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Why Competing For Tenure Is Like Trying To Become a Drug Lord
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Scott Jaschik writes in Inside Higher Education that the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders and with income distribution within gangs extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities. According to Alexandre Afonso, academic systems rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of 'outsiders' ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. 'What you have is an increasing number of brilliant PhD graduates arriving every year into the market hoping to secure a permanent position as a professor and enjoying freedom and high salaries, a bit like the rank-and-file drug dealer hoping to become a drug lord,' says Afonso. 'To achieve that, they are ready to forgo the income and security that they could have in other areas of employment by accepting insecure working conditions in the hope of securing jobs that are not expanding at the same rate.' The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on adjunct lecturers who rely on food stamps to make ends meet. Afonso adds that he is not trying to discourage everyone from pursuing Ph.D.s but that prospective graduate students need to go in with a full awareness of the job market."
Except that the UEA climate department was investigated and no problems with their science were found...
and they also get poor wages I worked at a word leading RnD organization as a research assistant and I was at the time paid abotu 1/3 of what a nurse was (the roles had the same educational entrance requirements :-( and this was when nursing was consider a badly underpaid profession.
superwiz was referring to the adjunct professors on food stamps mentioned in the summary, no need to get personal. (Clicking the link, the woman on food stamps is a medieval-history Ph.D, heh)
Otherwise, you'll be working as an adjunct instructor, teaching 3-hour semester courses at $5K to $15K a pop. You'll find plenty of those at every school nowadays.
In what dream world do adjuncts earn $15k per 3-hour course??
Aside from some sort of special appointed lectureship, the highest adjunct pay I've ever heard of was in the $12k range, and that's only at one top-tier university that is a known outlier.
Most top-tier research universities pay $4-8k per course, with actual salary surveys showing an average of $4,750 per course.
And that's top research universities, usually in desirable disciplines like engineering and science.
Smaller schools, rural schools, satellite campuses for state universities, etc.? You're looking at more like $2-5k per course. Community colleges? Often less than $2k. A lot of adjuncts have to cobble together a teaching load of 5-10 courses PER SEMESTER at multiple colleges just to get a salary of $30k or so to live on each year (generally without benefits).
While you have a lot of insightful elements in your post, the magnitude of pay disparity between tenured professors and adjuncts is woefully underestimated. It's not at all unusual for tenured or tenure-track professors to earn over 5 times the salary for teaching the exact same course as an adjunct.
If they actually had adjunct jobs that paid $15k per course, I know loads of people who would immediately jump into such jobs. They could teach 3 courses per semester and earn $90k per year, with absolutely no research expectations? With that sort of pay, I bet you'd see a huge number of regular faculty volunteering to take adjunct jobs.