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
Not necessarily, exclusive deals between two parties are common in business. If a restaurant chain signs an exclusive deal with Coke that includes a clause that they won’t sell any Pepsi products, is that a form of monopoly?
Sometimes it does make sense, but merchandising deals are of limited time. In other words, in your described deal, the contract would likely be some number of years, not indefinite. With a union, it is much harder to break the contract. Switching from coke to pepsi is very easy. So easy, that it basically doesn’t change anything for the seller so it remains competitive. Unions however, hold incredible power over a company since employees are often integral to the operation of the company and the union holds power over employees. Not only are employees much more difficult to change, changing from one union to another would likely be prohibitively expensive to do all at once or over time. This makes unions noncompetitive. Soda on the other hand, remains mostly competitive since changing is simple and would not put a business under if needed to be done.
A better comparison would be to a car dealership that basically has to be almost completely rebuilt from scratch every time a change in product happens. You need new mechanics who know the other manufacture.
Because they are at will contractors (not even employees) regardless of the state.
I’m still puzzled why you’d call this market exploitation or market failure. Why the oversupply of Ph.D.s in the humanities in spite of the costs and rewards? Kids enjoy studying this stuff, often get stipends to do so, but then what do they do, go back and learn programming or law or medicine? No they want to teach and hope to join the guild by getting tenure . It’s like all these kids who spend every waking moment trying to never miss a jump shot. The most they earn is a scholarship, and some of the very best make it to the NBA and some of those make the big bucks. You must discount the present value of an NBA star’s earnings to see if kids are being “exploited” by universities. Discount by the probability of making it to the top. What is the probability of getting tenure at a big named university? Of course tenure doesn’t measure whether one has the academic equivalent of a great jump shot. It’s a closed guild not based on teaching talent. The guild’s goal is always to capture the market and restrict it, and they have but their monopolies are destroying our universities. This is what happens to markets but it isn’t market failure. You have to gather a bunch of the best adjuncts and start your own, preferably on line. The question is how do you get accreditation and give degrees. Guilds again.
Let’s look closer at this one. I’ll work backwards. First, adjunct professors are the most flexible of work forces, so the university offers an adjunct 2 sections based on projected enrollment. The adjunct must then turn down sections at the college where that adjunct must also work… or vice versa… because time to teach the section is committed.
So we get to within a week of the semester starting, and the class has not “made.” One of the sections is canceled with the adjunct having no ability to replace that income. The university pays the adjunct nothing. Nor is the adjunct paid a premium to take this risk. The adjunct who was told he/she would have a section is simply out of work though he/she had accommodated the university in good faith.
Exploitation?
In truth, there’s a LOT to respond to here that was posted after midnight. I’ll give some counters after work.
Right, I agree with this. So I think all the stuff about education being a cartel or a guild etc. may be true but is irrelevant to the question in the OP. The job market for adjuncts is a free market, there are lots of universities and apparently a large supply of people wanting the job, and that has driven the market price down to the current level.
The cartel may explain the inflated salaries of admins and tenured professors, which makes the salary of an adjunct seem unjust by comparison. However if the cartels and all government interference were removed and market forces allowed to operate freely, I suspect the result would be to drive down the salaries of admins and tenured professors while leaving adjunct salaries about where they are now. If anything, competition from new online universities might drive them even lower.
I don’t think you guys quite appreciate how little adjuncts make. It seems to me that the conversation here is that there is an oversupply of adjuncts, so one can pay them next to nothing, and that’s great.
I remember talking once to someone who disliked labor unions but said they were necessary during certain periods in our history because workers were exploited during events like the Dust Bowl.
Recall your John Steinbeck.
Clearly, Okies would work for next to nothing for they had next to nothing, and they were starving. This is not anyone else’s problem.
When the workers would strike, others would break the strike because scabs were paid premium wages. Then the strike would be broken, and the wage would go back down to less than subsistence compensation.
I guess that was fair?
Not meaning to go all Emma Goldman on you, but the only liberty there was to work or to starve. That is not liberty.
Many adjuncts get into similar situations.
The oversupply is partially because of the system. Departments must have students to remain in place. If a professor is being paid more than $200,000 a year because his name attracts kids to study at his institution, well… there must be kids.
These become the TAs. They get “free” tuition for teaching or for doing research or for grading papers. They are tied to their departments and incapable of asking for more because, ultimately, they really can’t leave. This built in labor supply of students are a fixture in graduate schools, and they are the people interacting the most with your kids if the school doesn’t use adjuncts.
So why don’t they go back & learn programming or law or medicine?
Hm. Well. A BA in history takes 4 years to earn. A masters in history takes another three years to earn. Then a doctorate in history takes another–on average–6 years to earn. This is 13 years of higher education. While their path might be bad, it is not reasonable to think these kids would then sign onto more college to do other things.
You might ask, why do kids go to graduate school when the chances are about as good for them to play in the NBA as teach college?
Let’s think about that for a moment.
How many basketball teams are there in the United States?
How many basketball players are there in the United States?
How many are paid to play?
How many kids would play for minimum wage no matter what the franchise made off of them?
