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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
Mr. Amy and I have a Great Courses Plus subscription — in the history and literature classes especially, it’s like being back for the best lectures in college. If for an additional modest fee I could take a test and get college credit for the class, I’d probably have my third bachelor’s degree in another year. Heck, I’m going through courses that I *did* take in college that are even more thorough than the ones I paid a tenured professor a thousand bucks for. (State school.)
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/unappreciated
As long as the product sold by the academy is a degree and not an education it will not raise the salary of adjuncts.
If the primary product is an education, adjunct salaries would rise. Why? Because the quality of an education is a function of the instructor. That would push schools to bid up the price of superior teachers, including – or especially – adjuncts. It would be cheaper for a school to attract high quality instructors by doubling the pay (per class) of adjuncts than by adding a full-time educator (with benefits).
At present, and largely due to government intervention in the marketplace, people primarily go to universities and colleges for a degree. (That and four years of partying and sex.) Education is secondary to getting the degree (or maybe even behind the partying and sex).
When I got my MBA back in the late 1980s – early 1990s I was amazed at how few people were studying business administration to learn how to be a manager (my reason for going), or actually learn any business-related skill. They wanted the credential, and the less effort it took the better. I suspect it is worse today.
Seawriter
I just finished a six-week Coursera course on Functional Programming in Scala. The recorded lectures were by Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, and were outstanding. Every week had a homework assignment, that was automatically graded. It was better than some of my college classes (see comment #119).
Of course it’s easier to automate grading a computer science assignment than a history exam, but give A.I. a few more decades…
This brings up an idea I have had for how to reform universities. Basically, it would be more like the British model where the classes are secondary to exams. In this model, students pay their instructors directly for the courses the fees of which are set by the instructor. If the instructor wants to hold class he/she has to advertise in the course catalog and rent a classroom at rates determined by size, hours, and amenities. An instructor can teach whatever they like.
The exams are administered by the colleges for a fee and degrees are awarded based on accumulated exams and work product like senior projects, art projects, etc that are graded by committees.
The equivalent of Tenured Professors would get office and laboratory space, and partial compensation from the university for advising students on projects.
This does raise the question: why don’t you become a high school teacher? Higher income, better benefits, stable employment, in fact after a few years you can’t get fired, right?
Well, if her market is anything like mine, it requires going back to school for teaching certifications and then competing with 100+ applicants for every open position.
One reason why high school teachers may get paid better than college adjuncts is that they have to deal with high school students.
@zinmt
A nice idea in theory, but the people in charge of administering exams and whatnot would be the same registrars and administrators who allocate space in course catalogs and lecture halls for classes currently. I would love nothing more than for classes to be secondary to exams – I would very much like for participation to factor less heavily into the Theater Studies course I am currently taking in order to fulfill my arts requirements for graduation, for example – but there would still be little pressure for the exams themselves to assess useful knowledge and skills.
We almost need employers to start issuing aptitude tests. JP Morgan charges $70 or something to take a test on economic literacy, in the interest of assessing prospective hires, Pfizer administers a standardized battery of biochem tests, and so on. This would extend the med school and grad school model of quality checks for education along the way, while creating a greater pressure for students to learn more useful skills. Plus, it would pay heed to the fundamental truth that 70% of training is on the job.
Large corporations used to do this, but then they got sued for “disparate impact discrimination” so they switched to just requiring college degrees for everything.
I’ve finally caught up with reading the whole thread, and I am left thinking some things.
I do not feel that adjuncts are really working in a free market per some reasons that have been listed. However, perhaps this conversation should shift a bit to reforming academia or the actual purpose of offering an education in a country such as ours.
I mean, I am fine with changing our system. I sorta like the idea of kids finishing at 16 and then going to either vocational school or university. Higher education has all kinds of problems.
But what courses are essential for educated people to take?
If we are going to cut subjects like history out from a “core curriculum” and care less about a humanist education, then we have to stop having football coaches teach history in lower grades.
