The Cogs of Academia
Hello everyone,
As some of you may know, my "day" job(s) consist of being what's called an Adjunct Faculty member at a few different post-secondary institutions. I love being in front of a class and sharing knowledge and information with people. When students have what I call "light-bulb moments" and finally make the connection and understand the material, it's awesome!
Now, adjunct faculty are called a variety of different things by different institutions. Most commonly, they can be thought of as "part-time" faculty. I say "part-time" with quotation marks, because usually the time we spend is much more than would be considered part-time by anyone else. In fact, the only thing part-time about what we do is how much we are paid.
There's a lot of good info out there if you're willing to look for it (one blog I just discovered that's entirely dedicated to this topic is The Homeless Adjunct). I'll be focusing in on my experiences at 3 different post-secondary institutions.
Recently, with the advent of Obamacare (that is, the Affordable Care Act or ACA. I say "Obamacare" which some say disparagingly, but it sounds pretty nice if you remove the negative connotation. Obama cares), many institutions, both in the academic world and elsewhere, have begun restricting people's hours to be under the magickal "30 hour" limit that the federal government is saying marks full-time employment. This has happened to me.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," you might be saying. "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the ACA's definition of full-time in the first place?"
Why, yes, yes it does. In fact, that's primarily why it's being done. A lot of conservative types are crying at the top of their lungs, "See! That's why the ACA's bad news!"
And yet, the idea behind it is one I think people should be able to get behind. "If you work a full-time amount of hours, but are called part-time, you have a right to the same benefits full-time people get."
Still, you might be saying to yourself, "Shouldn't the liberals have realized that the a-hole people in charge of companies would just try to circumvent this definition by cutting hours?"
Well, actually, yes. They did. That's why there is a provision in the ACA that says if an employer cuts a full-time person's hours down to below full-time, they still count as being full-time for 6 months. It's been a few hours since I've read it, but I believe this would even apply to someone that is fired or let go.
So why doesn't this apply to what's been done to me? Because they've done it early, you see. Once the ACA goes into full effect, employers will not be able to do this thing where they drop your hours like this without penalty, but since it hasn't gone into full effect, employers are taking full advantage of dropping hours out the wazoo. They're getting it while the getting is hot. Or at least, before it's made illegal.
Recently Darden (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, etc) has taken a lot of flack for this, and apparently the pushback has been such that they've taken steps to reverse or at least not continue screwing people over. (New people I mean, the people that've already been screwed have well, already been screwed after all).
My personal experience with this is limited to academia, and that's what I'll be talking about for the rest of the post.
In Ohio, Youngstown State University, Stark State College, Kent State University, Lakeland Community College and Baldwin Wallace University have all officially taken measures to limit adjunct faculty to no more than 29 hours per week on average.
Yet, the way they are doing this, ostensibly, is pulling some contrived "work hour equivalency" out of their asses that happens to be just high enough that it will only cause some minor grumbling from people in terms of losing classes and magically makes their 12-month weekly hours average out to ~29.
A couple of points.
The Work Hour Equivalency and the Average WeekYSU's work hour equivalency is that every credit hour is the same as 63 working hours.
I was regularly getting ~15 credit hours every semester (my lowest was 12), so this equated to 63 work hours per credit hour * 15 credit hours / 16 weeks ≈ 59 hours per week.
Well that's not good, that's full-time! So YSU retroactively capped it to 24 credit hours per year.
Yes, I said retroactively. That means I went from teaching 15 credit hours to teaching ≤ 9 credit hours this semester. But I'm "rewarded" by getting an increase to only a 3 hour decrease NEXT semester! Whoo!
Anyway, that comes down to an average of 12 credit hours per semester. Let's do the math again, 63 * 12 / 16 = 47.25 hours per week. Oh, I'm starting to see how that can be part-time. Normal people only work 50 some hours a week, right?
Oh they don't? Then how is that less than 30 hours?
Looking up the Affordable Care Act, we can see that the company is allowed to average the work week over the course of 12 months for current employees. A normal working year is 50 weeks, right? So then if we work over the course of an entire year we would have 63 * 24 / 50 ≈ 30 hours per week.
Crap! That's still full-time. Wait, wait, wait. Who gets time off? 52 week year, duh! 63 * 24 / 52 ≈ 29 hours per week. Phew, I can see now why they say we're part-time. They had me worried!