How many colleges are there in the United States?
How many people are eligible to teach at those colleges?
How many of those professors make around $10 an hour no matter what students who consume their classes pay?
Look.
I don’t mind that there are some “Kobe Bryant” professors. I will never be on the shortlist for a pulitzer prize. However, there’s a much larger supply of would-be basketball players getting cranked out of high schools across America than there are people who qualify to teach on the university level.
It seems to me the supply/demand ratios for basketball players and college professors are not a very good comparison.
Also, the minimum salary in the NBA is $400,000.
That is true.
I wonder why all businesses don’t make their employees into contractors and thereby cut out any need to supply benefits. I think you could force quite a few salaries down if you changed the model.
That’s all true, but most students don’t go to Harvard or Stanford. Yet the cost of tuition is still rising. I work at one liberal arts university that costs almost as much as Harvard or Stanford to attend. I have on average 20 kids in a class. Each kid is paying around $4,000 for the class I teach. That generates $80,000. I make less than $4,000 for teaching one class, so one student alone pays for me entirely. Now, I have no idea what happens to the $76,000 generated, but it does not seem as if a high percentage is spent on the primary purpose of the school if that primary purpose is instruction.
@lois-lane – Thank you for a great OP.
As a current ABD grinding away on my dissertation (“Anyone want to talk about Revolutionary War American militiamen and their weapons?”) I keep asking myself if I’m just tilting at windmills? If conservatives are not willing to get into the trenches of the culture war by entering Academia, how can we ever expect to defeat the Progressive worldview? But everything you’ve raised in this essay strikes close to home. The invisible hand of the market clearly is not working in this situation; but how is it to be corrected? Start competing colleges and universities?
Let’s think about this politically.
While I think adjuncts are a good example of a group of people who are not compensated commisurate to the work they do, there are other groups in the United States who feel as if they are trapped within the system.
Truly, I think universities will eventually have to pay adjuncts more or otherwise change their employment model because the consumers of higher education will push for such. However, that takes a really long time.
So, if the adjuncts feel exploited in the meantime, and they’re told “you just shouldn’t have gone to school for so long,” how does that play in the public sphere?
Whether right or wrong, if the answer is that there is no exploitation of any group, free marketers will continue to lose ground to politicians who speak in an entirely different language.
I would find that fascinating. You could go all “Brown Bess” at a cocktail party, and I’d just listen.
Right???? And if we don’t take some of the issues that resonate on the left and figure out good answers, we will also lose more ground. I understand how supply and demand factors into this equation to some extent, but I also think conservatives here have an entirely different view of what “exploitation” is than a lot of the world.
It reminds me of the time that my kid sold a stick to another, younger kid. He called it a practice sword or some other such nonsense. He got $20 bucks for that thing he picked up in the yard. I guess it was a fair enough contract–no one was forced to buy anything–but I still thought it was wrong, as did the other kid’s mom when she found out. The business transaction was ultimately changed. (I think we decided our kid could keep $1 per his skill in marketing, and the other kid still kept the stick.)
We are, of course, not children when we go to work in academia. But the university doesn’t play fair.
It should strike close to home if you want to teach. I didn’t even touch another group of professors who are also contingent, albeit with a bit longer contract than an adjunct: the lecturer. ;)
The other thing that strikes me, however, is the fact that most of the people on this thread disagree with you and me about the invisible hand of the market not really working. They think we simply made poor choices if we wanted to make enough money to, you know, eat and pay rent.
Again, I recognize I choose to be an adjunct, and I am in a financial position that makes the money irrelevant. But I am not blind to the very real struggles of my highly educated peers, and I do think there’s something rotten in Denmark.
Well, Osprey has not yet done a Weapon on the Brown Bess. American Revolutionary War rifles either. they have done a Warrior on Patriot Militiamen, and a Combat on Continental vs. Redcoat but not one on Patriot Militiaman vs Redcoat.
Each book is work-for-hire, and pays between $3000 and $6000 (depending on the exchange rate). If you are interested, shoot me a PM and I can make introductions.
Seawriter
A classic characteristic of a cartel is conspiring to lower the price of the labor and materials used to produce the product sold by the cartel as well as conspiring to raise the price of goods sold. The products sold by universities and colleges are education and degrees. (Today a degree is more important than education. The degree is a ticket to a job whether or not you actually learn anything.)
The biggest cost of production in education is the salaries of those teaching classes – because so many instructors are needed. That is why adjuncts are cut out of the spoils. Economies of scale dictate controlling salary costs for instructors.
Tenured professors exist primarily to lure in research grants, not to teach. (They are actually producing a different product, but the research is secondary to the ability to get grants.) You can get big bucks with relatively few professors (who can farm the actual work to starving grad students headed for the adjunct track.
Seawriter
But isn’t that precisely the purpose of the invisible hand?
Prices are a signal and a coordination mechanism. If the price of wheat plummets while the price of barley shoots up, next season farmers will switch from planting wheat to planting barley. This system of coordination is more efficient (and also more compatible with liberty) than the system where the Soviet farm bureau sends out orders to every farmer telling them what crop to grow next year.
