Higher Ed Demographic Changes: IHE article

[mahagonny]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

Right, we will all be put out to pasture, and it will be as if we were never there at all.  A blemish of bad publicity finally erased. Progress.

[marshwiggle]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

Right, we will all be put out to pasture, and it will be as if we were never there at all.  A blemish of bad publicity finally erased. Progress.

If someone with that kind of stature in an area I teach in was giving a course, I'd sign up for it!

Honestly this is an example of something that decommoditizes adjuncting. Those people can't be replaced teaching those courses. On the other hand if someone is teaching 1 of 8 sections of "Generic Basketweaving for the Masses" which is taught at every institution in the free world, there's not a lot of job security.

If people can find a way to make the courses they teach unique in some way, on the basis of expertise and experience that is specific to them, they'll have a lot more bargaining power and respect if the courses are popular.

[polly_mer]

However, while a great many more quality academics would be employed in quality jobs, some still might not get a quality job.  I'd to see the hard numbers on how many credit hours are taught by adjuncts and how many FT time jobs this would create in [whatever] discipline, just so we could see the numbers (so no one wet hu's knickers on a hypothetical). 

I have to do real writing this morning, but I will give a few links for you.

even though it is several years old at this point: http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf has a comprehensive set of tables along with commentary.

Newer is https://deltacostproject.org/sites/default/files/products/Shifting-Academic-Workforce-November-2016_0.pdf with data and commentary.

Another good data resource with commentary is https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/05/full-time-faculty-adjunctified-recent-data-show-otherwise/ and other posts on the site.

Another recent data source is https://www.tiaainstitute.org/index.php/publication/adjunct-faculty-survey-2018

If you really want to dig into data, then try https://nces.ed.gov/datalab/index.aspx and create your own data sets using faculty characteristics.

You can look up individual institutions at https://www.collegefactual.com > academic life > faculty composition and get an overall picture of how many part-time/full-time faculty are being used.

The short answer to a complicated question is:

* Humanities and English in particular are most of the adjunct positions held and the largest fraction of the courses being taught.  It really is general education, not majors.  Any discussion about consolidating positions has to take into account that changing general education requirements or changing admissions requirements will affect the current demand in ways that will generally eliminate the need for those courses to be taught by anyone.

* Adjunct armies are not equally distributed among institution types.  For example, large research institutions may have non-TT faculty who teach intro classes that can be huge like intro physics/chemistry/biology augmented by the graduate TAs.  Both non-TT full-time faculty and graduate TAs usually count as contingent, but they aren't adjuncts.  This distinction will boost contingent faculty percentage, but aren't the part-time adjuncts that are generally pictured when thinking about consolidating jobs.

* The places with an overwhelmingly adjunct faculty are generally the places with the fewest overall resources and pay their adjuncts the least.  The Vo-Tech school usually isn't in this category.  However, many CCs are and would probably be better off all around if they just closed and sent the students, faculty, and resources elsewhere.

Anyway, do some research, Wahoo, and I'll be eager to see what you find to answer your own question.

[mahagonny]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

Right, we will all be put out to pasture, and it will be as if we were never there at all.  A blemish of bad publicity finally erased. Progress.

If someone with that kind of stature in an area I teach in was giving a course, I'd sign up for it!

Honestly this is an example of something that decommoditizes adjuncting. Those people can't be replaced teaching those courses. On the other hand if someone is teaching 1 of 8 sections of "Generic Basketweaving for the Masses" which is taught at every institution in the free world, there's not a lot of job security.

If people can find a way to make the courses they teach unique in some way, on the basis of expertise and experience that is specific to them, they'll have a lot more bargaining power and respect if the courses are popular.

Sure, but higher ed is the racket to get into. Selling credits is steady income stream.

[Wahoo Redux]

Another good data resource with commentary is https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2017/05/full-time-faculty-adjunctified-recent-data-show-otherwise/ and other posts on the site.

Anyway, do some research, Wahoo, and I'll be eager to see what you find to answer your own question.