Yes, that's right. Part-time faculty in the same situation as me at YSU teach enough over the course of the 32 week school year that it averages out to 30 hours a week for a 50 week work year. And that's just since the ACA! When I was making 28-30 credit hours per 32 weeks, I averaged over 36 hours per week for the entire year.
What about the compensation?Yes, what about the compensation? Oh, you mean since I have my Master's Degree (and in fact, each of my positions at all three jobs require an MS for accreditation) and I work in academia, so I must be making some major moolah, right?
It's public info, so I'm not ashamed to share it. YSU pays adjunct faculty with an MS $800 per credit hour, which if we assume the 3-credit hour class "average", that's $2400 per 16-week class. Some icing: the national median was recently shown to be $900 per credit hour or $2700 per class.
Some more icing: YSU is the highest paying post-secondary institution in the area. KSU is close behind with a tiered pay schedule with adjuncts maxing out ~$700/credit.
Last bit of icing: YSU adjuncts haven't had a raise in 22 years. It's been locked at $800 per credit hour since 1991. I was 6 in 1991.
Even before all the ACA business, we couldn't even get summer classes, forcing us to go through some hard times from May to August every year. Why? Because of the faculty union (which adjuncts are not members of...by the way, it's illegal for adjuncts to form unions in Ohio) which won the right to be offered summer classes first, even though they get paid some sort of ridiculous overtime rate to teach summer classes.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that the faculty union has been so successful at YSU, but I don't think it's exactly fair that they can just shit on the adjuncts to make up for the successes of the faculty. It kind of defeats the purpose of a union when a majority of the teachers at the school aren't a member (or allowed to be a member), but why on Earth would they go to bat for us anyway?)
Let's keep this going before we see how some other institutions in the area measure up.
YSU employs 573 part-time faculty members compared to 432 full-time. Part-time faculty members comprise $4.6 million of the budget, while full-time comprise 34.5 million dollars. Now, a lot of the adjuncts are part-time in more than just their pay and only teach a class or two, but if they max out, they can only make $800 * 24 = $19200 per year. Conversely, the average professor makes 34.5 million / 432 ≈ $79,861 per year.
You may be wondering what a full-time course load is for professors as opposed to adjuncts. It's 24 credits per year.
If you're curious about why 24 credits for adjuncts is part-time while 24 credits for professors is full-time, it's because of research and organizing and overseeing courses. That adds an extra 572 hours to their total per year (≈ 18 extra hours per week of the school year). (assuming we're paying them the $80K per year for working 40 hours a week on average over the course of the year).
Again, I'm really not saying professors don't deserve their salaries, but it's hard not to be bitter. I'm a better teacher than a lot of professors and educating students is not trivial and should matter.
A brief aside: there's actually quite a lot of discrimination in academia. When the mandates first came down, I heard the same thing I've always heard from all the professors, "When are you going to get your PhD?" Are you kidding me? How am I supposed to get a PhD? There's no university within 50 minutes of me with a PhD program in math, you're not supposed to have another job if you get an assistantship, and if you don't get an assistantship, then it's going to be absurdly expensive. I have a life that I can't just neglect for 2-4 years.
Back on topic. How many credit hours does 4.6 million dollars get you with adjuncts? 4.6 mil / 800 = 5750 credit hours.
Again, assuming the 3-credit class average, that's about 1916 classes. At the school published average class size of 25 students per class, that's ~47916 students (clearly, this number includes repeats).
Someone told me today that YSU only has 13000 students. If every single YSU student is taking a full-time schedule of 4 3-credit classes, then that would be 52000 students needed to be taught. Looks like the professors will have to cover the ~4000 some students not covered by the adjuncts.
These are clearly estimates, but they do give you an idea of what's going on. You might be saying that it's unlikely faculty teach so many students in a class. You're probably right. I know I usually get the 30-40 student classes. Adjunct faculty are most likely to teach classes that are "low-level" which nearly always have high enrollment and are a pain in the ass to teach (in the sense of grading especially).
One last bit about YSU, you may have wondered what the working wage comes out to. We get paid $800 per credit hour and each credit hour is 63 work hours, so that's $800 / 63 ≈ $12.70 per hour. That sounds great until you recall that it's required that you have a Master's Degree to make that much, there's no room for advancement, no hope of getting a raise based on performance or cost of living and the only benefits are discounted classes and paying into the state employees pension fund.
