IHE article: Institutional Changes to Support Adjunct Faculty

[polly_mer]

I grant that a 28yo just finishing a humanities or social science PhD may be able to reorient his career path to go outside of academia, especially given access to university career counseling resources, etc.  It is much much harder for a 40 plus one to do so, because, well, most employers hiring for the sorts of jobs that middle ager might well try to seek after, well, ah, err, ahem... Let's just say most forumites, especially long tenured ones and STEMers, vastly overestimate how hirable those people are.  Like it or not.

What I see far too often is people who don't seem to realize that, outside of academia, jobs tend to be advertised to the public only after the jobs cannot be filled through internal promotion and extended professional/personal networks.  Employers don't have to advertise to fill positions where the primary qualification is being a literate person who can pass a background check. Those jobs go to the equivalent of that nice intern who was here last summer, Bob's neighbor's cousin, or Joan's friend from church. 

That's true even for jobs that aren't strictly entry-level, although the equivalent there is more Steve's friend from cooking class or Mary's colleague from the Humane Society volunteer board.  I personally know someone who was appointed by the governor to head the state insurance board overseeing a $100M budget because that person played hockey with someone from the governor's office and had mentioned looking for a better job.  Few qualified people would want this job at the pay offered with the political liabilities, so the facts that this particular person had no insurance background and was then making about $30k/year as a low-level staff member at Super Dinky College were irrelevant.  This person had a graduate degree indicating she was an educated enough person and spoke good enough English to be allowed to speak to the press.

In contrast, employers advertise for mechanical engineers and accountants because those are specific skill sets that likely aren't going to be found by checking everyone's friends, neighbors, and church group.   Even non-profits tend to hire a lot of people at entry-level or just slightly above through their networks of a person who knows a literate person who can probably do the job instead of advertising to the world at large.

Thus, for people without the networks, the best course of action may be to take an entry-level job like fast-food line worker, custodian, front desk at the hotel, or office clerk and work their way up through constructing a network.  One bizarre disconnect I have seen over the years on these fora is the claim that custodians get paid $30k/year with benefits and then refusal to give up on adjuncting for far less money yet more work.  Someone who puts in a couple years as an excellent worker who then applies or is promoted to shift lead, office manager, and then eventually possibly head of facilities. 

A similar progression exists for going from fast-food line worker to shift lead, assistant store manager, store manager, and regional manager and hotel worker through several intermediate steps to regional chain manager.  It's true that someone will not be hired from no experience to store manager, but it's entirely possible to go from line worker to assistant store manager in a few years.

The question of how difficult being hired into non-academic positions is often depends on the individual opportunity cost of repeatedly taking low-level jobs to pay the bills today without making the longer-term investment to climb any job ladder or to do enough volunteer/community activities to have a wide-enough network that when one of the unadvertised, flexible background jobs becomes available, a relevant person says, I know just the person for that job.  Yes, getting a foot in the door is harder than one might like; however, that means people need to be looking for doors and readying their foot instead of wasting years on paths that go nowhere.

Sometimes, one must also move.  Living in a place where tons of people are acting as interchangeable warm bodies in the gig economy is a different situation than the places that have few or no college educated people who can pass a drug test as well as the background check.  For example, I live in a state where the qualification to be a substitute teacher is a GED and the ability to pass a TB test.  I work at an employer known for having a lot of STEM PhDs, but 75% of our workforce is in some other category.  We have local people who start as contract custodians to get into the system and then apply to better paying, cushier office jobs once people know them as good workers.  My employer has trouble keeping administrative assistants because the good ones move after a few years of building their networks into other positions that don't require a STEM PhD and the bad ones are fired. 

Getting a good job outside of academia isn't an overnight task, but people who refuse to believe that one will start at the bottom and need to work up or have a very good network are going to have an even tougher path to getting that good job.

[Hibush]

Polly's head of the insurance board story is something of a unicorn, of course. But In that general line of work one might go for an entry-level position of something like media-relations assistant at $50k, and then develop a network that leads over several years to a position in the low six figures based on excellent communication skills, insight into the human creature and some critical thinking. (I just checked Glassdoor to see what the likely numbers were.)

Entering at that level seems more likely for academics than line cook or custodian.

[polly_mer]

But In that general line of work one might go for an entry-level position of something like media-relations assistant at $50k, and then develop a network that leads over several years to a position in the low six figures based on excellent communication skills, insight into the human creature and some critical thinking. (I just checked Glassdoor to see what the likely numbers were.)

Entering at that level seems more likely for academics than line cook or custodian.

It depends on what one has been doing, what one is willing to do, and what is available where one currently lives.  Yes, people in large cities if they work their networks can get more office-type jobs than I described.  $50k sounds like a lot to start for someone who has zero experience and is drawing on being college-educated and willing to learn; $35k is more like what I've seen people start.  The trope for years was something like "you start at the same low pay as someone right out of college, but with a graduate degree and a good extra decade of life experience, one moves up faster with additional raises and promotions than the fresh college graduate." 