I will.  This one caught my eye right away.  I've been saying this for some time now:

Despite the common narrative's intuitive resonance, the instructional workforce of higher education is not being "adjunctified" in any conventional sense. In fact, full-time hiring in U.S. academia has increased every year since the early 1990s. While adjunct hiring rates grew as well for most of this period, they actually peaked in 2011 and have been on the decline ever since.

And:

Six years ago adjuncts reached almost perfect parity with full-time faculty, with about 762,000 professors employed in each type of position according to the Department of Education's IPEDS survey. Recently released preliminary numbers for 2015 reveal that full time faculty positions have surpassed the 800,000 mark. The most recent adjunct numbers dropped to a position just shy of 740,000, meaning the university system has actually shed over 20,000 adjunct positions on net during the same period.

My take on this reversal is that we in the Tower do care, the public cares, and the tide can be turned (no matter what certain posters say). 

In other words, one of my new favorite words:  CONSOLIDATION!!!!

Rock on Academia!!  Survive the Plague. Rebound!!!  Save academia!!!  Viva fulltime Employment!!!

Thanks Polly.

[mamselle]

<<Mamselle wanders in, uncertain whether to say anything or not. Decides to try. De-e-e-pp breath....>>

So, there's something about the math that seems funny....

If I have three pie plates in the refrigerator, one a third-full of lemon meringue, one a fourth-full of cherry crumb, and one a third-full of peach pie (my personal favorites...can't eat apple...) and I need space in the 'fridge, I can put them all together in one plate.

(I'd probably put the peach and cherry into the dish with the lemon, it's so messy to move lemon meringue around...)

So, OK, I'd have just one dish, and it would be full of all three different pies, with a bit of space left over.

But the other two dishes aren't needed anymore. They go to the sink to be washed, and sit in the cupboard until I get a chance to bake more pies (maybe after the COVID infestation resolves, next year sometime, when I can have guests over again.)

The dish that had the lemon pie in it wins: it's still getting used, it now has three different pies sitting in it, and it's replete with significance and the appreciation of those who wanted more space in the fridge, and were tired of shifting all those different dishes about.

But the other two dishes, forlorn and dry in the cupboard, are unused, unwanted, and empty.

And if they ever knew that the lemon pie-dish had schemed to get the pieces of pie they used to hold, just to keep its place in the fridge, by being so messy that it got to take the other pie pieces away, they'd be pretty upset.

And I'd wonder a bit about the human feeling of the lemon pie -dish, that was so sure that putting pie slices together was such a great idea that it never considered (or maybe just didn't care) what that would do to its worthy colleagues, the peach-pie and cherry-pie dishes.

Or that something similar might not happen to it the next time multiple pies were needed and it didn't get to be the dish into which all the remaining pieces of pie were consolidated.

I just don't see where that's being taken into consideration on any--well, let's say, considerate--level.

    <<Mamselle scuttles off to get a teeny-tiny slice of each of those pies before they'reall gone, too...>>

M.

[Wahoo Redux]

Wait!  Mamselle, come back!  No need to scuttle away!  We are friendly.  Really. 

That is a beautiful little parable (?) about the cost of job consolidation.  It is a conundrum.   

It is also the fault of higher ed for relying for so long on easily disposable employment, and now it looks like many of these people will be disposed of one way or the other.

[secundem_artem]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

New and Improved!!  Now, with extra Nobel Prizes!!

[marshwiggle]

Wait!  Mamselle, come back!  No need to scuttle away!  We are friendly.  Really. 

That is a beautiful little parable (?) about the cost of job consolidation.  It is a conundrum.   

How is it a conundrum? As long as resources aren't *infinite, it will always being a choice between spreading resources equally so that no-one really gets enough, or choosing who gets the resources so that those who get them have enough to benefit. 

*Note: Resources are NEVER infinite.