Now let's shift focus. Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division pays out $1600 per 3 credit class equivalent, which equates to $8.47 per hour.
National College pays out $600-800 per 3 credit class equivalent, which equates to $3.17 - $4.23 per hour.
At all of these jobs:
OK, this has been more than long enough for everyone to get the idea. I've been beyond bothered by all of this for the last 6 months, but really, I should have been questioning how hard I was working all along for the amount of money I was making even before the issues with the ACA came to light.
(One math equation I didn't do for you is the total work hours per week. It's too absurd).
A lot of information contained here. If you're curious where it came from:
As some of you may know, my "day" job(s) consist of being what's called an Adjunct Faculty member at a few different post-secondary institutions. I love being in front of a class and sharing knowledge and information with people. When students have what I call "light-bulb moments" and finally make the connection and understand the material, it's awesome!
Now, adjunct faculty are called a variety of different things by different institutions. Most commonly, they can be thought of as "part-time" faculty. I say "part-time" with quotation marks, because usually the time we spend is much more than would be considered part-time by anyone else. In fact, the only thing part-time about what we do is how much we are paid.
There's a lot of good info out there if you're willing to look for it (one blog I just discovered that's entirely dedicated to this topic is The Homeless Adjunct). I'll be focusing in on my experiences at 3 different post-secondary institutions.
Recently, with the advent of Obamacare (that is, the Affordable Care Act or ACA. I say "Obamacare" which some say disparagingly, but it sounds pretty nice if you remove the negative connotation. Obama cares), many institutions, both in the academic world and elsewhere, have begun restricting people's hours to be under the magickal "30 hour" limit that the federal government is saying marks full-time employment. This has happened to me.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," you might be saying. "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the ACA's definition of full-time in the first place?"
Why, yes, yes it does. In fact, that's primarily why it's being done. A lot of conservative types are crying at the top of their lungs, "See! That's why the ACA's bad news!"
And yet, the idea behind it is one I think people should be able to get behind. "If you work a full-time amount of hours, but are called part-time, you have a right to the same benefits full-time people get."
Still, you might be saying to yourself, "Shouldn't the liberals have realized that the a-hole people in charge of companies would just try to circumvent this definition by cutting hours?"
Well, actually, yes. They did. That's why there is a provision in the ACA that says if an employer cuts a full-time person's hours down to below full-time, they still count as being full-time for 6 months. It's been a few hours since I've read it, but I believe this would even apply to someone that is fired or let go.
So why doesn't this apply to what's been done to me? Because they've done it early, you see. Once the ACA goes into full effect, employers will not be able to do this thing where they drop your hours like this without penalty, but since it hasn't gone into full effect, employers are taking full advantage of dropping hours out the wazoo. They're getting it while the getting is hot. Or at least, before it's made illegal.
Recently Darden (Red Lobster, Olive Garden, etc) has taken a lot of flack for this, and apparently the pushback has been such that they've taken steps to reverse or at least not continue screwing people over. (New people I mean, the people that've already been screwed have well, already been screwed after all).
My personal experience with this is limited to academia, and that's what I'll be talking about for the rest of the post.
In Ohio, Youngstown State University, Stark State College, Kent State University, Lakeland Community College and Baldwin Wallace University have all officially taken measures to limit adjunct faculty to no more than 29 hours per week on average.
Yet, the way they are doing this, ostensibly, is pulling some contrived "work hour equivalency" out of their asses that happens to be just high enough that it will only cause some minor grumbling from people in terms of losing classes and magically makes their 12-month weekly hours average out to ~29.
A couple of points.
The Work Hour Equivalency and the Average WeekYSU's work hour equivalency is that every credit hour is the same as 63 working hours.
I was regularly getting ~15 credit hours every semester (my lowest was 12), so this equated to 63 work hours per credit hour * 15 credit hours / 16 weeks ≈ 59 hours per week.
Well that's not good, that's full-time! So YSU retroactively capped it to 24 credit hours per year.
Yes, I said retroactively. That means I went from teaching 15 credit hours to teaching ≤ 9 credit hours this semester. But I'm "rewarded" by getting an increase to only a 3 hour decrease NEXT semester! Whoo!
Anyway, that comes down to an average of 12 credit hours per semester. Let's do the math again, 63 * 12 / 16 = 47.25 hours per week. Oh, I'm starting to see how that can be part-time. Normal people only work 50 some hours a week, right?