I think of other options mostly because I have spent the past 10 years in rural places where bright, motivated people who can do paperwork do start as line cook or custodian and then fairly quickly (3 or fewer years) become management in those areas.  I remember one person who was working her way through college in fast food.  Upon graduation, she turned down all the entry-level career-focused-degree-required jobs to which she applied when she realized she was already making more than that as an assistant manager in a fast-food franchise and would get better raises and promotions staying in fast food for the next few years.

The one insurance person is indeed a unicorn, but I've also been astounded by how many people get offered nice enough office jobs by virtue of who they know (e.g., other volunteer at the library, acquaintance from coaching kids' teams) where no job ad is ever circulated.  As one of my managers put it to me, the person who is known in the community as being able to successfully wrangle volunteers will likely be hired for similar paid positions because those are damn handy skills.  Again, taking that job at $35k-40k to get a toe in the door and then network to the next level is a reasonable strategy, even in the hinterlands where $50k is considered huge money.

Kaysixteen stated that we forumites vastly underestimate the employability of many people with graduate degrees; I will continue to counter with the opportunity cost in following paths that cannot possibly lead to better employability outside of academia.  We haven't even touched on getting a certificate or serving an apprenticeship in something that's mostly mental effort takes less than a year to learn and yet is more likely to result in a job offer. 

[Hibush]

I was thinking principally entry points for those who are adjuncting now.

There will be a lot of variation among people who are stuck in the adjunct situation, and some may indeed be unemployable elsewhere because they have been all along.

Some PhDs will find employment difficult if they went to graduate school because they are temperamentally unemployable in conventional work settings, and continuing in school was the easy way. They may end up in the familiar environment by teaching as an adjunct. I don't think that is a very big number, but the solution for that group is more difficult.

[ciao_yall]

Kaysixteen stated that we forumites vastly underestimate the employability of many people with graduate degrees; I will continue to counter with the opportunity cost in following paths that cannot possibly lead to better employability outside of academia.  We haven't even touched on getting a certificate or serving an apprenticeship in something that's mostly mental effort takes less than a year to learn and yet is more likely to result in a job offer.

Certificates can mean a lot of thing.

There are certificates in high-demand areas like coding, data analytics and so forth. It would be pretty difficult to complete one of those without already having a bachelor's degree because these fields require high literacy levels, plus calculus and statistics. It would help if the student had taken  a lab science to do problem-solving in groups. While "anyone" can go into the certificate, "everyone" is not going to complete it.

Short-term vocational training in highly paid fields like nursing and auto-tech.... Maybe you don't need a bachelor's degree to complete these programs. However, after 5 years, a nurse with a bachelor's degree has a lot more career options after s/he is tired of bedside nursing. S/he could do social work, patient advocacy, clinical research... or go on and teach nursing. Same with the auto-tech who one day gets tired of fixing brakes all day and wants to move up in his career. My stepfather had a PhD in Philosophy and had his own auto repair business in Beverly Hills. The rich ladies loved coming to him because he was so great to talk to.

And then, there is the new college grad who is working in retail or at Starbucks or wherever alongside the high school grads and dropouts. Yes, today, they are all the same. Still, 5 years from now that college grad will probably be in a management or corporate role at the company while the sales reps and baristas are still doing the same thing.

[kaysixteen]

I guess I need to be more direct.  There simply are several reasons why it is very hard for a non STEM PhD to reorient outside of academia after say 35 to 40.  First, age discrimination is real.  Also, overqualification is also a substantial hindrance, as is the related employer fear of not being able to offer a salary the PhD would expect, and the fear he'll depart asap.  Lastly, of course, it is also the case that however impressive we all think that a non STEM PhD is, however much we think of the skills and aptitude he could offer a non academic employer would be, most said employers simply do not think this.  Heck, that is even often the attitude evinced by private k12 school admins.

[Hibush]

...however impressive we all think that a non STEM PhD is, however much we think of the skills and aptitude he could offer a non academic employer would be, most said employers simply do not think this.  Heck, that is even often the attitude evinced by private k12 school admins.

Is this comment referring to experiences applying for teaching positions at private secondary schools? That is a job that is often mentioned as being paid as well as a faculty position at a small college, and one where the teaching skills and subject matter knowledge have direct application.

I'm curious what the school administrator conveyed as valuable or not valuable to them.

[spork]

...however impressive we all think that a non STEM PhD is, however much we think of the skills and aptitude he could offer a non academic employer would be, most said employers simply do not think this.  Heck, that is even often the attitude evinced by private k12 school admins.

Is this comment referring to experiences applying for teaching positions at private secondary schools? That is a job that is often mentioned as being paid as well as a faculty position at a small college, and one where the teaching skills and subject matter knowledge have direct application.

I'm curious what the school administrator conveyed as valuable or not valuable to them.

As a disclaimer: I don't have any private school teaching experience except for teaching one course during a summer session twenty years ago. But I poked around a few of the websites for some of the favorably regarded private high schools schools in the area, and I couldn't find any teachers at those schools with PhDs. They have bachelor's degrees in the fields they teach in, often from prestigious universities, and many have master's degrees in teaching or "educational leadership" (sometimes also from prestigious universities). So based on this small sample, it looks like holding a PhD confers no advantage in getting a job as a teacher at a private high school. Maybe it's even a disadvantage.