Analyzing data on adjunct salaries and benefits
In his speech at the University of Buffalo last year, President Obama said, "A higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future." Traditionally, a post-graduate degree has been seen as an even better investment. But for many who get advanced degrees, and then seek to (or are left with no other options but to) use that training to teach in higher education, that investment can begin to resemble a Ponzi scheme. As the House Committee on Education and the Workforce writes in its report this past January, "Having played by the rules and obtained employment in a highly skilled, in-demand field, these workers should be living middle-class lives. But...many often live on the edge of poverty."
This issue is important to the students (and their parents) as well as the instructors; contingent faculty, which includes part-time adjuncts as well as non-tenure-track faculty and graduate student assistants, now account for over three-quarters of the teaching workforce at American colleges and universities. At many schools, there are more adjuncts -- who have less time and resources to work with students -- than there are full-time professors. This, even as tuition and average debt at graduation continue to escalate, raises questions about whether the instructional bang is worth the considerable buck.
But what is the story behind such low pay for people with advanced degrees? The Adjunct Project, now under the auspices of the Chronicle of Higher Education, has been collecting self-reported data on adjunct salaries, benefits, and working conditions. Combining these data with data from the US Department of Education's IPEDS surveys, we can begin to tease out some of the factors underlying significant variation in the adjunct experience. For example, I find that unionized adjuncts make about 9% more than their non-unionized peers, controlling for a number of other characteristics. Compared with adjuncts in the Far West region (such as California, where I live), those in New England make about 13% more, while those in the Southeast make 13% less. Though by far the biggest explanatory variable for adjunct pay is the average pay of full professors at that institution, doubling full professor pay only increases adjunct pay by an average of 45%, indicating that adjuncts are lagging behind the (according to the American Association of University Professors) already-slow growth in salary for full-time instructional staff.
To see the exploratory analysis I have done so far, you can go here or here