By Darren Johnson
Campus News
The typical full-time professor may earn $50,000 to $100,000 a year, give or take, and teach a spring and fall semester of about nine credits each, or 18 credits a year.
At better schools, they may only teach six a semester, at “teaching colleges,” sometimes 12.
A credit refers to a “credit hour,” meaning, for each they will spend that much time in an actual classroom for about 15 weeks. A typical course is three or four credit hours. They also will get a generous benefits package and an office.
They may get a sabbatical, where they don’t have to teach any courses for a semester or two, or they may be “research professors,” and perhaps only have to teach one course a semester. Some professors get a reduced workload if they do some community service, such as advising a club like the school newspaper or direct the school play.
They are not obligated to teach during winter session – the period of time between fall and spring semester when condensed courses are offered for students who need fast credits – nor the very long summer session, which stretches from mid-May to about September.
If they do want to pick up courses during special sessions, they get first dibs over adjuncts and will get paid at the adjunct rate or better.
Adjuncts, the part-timers colleges employ to teach a large portion of courses, earn about $1000 per credit up here in the Northeast and about a third less than that in states with lower costs of living. There are variations on payment tiers, but these ballpark numbers are about right. They also earn no benefits and can be cut without much notice; they usually don’t qualify for unemployment, even – if cut, because they were just pure contract employees.
This is not to disparage the work each side does. To be fair, judging from a purely academic point of view, the full-timers usually are more accomplished than their contingent counterparts – even though, on paper, a credit hour is a credit hour, and the cost to the student is the same.
Surely we see in other fields different tiers. Lawyers from top law schools usually earn more than those from commuter law schools. Doctors, same. “That’s just the way it is,” as the song says.
But, you’d be hard pressed to find a lawyer or a doctor – no matter what their pedigree – whose employer doesn’t give them an office, health benefits, a 401K.
Yet, that’s the fate of the adjunct. If they merely teach what a full-timer does – even at a “teaching college” – they will only earn $24,000 a year at most, with no perks. They could get hit by a bus tomorrow and be SOL, and a new adjunct will instantly take their place.
And most people can’t live off of $24,000 a year. Not adjuncts, who at least have a master’s degree and more than likely student loans to go with that.
I posted in an adjunct Facebook group, asking how many credit hours people were teaching per year. Many reported teaching 40, 50 – even 75 and more – credits a year.
(Some revealed how they do it. For example, one person responded: Someone teaching 10 composition courses a semester can learn to speed read and copy/paste common critiques at the end of the each student essay. Really, that’s unfortunate for all involved. Not truly reading a student’s work devalues that student, in my opinion – but low pay forces some workers to cut corners.)
Many adjuncts are teaching three times as many credits as a full-timer, for less annual pay, no respect and no future.
While colleges are supposed to be a safe haven for progressivism, this two-tiered structure is Adam Smith/Charles Dickens economics from what should be a bygone era.
Darren Johnson runs Campus News, so only had time to teach 16 credit hours as an adjunct instructor this past year (which felt like a lot). Contact him at theadjunct@cccn.us.
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