Jun 22, 2015 3 min read

A recent post by an adjunct instructor at several Pittsburgh-area colleges and universities made us sit up and take notice.

She pointed out that a Starbucks outlet was going to be opening soon at one of the campuses where she teaches. They were looking for applicants to work at the new store, and the jobs at Starbucks, the instructor noted, offered better pay per hour than what she was making standing in front of a classroom, and also came with health care coverage – something she has never received as an adjunct instructor.

It was starting to seem that maybe she should apply for one of the Starbucks jobs – introduce her students to American literature in the morning, serve them a pumpkin spice latte in the afternoon.

The travails of this adjunct instructor are hardly unique. Despite the image of academics living genteel lives immersed in cogitation and swathed in the comfortable sinecure of tenure, teaching on a college level has become an increasingly precarious proposition. Colleges and universities continue to relentlessly pump out freshly minted Ph.D’s, even as jobs that offer security and a decent wage wither away.

A recent report by the American Association of University Professors found that 76 percent of the instructors at colleges and universities now are adjuncts.

They make about $2,700 per course, sans benefits. Many are also not compensated for work they do outside the classroom, such as preparing lectures, grading papers or meeting with students. Some are lucky if they make $20,000 per year, which is not enough to pay back student loans and support a family. It’s estimated that 25 percent of adjunct instructors have to rely on some form of public assistance, such as Medicaid, welfare, food stamps or the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Some would counter that it’s a simple matter of supply and demand – there are vastly more Ph.D’s out there than there are tenure-track slots, so these adjunct positions offer fledgling academics a chance to test their mettle and gather experience that maybe, just maybe, could lead to the tenure track.

There’s also the argument that, well, these hapless adjuncts knew what they were getting into when they decided to spend a couple of years churning out a doctoral dissertation on 19th century Chinese ceramics or feminist interpretations of Restoration-era novels.

But adjuncts are the folks who are, by and large, offering instruction to students before they embark on their own careers.

Institutions of higher learning say they have to give adjuncts paltry wages in order to keep instruction costs down. However, too many schools, like the one we cited earlier, are focused on adding extravagant, brick-and-mortar lures to their campuses that they contend will draw “customers,” like coffee shops and fitness centers.

Of course, some larger institutions also pour large amounts of money into their athletic programs, which are not the cash cows they are cracked up to be.

State governments across the country have also slashed and sliced the amount of funding they provide for public colleges and universities over the last couple of decades, leaving students and their families to foot a larger share of the bill.

It’s a matter of priorities. The quality of a student’s education would likely be greatly enhanced if they were receiving it from instructors who were well-compensated and who possess some measure of job security.

Students won’t go out into the world any more wise or capable by having had easier access to pumpkin spice lattes.