A Look At Adjunct Professors

There is a commonly repeated phrase that puts American Education into a depressing perspective; “Those who can’t do, teach.” Although this was originally a Woody Allen quote, it has been taken and repeated so many times it is now heard frequently whenever the quality of teaching is brought up. The American Education system was once a model of fine education, ranking first among all industrialized nations.
However, according to some we have been too slow on improving and are now ranked 18th of 36 studied nations. We are left in the dust by nations such as China and South Korea, which paints a very troubling picture for the nation’s future according to economists. But what is the reason? Why isn’t our education system keeping up the global market? Why are our educators figures of ridicule?
Consider the plight of students at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, which is mainly a teaching college. They will pay similar fees, take similar numbers of credits and years to graduate as well as endure two semesters of student teaching in which they may have to travel several hours or relocate to get the credits they need. Once they have graduated, their average salary in Montana will be around $37,000, if they go on to get a doctorate (which takes 5 or 6 years) and teach at a university in Montana, the average starting income would be around $50,000/year. Compare that to the average Montana Tech graduate’s salary of $48,000 for bachelor’s degrees and it just goes up from there. The average Petroleum Engineer’s salary begins at $74,000. For college professors, going from working in industry to an academic career often means taking a substantial cut in pay. So why teach? If an individual is passionate about teaching, they must accept that opportunities for gainful employment may be difficult to come by.
And why should we as students be concerned with instructor’s salaries? The costs of post-secondary education are already so high we can hardly pursue a degree without emerging riddled with debt. To afford tuition, students are already living on macaroni and cheese. From this perspective it seems that increasing instructor’s wages may be out of the question. However, to get the best, we have to pay the best. True, Montana Tech does have some of the very best professors, but many of your courses are not even taught by full-time professors, they are taught by part-time faculty or adjunct professors.
Part time professors are held to a different standard and paid much less than full-time professors. For one thing, no advanced degree is required. Although a master’s may be preferable, bachelor’s degrees are acceptable and at times when there are few applicants to choose from, they may not have majored in or even had focused studies on the subject they teach. Full-time professors must obtain at least a master’s degree and generally a doctorate and original research are required. Part time professors accounted for 22% of faculty members in 1970. Today, they account for 46% nation-wide. The use of part-time professors helps to keep tuition costs down because they are only paid about ¼ as much as full-time professors. They are often not given office space and usually must use their own phones, computers and printers. The problem with this is that they are not paid enough to even amount to minimum wage if you factor in the many hours they work in a semester. If you were to look for a part-time job, you could make more at Wal-Mart or Starbucks and probably have more benefits. These faculty members are overworked and underpaid, often teaching after working a 40-hour work week and grading on the weekends. Many are doing their very best to deliver quality education while having a distinct disadvantage in pay and resources.
The issues that have been troubling Montana Tech with part time professors are a lack of quality control. Some of these part-time professors are wonderful, but if they aren’t, your concern will not be voiced as a student because no one reviews part-time instructor’s course evaluations at the end of the semester. These professors have different standards of education so depending on what professor you take a course from, you could be end up overworked with homework and research papers or be allowed to slack for an entire semester and receive the same grade another student devoted hours of studying to achieve. Problems with hiring full-time faculty and standardizing classes taught by part-time instructors has evolved into a serious issue in the communications department where Writing 101 has seen some of the greatest variance in instructors and course quality.
We’ve all had classes where part-time professors struggle to provide the quality of education they would like to deliver, because they are saddled with obligations at other jobs, time constraints and lack of resources. Often the classes I have taken from part-time faculty involve many cancelled and early-out classes because after a day of work, the last thing an adjunct wants to do is teach a three-hour class. The issues involved in part time faculty are serious and need to be considered by students. In this series on the part-time faculty and their positive and negative effects on education, I will be looking into the challenges that are presented in hiring part-time faculty, the challenges they face in teaching with limited resources, the effects on our education and possible solutions to the problem.