No tears for adjunct fears

The Washington Post ran one of those annual "buyer beware" or "income inequality" pieces on college campuses, just as families are approaching their May 1 deadline for committing to a college for their first-year college offspring.

The pitch to the story is the disparity between tenured and adjunct faculty salaries and the high and increasing number of low-paid adjunct faculty, even on campuses charging annual tuition in excess of $45,000. The Post poses this is both a lack of quality from the college and unfairness to the adjuncts. This is traditional misinformation from the elite media. First, adjuncts were never intended to earn a full-time income from part-time work; the inability of an adjunct to earn a living from adjunct work was never in the cards. Send, even as the number of adjunct faculty increase, that count says little as to how many students they teach, creating a false impression about class coverage. For instance, six adjuncts might teach as many sections of a college course as one full-time, tenure faculty member, translating as half the students get an adjunct and the other half a tenured professor teaching their class. Per the Post, adjuncts outnumber tenure faculty 6 to 1, making them 85% of the faculty, while the better measure is 50% of student credit hours taught.

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Per a colleague: If it's all about quality and the value proposition, then this is stupid:

About 50 percent of GWU’s nearly 2,500 instructors are adjuncts. At AU, 46 percent of instructors are adjuncts, and 44 percent of those at Georgetown are teaching part time.

Of course, it would also be stupid to put someone on the tenure track to teach "Arabic film."

Here is my take on the subject:

Part-time, adjunct employment is the 'negative externality' generated by tenure: Employ cheap, at will employees to generate profit enough to be able to afford unproductive tenured faculty and unnecessary administrators. Just as universities shift prices to maximize enrollment revenue with wealth-transfer financial aid, they do the exact same thing on the cost side, both price discrimination and wage discrimination.

In any case, I'd want to know more about what percent of SCHs are taught by "quality," effective faculty, regardless of the nature of the employee's compensation or appointment. And without a comparison as to the effectiveness of full time, tenured faculty versus part-time, adjunct faculty, this arrangement might be the best way to teach students effectively AND also for students to learn. As a parent and as a dean, I am more concerned about the quality of the classroom experience than by the 'quality' of the tenured professors' research, degrees or Ivy League credentials.

I think that this employment strategy probably enhances the value proposition, as an all-tenured instructional faculty would likely increase tuition by another 20-50%. And I'd have to see the measures of quality. Worse, let's say that tenured Gender Studies professors do a great job in the classroom, only to have their graduates buried in debt and unemployable or serving coffee. Since tenured faculty control the curriculum, majors and degrees, they are their own worst enemy, like asking auto workers what kind of cars they want to make and to then judge the quality of the cars coming off the assembly line themselves. When I did my training for GM back in my Marquette days, the line employees all thought that they produced quality products; the market disagreed vehemently. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize that there is one. Do you think after reading this article, Georgetown apps will decline? Probably not, but the students will clamor for more obscure and irrelevant programs, and assume that the Georgetown diploma will get them a good career. Instead, more likely that the Post's owner will have more of them driving delivery trucks for his firm.