Unless one believes that academia "owes" employment to everyone who wants it, it's a much easier question about whether offering a smaller number of decent jobs is more reasonable than offering a bunch of inferior ones. There's no shame in picking the first option, and anyone who makes that choice should not be implicitly criticized for somehow failing to help everyone who didn't get those decent jobs.

[dismalist]

Wait!  Mamselle, come back!  No need to scuttle away!  We are friendly.  Really. 

That is a beautiful little parable (?) about the cost of job consolidation.  It is a conundrum.   

... it will always being a choice [about how to allocate resources]. 

Yes, always and everywhere. Question is, who allocates? The higher education czar? Or the multitude of those in, and out of, higher education, signalling their desires to each other?

Don't need czars, except perhaps in the military.

[mahagonny]

Unless one believes that academia "owes" employment to everyone who wants it, it's a much easier question about whether offering a smaller number of decent jobs is more reasonable than offering a bunch of inferior ones. There's no shame in picking the first option, and anyone who makes that choice should not be implicitly criticized for somehow failing to help everyone who didn't get those decent jobs.

What higher education owes everyone is honesty, and that's where it's an abject failure. It claims that academic freedom is one of its tenets or foundations. It's not. It's a job perk given to people who profit from cheap, stifled disposable labor, have a role in running the institutions, the right to speak the truth freely (tenure) which they use to deny complicity. They claim to be in the advising business and then implement jobs that they recommend you quit. Then they arrogantly imagine the public couldn't see through the chicanery.

[spork]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

New and Improved!!  Now, with extra Nobel Prizes!!

Your comment made me laugh. Thank you.

My fundamental point with that link is that you can now get someone like Paul Krugman to supply content that is far cheaper and more convenient to access than the typical college course. And yes, I know it's not credit-bearing, but maybe it should be, since it's more memorable for the typical college student than all of the content in a typical Econ 101 course. In other words, it makes much more sense to deliver standard 101 gen ed requirements this way to the non-majors-who-never-will-be-majors than to force them to sit through two semesters' worth of very expensive courses they have no interest in, can't afford, and don't have the time for. 

[mamselle]

Wait!  Mamselle, come back!  No need to scuttle away!  We are friendly.  Really. 

That is a beautiful little parable (?) about the cost of job consolidation.  It is a conundrum.   

It is also the fault of higher ed for relying for so long on easily disposable employment, and now it looks like many of these people will be disposed of one way or the other.

Thanks.

(I'm gratified no one has mentioned cake as an alternative....)

;--}

M.

[Wahoo Redux]

Wait!  Mamselle, come back!  No need to scuttle away!  We are friendly.  Really. 

That is a beautiful little parable (?) about the cost of job consolidation.  It is a conundrum.   

It is also the fault of higher ed for relying for so long on easily disposable employment, and now it looks like many of these people will be disposed of one way or the other.

Thanks.

(I'm gratified no one has mentioned cake as an alternative....)

;--}

M.

Indeed. Let them eat cake!

[mahagonny]

I give you the adjunct of the future . . . today!

Yup!

New and Improved!!  Now, with extra Nobel Prizes!!

Your comment made me laugh. Thank you.

My fundamental point with that link is that you can now get someone like Paul Krugman to supply content that is far cheaper and more convenient to access than the typical college course. And yes, I know it's not credit-bearing, but maybe it should be, since it's more memorable for the typical college student than all of the content in a typical Econ 101 course. In other words, it makes much more sense to deliver standard 101 gen ed requirements this way to the non-majors-who-never-will-be-majors than to force them to sit through two semesters' worth of very expensive courses they have no interest in, can't afford, and don't have the time for.

I think I get it, but will add: what makes it memorable might be the stature and knowledge of the professor, but it's more likely the self-selection of the student having chosen the instruction without the credit, because he's interested in the knowledge. When our school  first announced everything would be going online, the first student to contact me was one who isn't even enrolled in our department. He's just a science major who found out about me and we were getting together in our spare time. I think you are right, but also, there's no real solution. Selling diplomas always means you get some students who chose you because they need another credit and, particularly these days when so many are employed, don't really have time for the work.