Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This is the same old tune of teachers wanting to be portrayed as being underpaid. This was once true in the not too recent past. The thing is that as all memes, it has carried over beyond the time when it became not so true.
I've shared this before: I have a relative who is a 1st grade teacher in a public school. She earns $105k year and has a TA who earns $53k a year. Her class is only 16 children which is nearly $10k per child per year just to pay the two teachers. This is not an isolated gig either, in fact she teaches in what is supposedly one of the more lower middle class areas in the Inland Empire.
When I was a contractor I had dozens of customers who were PSS teachers. NONE of them were even remotely poor or lower middle class. Many lived in million $ homes and all lived in upper middle class areas.
With that said... adjunct professors are basically part time instructors. Depending on where they teach they can be paid per course or a salary. My understanding is they are all mostly part time teachers who earn somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30k a year. There's nothing keeping them from either taking on a tutoring gigs or ?
It's pretty hard to make the case that you are a poor instructor if you're only working 16-24 hours a week.
Maybe they should apply to be an over qualified grade school teacher and pull down a 6 figure income for 8 hours a day 44 weeks a year. If they teach Summer school they get an additional 12-15k.
Also, my relative is retiring with 80% of her full income. <<<isn't public work great?
As for finding other jobs, well what job can they do? Most every job requires them to start from scratch and the lure of a teaching gig (their passion) often times are too tempting to pass up, low pay or not. There are musicians, actors, writers, who makes little money but keep doing what they are doing because that's their passion. I put these adjunct professors in the same group.
Same thing everyone does when they need to supplement their income: whatever pays the bills. My father was an adjunct for 20 years without ever making tenure, and worked as a diesel mechanic. He hated turning wrenches and getting grease under his nails, but part of being an adult is working and earning enough income to take care of your responsibilities. That may take more than one income stream, PhD or not.
Do a search for adjunct professor on youtube to get more videos like that.
I've been watching those video documentaries on adjunct professors who live in poverty because they get paid less than custodians. Worse, they do not have any benefits or job security.
So, apparently, a phd does not necessarily get a person the high pay and job security like what we have all been told.
While I was watching these videos, here are the thoughts that came up in my head.
My full time job is an engineering manager. My husband just graduated college and started working for a temp agency at $12/hr while he looks for a full time job that utilizes his degree with good pay. In the mean time, we own a business flipping houses. Instead of hiring contractors to do the work, we do ALL the work ourselves, including plumbing, electrical, etc. Because we are using sweat equity to flip the houses, the profits we make from flipping houses are considerably higher than normal flippers per house. We are saving every penny we get from these houses to expand our real estates business in the long run.
In other words, aside from our full time jobs, we also do other things to better our financial future.
Aren't phd people suppose to be smarter than the rest of us? If they can't find a tenure position, why not attack their financial situation from multiple fronts? A lot of these adjunct professors say teaching is their passion. Well, ok, find something that is profitable and do that in addition to teaching. My husband and I both work full time and we also flip houses in addition to our full time jobs. Trust me, when you have the will you will find the time.
If these adjunct professors can't make ends meet at the end of the day, why not be creative and do other things to subsidize their passion? Complaining about it does absolutely nothing to better their situation. In fact, that's what low skilled minimum wage workers do, complain about it instead of actually doing something to better their situation.
All PhDs do not become professors. My brother has one and does very well.
Take a ride through some upscale neighborhoods in the suburbs around Boston. You'll find a lot of PhDs making high incomes. Higher education is not for everyone, but the facts are that there is a correlation between education and income.
"...But it pales compared to the gap between the wages of a family of two college graduates and a family of high school graduates. Between 1979 and 2012, that gap grew by some $30,000, after inflation..."
Adjunct professors, per the first video, make $2-3k per class. A "class" on average is 2.5 hours per week for 15 weeks, or 37.5 total hours. Paper grading time is always exaggerated like they do it every day for 19 hours, but having done TA grunt work grading for Chemistry, Physics, CS and Math, it's not as bad as reported and almost always done during office hours, which most professors give 3-6 hours per week regardless of their number of classes. So lets's say they give a further 4.5 hours per week to office hours and make $2500 per class and teach two 3 credit classes.
5 classroom hours and 4.5 office hours per week, rounded to 10 hours for easy math, times 15 weeks = 150 total hours worked for $5000 pay, or $33/hour for part time work. That's $67k salary if it is adjusted to the 40 hour work week, which given how easy teaching the standard undergrad 100-200 level class is, is pretty good freaking cash, all things considered.
Sorry, I've done adjunct teaching, and it's so easy it's like stealing money.
