this transaction are the administrators and the alumni (including prospective alumni). The administrators make fabulous coin today, the profits go to the endowments in order to perpetuate the self-licking ice-cream cone and the alumni derive higher pay due to the prestige factor.
Adjuncts would make better money if they quit adjuncting and began tutoring. Your earnings per student are almost 2 orders of magnitude higher.
That doesn’t explain why adjuncts’ salaries are so low, though. If the colleges are colluding to inflate prices, they should be flush with money. The question at hand is why the adjuncts are cut out of the spoils system.
There are other issues with unions though. Worker strikes with picket lines and such should be illegal as they use force against the employer, preventing them from working or getting customers etc. Also, deals with employers that prevent them from hiring outside the union are also a form of monopoly that is not healthy.