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
I figured that out in high school. I majored in engineering despite a real interest in history. As I told my disappointed guidance counselor (after he said “but you love history”), “I’d rather make history than just write about it, and figure I am best likely to do that in engineering.”
Spent 30 years in the Shuttle Program and I can think of three times in my career as an engineer I literally changed the course of history. Big thrill for a history buff.
As for writing about history? I decided to embrace the power of “and.” I did that, too.
Seawriter
@randyweivoda you hit the nail on the head, it’s a glut of management problem. The beuracracy at some schools is so bloated it’s ridiculous. One example is the dean of diversity and inclusion. A $100 k+ salary is not uncommon for the position. The job is effectively a dean of students just for the minorities, they have virtually no real power. Even if say it was desirable they can’t legally do much about admissions and they work outside of major operations. A minorty PhD with little more than a title and an inflated salary put on display for all to see how diverse we are.
No doubt. But let me be clear. I believe in free markets. I don’t think that there s anything at all wrong with STEM people making more per the current global economy. Fine. But pretty much every single degree requires at least one history course be taken, so there are a lot of history classes still being taught, even if they are surveys.
I mentioned in an earlier comment the number of students in an average class where I adjunct at a liberal arts college. I know what they pay for the class. The amount I am then paid for that class is around 5% of what the university is being paid… less when I have more students because MY pay doesn’t go up just because the roster is longer. (I’m not great in math, being in the humanities, but I think that’s right. ;) )
I don’t know where the 95% goes, but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable demand for history adjuncts to take a little more of that percentage so as to earn a living wage.
And I would contend that the kid sitting in my class and expected to pay $4,000 for those 3 credit hours he’s earning would be annoyed to know that so much of that bill is being generated NOT by people who will help him learn anything–those professors with whom he interacts every day–but by some dude sitting in some office some where he will never visit.
That is my point. It’s not market failure, it’s market capture by the guild on the one hand and it’s supply and demand for everything else.
Lois,
I’ll go out on a limb here and say I think you are making a qualitative argument (what should be) whereas economics concerns itself with quantitative outcomes (what is).
Economics, in it’s purest form, has nothing to say about whether or not the outcomes of market forces are fair or just. It simply makes a set of falsifiable propositions such as, if prices are allowed to float there will be an equilibrium outcome such that the quantity supplied will be equal to the quantity demanded, ie… the market will clear. It is entirely possible that the result of that market clearing equilibrium is that adjuncts become “exploited” by whatever philosophical/ethical norms you happen to be applying.
You would not have this problem is the goverment just got out of higher education.
Let me qualify this with the observation that I acknowledge it’s actually an open question as to how “free” the market for adjunct professors is.
Former Adjunct here.
The community college administrators do not care what is being taught. There is no reward for high quality work, so the logical option was to keep the time to a minimum. Don’t be an evil grader and be nice to your students, and you won’t have a problem getting rehired if there is a need, even if you use almost the exact same test each year.
The problem is that teaching positions are very tightly controlled, and teaching opportunities are highly limited. I think accreditation is part of this issue, but also the K-12 school problems. I live in Chicago, and I have ample chemistry teaching experience. I taught a college course that was basic high school chemistry for several years. However, I would need to go back to school to get my teaching certificate.
It’s all hoops to jump through
I think this is where we are talking past each other. What (or who) determines the “necessary” corrections?
I presume you think the necessary correction is that adjunct salaries should rise. I understand you wish that would happen, but is there an economic argument for why that should happen? What is the “correct” salary for adjunct professors, and who or what should determine that salary?
Stock answer, not convincing without further explanation.
Supply and demand still works. If you are willing to work for 5%, they will pay you 5%. Other comments have already addressed the issues of cartel and guild. The internal politics of the academy are not subject to the same rules as the business world. Furthermore, price signals are broken in higher ed, so it’s not a free market.
Nevertheless, if there were a shortage of adjuncts in history, the pay would be higher. @randyweivoda explained it all in comment #1. His second question is the real puzzlement.
There’s further insight to be gained from the opening of the OP:
Your love of the job causes you to accept lower pay, even to pursue a field where low pay is the norm. There’s such a thing as the disutility of labor; a person’s reluctance to work is overcome by money. Most people would stop working if they didn’t need the money. It is rare to be well-compensated and to enjoy one’s work – rare, not unheard of.