In the employment market, students should investigate the salaries they are likely to end up with before they chose a course of study, and especially before they go into debt for expensive graduate degrees. That seems to be the market failure here: why aren’t students responding to price signals when choosing a career?
How is your position different than a farmer who says “I refuse to plant barley, I’d rather grow wheat, I demand the government prop up the price of wheat so that I can keep planting it and make a living!”
How, precisely, are universities conspiring with each other to keep adjunct salaries below market rates? Do you have any evidence of this conspiracy?
A classic cartel consists of a small number of companies, such that the directors can all meet in a room somewhere and hash out agreements over the prices they will set. There are a lot of universities and colleges in the US, with many separate independent boards of trustees. How would you coordinate a conspiracy among all of them? No offense, but this sounds pretty much like a conspiracy theory to me…
That is kind of like saying there are lots of McDonald’s owned by hundreds of different franchisees. In California, you have the University of California system. In Texas, there is the University of Texas System, Texas A&M System and Texas State University System. These are the market makers in each state, and most states have one to three dominant systems which set prices for the rest of the schools in the state. Plus, there are very few accreditation organizations. They really have power to set standards.
There were lots of independent universities and colleges a generation or two ago, but over the last 25 years they have consolidated. And their “independent” boards of trustees have about the same power as a McDonald’s franchise owner.
Question: How many schools or colleges buck the US Government? I can think of one: Hillsdale. I don’t think they rely on cheap adjuncts.
Seawriter
It is also worth pointing out the “cheap adjuncts” setup favors the state governments funding the education system. There are fewer major states than there are OPEC members.
Seawriter
So is McDonald’s a cartel that conspires to keep the price of burger-flipping jobs artificially low? If so, you’ve just justified minimum wage laws as necessary to correct the injustice.
True enough; we seem not to be making our case to our fellow Ricochetti. If the free hand of the market is yet to make the necessary correction, how do we convince younger academics to hang in there long enough to see the correction happens (20, 30 years from now?)
Umm . . . did you miss the part where I said cartels are sponsored by the government? Just to refresh your memory:
In places like North Dakota McDonald’s was paying over $15/hour due to labor shortages. So, no. I did not say McDonald’s a cartel that conspires to keep the price of burger-flipping jobs artificially low.
Seawriter
The cartel is also perpetrating a scam (see Glenn Reynolds’ writing on the higher education bubble.)
When for-profit colleges wanted in on the action the government shut them down.
If anecdotal experience is any indication, they do.* But only until they realize that computer scientists and engineers are well-compensated for a reason, and that an economic calculation (“Engineers make money, so I’ll be an engineer!”) is no substitute for aptitude and affinity.
Another group, I think, reasons differently:
“I could limp through a computer science curriculum (despite having no particular interest in — or talent for — the subject), graduate (barely) with a mediocre GPA, then be trounced in the job market by hordes of machine-minded prodigies who spent their fetal years factoring matrices; or I could study something moderately rigorous, interesting, and possibly lucrative.”
I, for one, let price signals dictate my first choice of major, and my experiment ended in disaster — perhaps a greater disaster than if I’d declared, “Money, schmoney! I’m following my passion!” (Of course, time will tell whether I’ve made simply a mistake, or a terrible mistake.)
* For what it’s worth, I’ve never met an underwater-basket-weaving major, but I’ve encountered plenty of aspiring marketers, engineers, zoologists, doctors, nurses, accountants, and computer scientists. They’re suffering, too.
My position is different because the people paying for the wheat are sitting in my classroom. They don’t understand the product they are buying. They don’t “get” that in this system they are paying for wheat but getting ground sand.
There is a disconnect.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I think that they, the consumers, will eventually push for a better quality education, which means in part better pay for the instructors with whom they interact, OR they will push for a cheaper education, which will devalue the whole thing.
In the meantime, conservatives should figure out how to explain to both the farmer and to me how people who don’t grow the wheat and don’t pay for the wheat are walking away with most of the money from the wheat while the farmer and I are left starving.
If that doesn’t happen, people who feel exploited will not go “thank you.”
I’m surprised it took until page 3 of the comments to get to this. Studying history may be fun but there’s little market for those services. If the OP had a Ph.D. in, say, math or science, the market would have a very different response. I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that science adjunct faculty are better paid than humanities adjuncts. Even if this is not true, science Ph.D.’s have a plethora of alternatives outside the academy. History Ph.D.’s, not so much.
For reference, we were hiring freshly-minted Ph.D.’s in physics at six figures ten years ago. There’s the market talkin’. Here’s a helpful graphic:
We can’t. I am very honest with students. I tell them this is not a viable career as it currently stands unless they are in the top 5-10 programs in their disciplines, in the top 1% of grad students in those programs, connected, able to keep politics hidden, and maybe a Native American like Elizabeth Warren. ;)
I think our fellow Ricochetti are not looking at the implications of this either… the long run that may “correct” the market by pushing many new graduate students out but will also negatively impact education in the meantime.
Society has an interest here that seems to me deeper than whether or not there is an oversupply of a particular commodity, but maybe I am getting too big for my britches…. thinking education matters and whatnot. :D