Unless we don’t think history has value in our society… republic in which people vote.
The humanities were intended originally to teach people critical thinking skills… to stop them from falling prey to demagogues and bad arguments… to give citizens an understanding of the world as it was so that they could have some reference points when moving forward.
What is the purpose of education in the United States?
What should it be?
Thanks.
Oh, I agree it is theory. It is a long road from here to there. More likely what we will see first is that free online courses like Khan Academy will supplement the traditional instruction to help students through their classes. Then as the value of a college degree gets sucked away by a glut of too many people wasting their money and time getting degrees and graduate degrees, you will see more industry certifications taking over for traditional degrees, then you might see a model such as mine emerging.
@zinmt
By that logic, shouldn’t the College Board people be sued on similar grounds? As I understand it, SAT scores are partially correlated with race – would this not be sufficient to prove a “disparate impact” argument?
Edit: I’m going to Google. There are probably some suits to that effect in the courts as we speak.
Oh, thank goodness for you. That is so much better articulated than anything I’ve said. You are a billion percent right. (I’m in the humanities. I’m not good in math.)
The problem with this statement is that for the most of our history only a small minority of citizens went to college. I don’t believe that one needs a liberal arts education to be a well-informed citizen.
In Amy’s perfect world, everyone graduates high school at sixteen knowing what is special about the history of the United States and our system of government, how to write a grammatically correct five paragraph theme, how to use algebra and geometry, how to test hypotheses with a scientific experiment, how to speak in public, and how to research topics. From there, they would either go to a university to get a professional degree or a community college to learn a trade. The rare soul who is independently wealthy or has parents who can cater to his whims can get a liberal arts degree.
That list is beyond many college graduates (If they did, my law school wouldn’t have to offer remedial classes in topics like subject-verb agreement!) So long as neither secondary nor tertiary education is capable of this, college’s main use is for signaling employers that this person is at least smart enough to earn the signal.
You do not need one, but it helps. Again this presumes liberal arts teaches critical thinking. It did back in the 1960s. With few exceptions (Hillsdale comes to mind) it no longer does. The ability to tell the difference between gold and dross (which is what critical thinking is) is extremely useful. The most valuable part of my MBA was that it taught how to do research. It helped me both as an engineer and as an author. Most of the folks in my class who were there to get tickets punched slept through that.
One reason STEM (especially engineering) remains valuable is because they still teach a form of critical thinking. Read this, and you will see what I mean.
Seawriter
One needs a liberal arts education, yes. We just used to do that by making high school a liberal arts education. Now all you need is a pulse and the patience for four years of babysitting to get a “high school” diploma.
I don’t actually need money. I do this purely for the love of teaching. However, I am in the minority when I look at other adjuncts. I mean, they may love to teach, too, but they do not have the luxury I have of not paying attention to compensation. I guess I’ve been thinking a bit more about their position and the system in general, which is not great.
Also, I live in a state in which high school history is the least valued subject taught. One is most often required to also coach a sport. This is because people think that history is just about memorizing some dates or putting together a crossword puzzle with the names LINCOLN and EMANCIPATION.
Nothing against coaches but in many school districts they are focused on Friday Night Lights and don’t have the time to care about education. You thereby put such guys in the department you think matters least.
I have no interest in learning how to coach softball to check the high school’s “Title 9” box.
I think that it is very possible for a liberal arts education to create more informed citizens – I think rather highly of this program that I took as a first year here, for instance:
https://focus.duke.edu/clusters-courses/visions-freedom
I had to apply to get into the program – writing a five page essay on how I would set up the government of a new society on the moon, and one of our class projects was to play a game of Diplomacy for a cash prize and bonus points on our final grade, then write an essay on how we applied game theoretic approaches to our playstyle. That, I think, is an example of good liberal arts education that really influenced the way I think about the world.
But it depends very much on what you study, and how you study it. For every class that focuses on Locke or Dante or Nash, there are two other film studies courses that only exist because the university requires two Arts/Literature credits for graduation.