Someone said earlier that when you were an undergrad, you were being taught by TA’s and graduate assistants, regardless of where you went to school. I went to Davidson in the early 70’s. There were no TA’s or graduate assistants because there was no graduate program. All educators were professors. It may have changed since then, but I doubt it. I’d guess there were still no graduate programs.
Yeah, well, I went to a college that was part of a major research university in which the graduate schools, in aggregate, were much bigger than the college. Professors taught all my classes, though there were TAs in science labs. No TAs in social science or humanities.
I understand that low-paid adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants are less likely to deliver a good education, however the cynic in me says that universities can only get away with using low-paid adjuncts because their consumers (students and parents) don’t really care about the quality of their education – they only care about the quality of their credential.
So universities have determined that the best product they can deliver is to get as many high profile professors as they can by paying them well and giving them nice offices, benefits, low-work loads, etc. and then cover the necessary instructor hours with cheap adjuncts and graduate students.
The discussion reminded me of this:
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Speaking as an undergraduate, due to graduate in a month (Lord willing), it feels as though the best solution to this problem is further atomization of education. I have learned far more about biochemistry and multivariable calc from Khan Academy and other services like it than I did from attending my classes and listening to my beleaguered TAs. I suspect that there will come a time when capable and passionate educators will realize that they can reach more people and make more money by teaching a subject online than by becoming an underpaid and overworked adjunct. Universities might then be forced to compete with a more unregulated market that is not as dependent upon administrative staff to keep the wheels turning.
Like you, I had professors for most classes at a Midwest Big-10 school in the early 1970’s. TA’s taught the various labs in Chemistry and Physics, but the main subject was lectured by the professor. Rhetoric 101/102 (similar to English in High School) was my only main subject taught by TA’s. Semester tuition started at $180 for a normal (12 hour) load, and by graduation, it was about double that. It cost over $1,000/year for room and board, but tuition was more than affordable.
Ask me what Duke charges. Go ahead, ask me.
I think you’re right that I’m making one argument connected to something separate from numbers, but I was fine with the whole supply and demand thing until I looked at how the money is being paid out. I think the exploitation thing comes from small groups within the larger group taking way more than they would be able to take if the people actually paying the bill understood what the unequal disbursement of $ was doing to the product they are buying. I think this is an artificial market. I think @seawriter‘s description of “cartel” is a good one.
Suppose tomorrow every university was fully privatized, and all government interference in higher education was removed. I think that this would:
I don’t see why this would raise the salary of adjunct professors. That seems to be the only salary that’s actually set by the market under the current system.
@rebark Your views aren’t too different from Prof. Jordan Peterson. He places all his lectures online and has drawn a great deal of support on Patreon and other sources etc. This form of competition like think tanks might only serve the rockstar professor types though. The draw for students hasn’t been getting an education for a long time, see Albert Nock. Those looking for a degree that offers a bit more than name recognition will probably still need helpful adjuncts and skilled TAs plus a little Khan since profs at certain schools can’t be bothered with anything but research. Nvm the hive mind in the humanities/social sciences.
Lois,
I was a little harsh before. I agree that adjuncts are paid too little for the work that they do. In a “fair” world they would be paid better.
I am a soft-money researcher at a state university. A year ago I taught a graduate level course in Electric Engineering for no pay because it wasn’t worth my time to accept the adjunct money offered. (Particularly since I would have to reduce my FTE on the research side which is about 5X times the adjunct rate).
Unionization might be a solution, but the adjuncts at my university unionized recently and it has made basically no difference in their pay. The (NEA) Union contract has made some adjuncts in the STEM areas actually worst off because it raised the number of sections required to be eligible for benefits.
The largest problem for adjuncts is that the supply is just too great. Set an example for your fellow adjuncts, try negotiating for higher compensation and if you don’t get it, quit.
Also, I agree with an earlier comment that you should try tutoring instead. You might make the same amount of money with less effort.
Sounds like the places that house the greatest critics of the free market are really benefiting from the free market.
