Colleges, universities rely heavily on ‘adjuncts’
By Roy Ockert Jr.
Dec. 15, 2015
With their costs soaring, U.S. colleges and universities have begun to rely increasingly on part-time faculty members, or adjuncts, to teach many classes. Adjunct compensation generally is so low that unionizing efforts have sprung up on many campuses.
Citing an American Association for University Professors study, the Wall Street Journal reported in February that the percentage of adjuncts or other contingent workers had grown from 43 percent in 1975 to 70 percent in 2011.
The number is misleading, though, because “contingent workers” may include full-time instructors who are not on tenure tracts, i.e., serving in positions that cannot lead to permanent contracts. The AAUP study actually showed the percentage of part-time faculty had grown from 24 percent to 41.
Nevertheless, that’s the fastest growing category of college and university instructors, and the only other category that increased over that period was full-time non-tenure-track faculty. The percentage of graduate student teachers dropped slightly but remained the second highest category, just over 19 percent.
The percentage of full-time tenure-track faculty, the study said, dropped from 16 percent to 8. In theory, at least, tenure-track faculty are the stars of higher education — the best-educated, most-experienced mentors.
Those percentages reflect the number of people employed to teach. Actual teaching production is a more realistic measure.
However, Arkansas Business recently surveyed more than a dozen public colleges and universities in Arkansas to determine the breakdown of full-time and part-time faculty for each, as well as the average compensation of adjuncts.. Amazingly, the state Department of Higher Education doesn’t keep such statistics.
The University of Arkansas System doesn’t keep such statistics for its campuses, but the Arkansas State University System does.
Generally, a full-time faculty “load” is 12 credit hours per regular semester. Most college courses provide three hours of credit, which ordinarily means the class meets for three hours a week over a regular semester. A semester now on most campuses is 14 or 15 weeks long, plus a week for final exams.
The rule of thumb is that a 3-hour college class requires an average of two hours’ preparation time for each hour in the classroom. Therefore, a full-time instructor would spend about 36 hours on preparation and instruction. Add in a few hours of office time and paper grading, and you’ve got a full-time job.
The average faculty salary for Arkansas’ 4-year colleges is about $65,000. The average at 2-year colleges is much less — about $45,000. Of course, that doesn’t include fringe benefits like health insurance, retirement, and Social Security and Medicare match.
Now consider what the college administrators save by hiring an adjunct instead. The Arkansas Business survey showed that 2-year colleges paid between $1,200 and $2,000 per 3-hour course, while the 4-year colleges (except for UA-Fayetteville) paid between $2,000 and $2,500.
At $2,500 per course the cost to cover four classes would be $10,000, and no fringe benefits are paid. Thus, you can see the colleges and universities can cut costs significantly by hiring adjuncts instead of full-time faculty, and they do.
But the Arkansas Business survey shows Arkansas’ 4-year institutions aren’t employing adjuncts at quite the same rates as AAUP shows nationally and in fact that their numbers are flat or declining.
UA-Fayetteville, which pays $3,000 to $5,000 per adjunct course, employs the lowest percentage of adjuncts, 13. UA-Fort Smith has the highest, 39 percent, still short of the national average.
ASU-Jonesboro, in its annual Factbook, breaks down the percentages of semester hour production by faculty rank. Those numbers indicate the university’s reliance on supplemental faculty (including graduate teaching assistants, administrative staff and high school teachers) declined between 2011-15.
Arkansas Business illustrated the economics of using an adjunct to teach a course. At UA-Little Rock an Arkansas resident pays $837 in tuition and fees for that class, which means that a class of 20 students would generate $16,740 in revenue. “If the class is taught by an adjunct, no more than $3,000 of that revenue would be spent on instruction,” the story said.
Two-year colleges in Arkansas generally have more adjuncts than full-time faculty, according to the Arkansas Business survey, and the numbers seem to fluctuate substantially from year to year.
An adjunct can be an excellent teacher. Especially in professional fields such as journalism, law and business, regular faculty may find it difficult to keep up with changing technologies in their field. A local business owner, an attorney or a public official to teach a course focusing on those changes can give students a different perspective.
Years ago, while editor of The Batesville Guard, I taught a journalism class at then-Arkansas College, which had no full-time journalism professor. It helped that I had previous full-time teaching experience and a master’s degree. While I enjoyed that brief return to the classroom, the pay was miserably low, and sometimes leaving the office at a certain time three times a week created a conflict. I turned down future offers because my full-time work came first.
Considering the high cost of attending college today, students can expect the best possible instructors, and those are usually scholars who can focus full-time on teaching.
Roy Ockert is editor emeritus of The Jonesboro Sun. He may be reached by e-mail at royo@suddenlink.net.