Teaching College Is No Longer a Middle Class Job

An anonymous reader writes When you think of people who teach at a college, you probably imagine moderately affluent professors with nice houses and cars. All that tuition has to go into competitive salaries, right? Unfortunately, it seems being a college instructor is becoming less and less lucrative, even to the point of poverty. From the article: "Most university-level instructors are ... contingent employees, working on a contract basis year to year or semester to semester. Some of these contingent employees are full-time lecturers, and many are adjunct instructors: part-time employees, paid per class, often without health insurance or retirement benefits. This is a relatively new phenomenon: in 1969, 78 percent of professors held tenure-track positions. By 2009 this percentage had shrunk to 33.5." This is detrimental to learning as well. Some adjunct faculty, desperate to keep jobs, rely on easy courses and popularity with students to stay employed. Many others feel obligated to help students beyond the limited office hours they're paid for, essentially working for free in order to get the students the help they need. At a time when tuition prices are rising faster than ever, why are we skimping on the most fundamental aspect of college?

Comments

Any chemistry or physics adjunct could explain

[russotto]

It's because colleges and universities are natural collectors of Element 0 -- Administratium

Re:Administrators

[wisnoskij]

Lets not delude ourselves. People go to college for the drugs, sex, and booze. The piece of paper at the end is incidental.

Re: Administrators

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. So many full time faculty just soak up the union perk of never needing to evolve. Half the IT profs I have come across couldn't cut it in the real world as an entry level programmer or sys admin, yet they are making six figures to regurgitate a book written by someone else.

Re:Administrators

[I'm New Around Here]

Was it ... bagel making? :^)

Re:Administrators

[Hognoxious]

We are already second century Rome here, only we are our own visagoths.

The ancestors of the mastercard race...