Most consumer of education don’t actually want the product. In professional degree programs (STEM, business, law, teaching), the classes are relevant to the job; in liberal arts, they aren’t. But even in a liberal arts degree, most of the classes one takes are irrelevant to one’s major! So why are people borrowing money they don’t have to learn stuff they don’t care about? Because it’s necessary to take unwanted classes to graduate, and in many cases it’s necessary to graduate to get the job. If there were no required history classes, there would be no need for history adjuncts — the tenured history faculty would be more than enough. So were it not for Supreme Court decisions that force employers to use proxies for IQ like college degrees and state boards of education that declare that one can’t be a nurse without foreign language, public speaking, and US history surveys, most adjuncts wouldn’t have the work they do.
Frankly, I really like my adjunct professors. They weren’t newly minted Ph.D.s with no other jobs skills, though; they were masters of their chosen field who loved teaching their profession. I got to learn patent prosecution from a real patent attorney, literature from a published poet, and archaeology from a professor who could pepper his lectures with anecdotes from his own digs. Adjuncting is like burger flipping; it’s not supposed to be a career but a supplement.
You’re right; this is inevitable. The unis are accelerating this trend by raising prices faster than general inflation. It’s really disintermediation since the university structure is the intermediary that will be eliminated. People have been talking about disintermediation of education for a couple of decades. The time is right.
When Khan Academy was relatively new, I watched some of the lectures. The quality was uneven. Since then, Mr. Khan has gotten lots of outside funding so the lectures are probably better. Also, edX is quite good. I took the Hypersonics class a while back just for fun.
There’s definitely been progress. The days of the brick-and-mortar monopoly on higher ed are numbered.
I think that adjuncts should be able to make–if teaching a full load–the same as a secondary teacher of the same subject. That is not a lot, but that is a living wage.
I think this would allow adjuncts to provide a better product for their students, and I think if students actually had any say at all in where their money went, they would prefer a shift away from sending $ to the “diversity dean” and giving it instead to a professor who will not have to cut office hours short and run to her waitressing job after her lectures.
The student would get a better product if the adjuncts were not starving.
I also think an adjunct should be allowed to secure a full load at one college without the college having to then provide healthcare. I’m fine with making that trade-off. Since high schools give benefits, that still keeps my income below a secondary school teacher’s income.
Instead of you hiring two of us adjuncts who then must drive to two institutions each week, keep one of us at each institution with the same number of classes you used to split between us. (That means we’ll look “full time” but we already were.)
Cont…
I am coming late to this discussion, and many excellent points that reflect my own experience (as a five-year adjunct-turned-thirty-year-full-time-faculty) have already been made. I will just offer one, small, practical example of your “underpaid adjuncts needs to get together” call, MarciN. Some community college adjuncts in our local system got together across our five campuses and worked out what amounts to a job-sharing-across-campuses plan. They created several full-time positions (with benefits) that two colleges would fund. Yes, the travel was a bit inconvenient – and schedules are (rarely) ever ideal – but it was full-time employment, with a long-range plan to eventually locate on a single campus.
The most important point here is that the adjuncts took the matter into their own hands and they (not the administrators) created a plan that was fiscally and academically responsible and successful. It is just one small step, but at least it represents moving forward.
My favorite Computer Science professor was a “Senior Lecturer,” which I assume is another name for the same thing, a non-tenure-track position. His classes were very popular, and he’d recently won an award for best teacher voted by the students.
In contrast I had a few tenured professors who I can only assume got their position because of their research, because they were terrible teachers. One would spend 5 minutes writing his lecture notes out on the white board, then read them in a monotone, then erase them, rinse and repeat. I literally fell asleep in that class a few times, the large classroom had dim lighting and very comfy theater-style seats, and if you sat near the back it was a great place for an afternoon nap…
Cont…
Students would also benefit from a more stable workforce. If I can actually afford to teach, even with no benefits, no retirement, and working contract to contract, then I will likely stay longer. There’s research that shows a more stable faculty is helpful for students… especially “at risk” students who attend community colleges.
While we are talking about contracts…
Adjuncts are asked to reserve time that can be canceled up to a week before a term starts. IF a college asks an adjunct to fill a position in this way, there should be a cancelation fee. OR the compensation should be higher to offset those sections that are canceled.
Again… This makes it possible to have a more stable faculty.