I am a big proponent of getting rid of distribution requirements altogether, because in many cases they subsidize easy and useless courses that would not be there but for people trying to check off their requirements. For instance: EOS 101, the only undergraduate geology course taught here, colloquially known as “Rocks for Jocks”, and everyone’s favorite Natural Sciences credit.
I’ve taught both college and high school. I’ve loved teaching in both environments. A college freshman is one year older than a high school senior. It’s not that big a difference.
Oh! I also teach dual enrolled classes now. This means I have some courses that are taught to high school kids getting college credit. One of the campuses to which I travel is at a high school, actually.
I get paid the same as I would for any other section, though the state picks up the bill for those kids’ tuition.
This is a key point, for all the problems with out higher education system, it’s still in much better shape than our primary school system. That’s a disaster.
By 16, students should have all the bases of humanist education already covered. They did 100 years ago. If public high schools weren’t graduating illiterate students with no knowledge of history or critical thinking skills, we would be less worried about how to correct this with remedial courses at the college level.
As well as give otherwise useless tenured faculty work. My undergrad required a “cluster course,” that is, an interdisciplinary course taught by multiple professors. I paid a thousand bucks to watch movies at the local art house cinema on Tuesdays and listen to three hours of lectures on Thursdays, with two of those professors managing to set new records for boring and trite analysis.
While I mostly like your vision, I do think one problem with our current public school system is that it is overly egalitarian. A few students are not capable of learning what you’ve outlined, a lot more simply are not motivated to do so.
My experience in public high school was that some of my classes were honors or AP classes, the students in them were a self-selected group that were actually motived to learn, and those classes were actually worthwhile and taught me a lot. The rest of my classes were “general” classes (where no honors option was available), and in those classes the teachers were basically baby sitters and no one learned much of anything.
I don’t know what we do with teenagers who refuse to study or learn, but any system that aims to teach them all the things you’ve outlined is doomed to failure. The key is not to let them drag down the motivated students along with them.
I suspect that this is a large part of the problem. There is a proliferation of “diversity-based” courses along with the staff to teach them, and there is an enormous portion of the college bureaucracy that now exists to manage (or exploit) “diversity.” I went online to my daughter’s alma mater (a very small midwestern liberal arts college with a very good reputation) and was amazed to see the number of professors listed for “studies” courses – along with an institutional bureaucratic staff to support them. While adjunct professors may come cheap, institutional bureaucracy does not – it gets the salaries, pensions, healthcare, etc., that adjuncts don’t. Welcome to “progressive” higher education.
Let us not forget that I am a history teacher, Z.
When our republic was established, the founders envisioned an educated elite controlling government, but even our masses were pretty literate. This varied from region to region, but there was a stress on reading so that all could engage with the Bible. Early citizens could quote John Locke. People actually used to talk about things like civic virtue.
The right word here isn’t “college.” It’s “education.”
A big majority of people in the United States don’t go to college now, but people on this website bemoan the fact that a lot of voters aren’t great at reasoning and seem rather ignorant of the present– as well as the past–all the time.
This should answer all your questions. If you needed the money, you’d have made different choices in life.
It’s hard to understand the motivations and the situation of others. It seems like you’re projecting your own motivations and responses onto them. Presumably, your colleagues understand the tradeoffs and have made their choices. It’s often more instructive to look at people’s behavior instead to listening to what they say. I believe economists refer to this as a revealed preference.
I think that we let too many kids into college, too.
That curriculum used to be the requisite for high school; there are very people who are not capable of it.
As for those who aren’t motivated to — kick them out. The point of school is to provide an education for children, not providing free babysitting for parents and keeping down unemployment rates for politicians. Heck, tie graduation to eligibility for welfare and Medicaid, and be amazed at the sudden jump in teachability of the previously unmotivated. Watering down the standards doesn’t get the unmotivated to learn; the laxness just spreads until college graduates with excellent GPAs must be reminded of elementary school grammar.