Adjunct professors, per the first video, make $2-3k per class. A "class" on average is 2.5 hours per week for 15 weeks, or 37.5 total hours. Paper grading time is always exaggerated like they do it every day for 19 hours, but having done TA grunt work grading for Chemistry, Physics, CS and Math, it's not as bad as reported and almost always done during office hours, which most professors give 3-6 hours per week regardless of their number of classes. So lets's say they give a further 4.5 hours per week to office hours and make $2500 per class and teach two 3 credit classes.
5 classroom hours and 4.5 office hours per week, rounded to 10 hours for easy math, times 15 weeks = 150 total hours worked for $5000 pay, or $33/hour for part time work. That's $67k salary if it is adjusted to the 40 hour work week, which given how easy teaching the standard undergrad 100-200 level class is, is pretty good freaking cash, all things considered.
Sorry, I've done adjunct teaching, and it's so easy it's like stealing money.
If teaching is such easy money, why do so many school districts struggle with not enough teachers?
This is the same old tune of teachers wanting to be portrayed as being underpaid. This was once true in the not too recent past. The thing is that as all memes, it has carried over beyond the time when it became not so true.
I've shared this before: I have a relative who is a 1st grade teacher in a public school. She earns $105k year and has a TA who earns $53k a year. Her class is only 16 children which is nearly $10k per child per year just to pay the two teachers. This is not an isolated gig either, in fact she teaches in what is supposedly one of the more lower middle class areas in the Inland Empire.
When I was a contractor I had dozens of customers who were PSS teachers. NONE of them were even remotely poor or lower middle class. Many lived in million $ homes and all lived in upper middle class areas.
With that said... adjunct professors are basically part time instructors. Depending on where they teach they can be paid per course or a salary. My understanding is they are all mostly part time teachers who earn somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30k a year. There's nothing keeping them from either taking on a tutoring gigs or ?
It's pretty hard to make the case that you are a poor instructor if you're only working 16-24 hours a week.
Maybe they should apply to be an over qualified grade school teacher and pull down a 6 figure income for 8 hours a day 44 weeks a year. If they teach Summer school they get an additional 12-15k.
Also, my relative is retiring with 80% of her full income. <<<isn't public work great?
It depends on where. There was a brouhaha going on in WVa a couple weeks ago. Something about the pay scale.
My friend teaches AP math. She had aa masters and 30 years. The most she can make is 65K a year.
Tell me where an elementary teacher can pull down 105 a year so i can send my grandson there.
Status:
"Let this year be over..."
(set 25 days ago)
Location: Where my bills arrive
19,219 posts, read 17,102,322 times
Reputation: 15538
All I can say is if the field your working in does not /will not pay what you need to live then you need to find a different job. I can appreciate your passion but that won't pay the bills so they need to take their college education, grow up and get a job that will support them.
Teaching at colleges is much more competitive, from what I've heard.
OK, first issue is forced diversity in hiring. The common requirement of 3.0 GPA disqualifies half of all black applicants and a third of Hispanics. Then comes the Praxis I basic skills test, which blacks are 40% more likely to fail than whites, and Hispanics are 20% more likely, and that same pattern holds for the Praxis II specialty/mastery exam.
But your current teaching force is ~75-80% white and you gotta be diverse, right? So no more white hires please, and now go find the qualified black/Hispanic, preferably female, applicant. Given the higher rates of disqualification on the standards of GPA and skills testing, yes, that is harder to find.
Second issue is the decline in quality of education colleges within the university system, where year after year, the lowest high school GPAs and SAT/ACT scores wind up. SJW indoctrination and a properly aware/awoke/inclusive/blah blah curriculum kills education majors on their Praxis exams same as fubar new age crap kills high schoolers on their SAT/ACT exams. Sounds great around the SJW protest water cooler, but when knowledge gets tested, uh oh...fail.
Third is the bureaucratic madness of the modern school system where both curriculum and discipline is concerned. Inmates run the asylum in too many schools and districts, so the best and brightest that do have the 4.0 GPAs and rocking praxis scores blow off the crappy public school and go to the nicer schools. Check out applications to the inner city school versus some shiny suburban castle of uppity soccer moms. You'll notice a difference in both quality and quantity of applicants. When I got my math undergrad, a bunch of people in my classes were getting math teaching degrees, and when they were close to graduating, they had to put their top three preferred school systems for job searching. All of them chose private/parochial and then the outer suburbs, and not one put the city's public system on their application. Not one person not one choice. When they got their initial destinations, it was done by GPA and Praxis scores. Bets scores got best schools, and so forth down the line.
Now, this is not just teaching. Lots of industries are having increasingly harder times finding properly qualified applicants for all kinds of jobs. Our education system is in decline, and even more than that, our national work ethic and ambition to succeed is in worse decline. Most jobs aren't that hard, they are just time consuming and boring. That's why it's called work and we get paid for doing it. But a lot of folks can't handle that and feel entitled to more fun, more money and less work. It starts in school.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