Oh they don't? Then how is that less than 30 hours?
Looking up the Affordable Care Act, we can see that the company is allowed to average the work week over the course of 12 months for current employees. A normal working year is 50 weeks, right? So then if we work over the course of an entire year we would have 63 * 24 / 50 ≈ 30 hours per week.
Crap! That's still full-time. Wait, wait, wait. Who gets time off? 52 week year, duh! 63 * 24 / 52 ≈ 29 hours per week. Phew, I can see now why they say we're part-time. They had me worried!
Yes, that's right. Part-time faculty in the same situation as me at YSU teach enough over the course of the 32 week school year that it averages out to 30 hours a week for a 50 week work year. And that's just since the ACA! When I was making 28-30 credit hours per 32 weeks, I averaged over 36 hours per week for the entire year.
What about the compensation?Yes, what about the compensation? Oh, you mean since I have my Master's Degree (and in fact, each of my positions at all three jobs require an MS for accreditation) and I work in academia, so I must be making some major moolah, right?
It's public info, so I'm not ashamed to share it. YSU pays adjunct faculty with an MS $800 per credit hour, which if we assume the 3-credit hour class "average", that's $2400 per 16-week class. Some icing: the national median was recently shown to be $900 per credit hour or $2700 per class.
Some more icing: YSU is the highest paying post-secondary institution in the area. KSU is close behind with a tiered pay schedule with adjuncts maxing out ~$700/credit.
Last bit of icing: YSU adjuncts haven't had a raise in 22 years. It's been locked at $800 per credit hour since 1991. I was 6 in 1991.
Even before all the ACA business, we couldn't even get summer classes, forcing us to go through some hard times from May to August every year. Why? Because of the faculty union (which adjuncts are not members of...by the way, it's illegal for adjuncts to form unions in Ohio) which won the right to be offered summer classes first, even though they get paid some sort of ridiculous overtime rate to teach summer classes.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that the faculty union has been so successful at YSU, but I don't think it's exactly fair that they can just shit on the adjuncts to make up for the successes of the faculty. It kind of defeats the purpose of a union when a majority of the teachers at the school aren't a member (or allowed to be a member), but why on Earth would they go to bat for us anyway?)
Let's keep this going before we see how some other institutions in the area measure up.
YSU employs 573 part-time faculty members compared to 432 full-time. Part-time faculty members comprise $4.6 million of the budget, while full-time comprise 34.5 million dollars. Now, a lot of the adjuncts are part-time in more than just their pay and only teach a class or two, but if they max out, they can only make $800 * 24 = $19200 per year. Conversely, the average professor makes 34.5 million / 432 ≈ $79,861 per year.
You may be wondering what a full-time course load is for professors as opposed to adjuncts. It's 24 credits per year.
If you're curious about why 24 credits for adjuncts is part-time while 24 credits for professors is full-time, it's because of research and organizing and overseeing courses. That adds an extra 572 hours to their total per year (≈ 18 extra hours per week of the school year). (assuming we're paying them the $80K per year for working 40 hours a week on average over the course of the year).
Again, I'm really not saying professors don't deserve their salaries, but it's hard not to be bitter. I'm a better teacher than a lot of professors and educating students is not trivial and should matter.
A brief aside: there's actually quite a lot of discrimination in academia. When the mandates first came down, I heard the same thing I've always heard from all the professors, "When are you going to get your PhD?" Are you kidding me? How am I supposed to get a PhD? There's no university within 50 minutes of me with a PhD program in math, you're not supposed to have another job if you get an assistantship, and if you don't get an assistantship, then it's going to be absurdly expensive. I have a life that I can't just neglect for 2-4 years.
Back on topic. How many credit hours does 4.6 million dollars get you with adjuncts? 4.6 mil / 800 = 5750 credit hours.
Again, assuming the 3-credit class average, that's about 1916 classes. At the school published average class size of 25 students per class, that's ~47916 students (clearly, this number includes repeats).
Someone told me today that YSU only has 13000 students. If every single YSU student is taking a full-time schedule of 4 3-credit classes, then that would be 52000 students needed to be taught. Looks like the professors will have to cover the ~4000 some students not covered by the adjuncts.
These are clearly estimates, but they do give you an idea of what's going on. You might be saying that it's unlikely faculty teach so many students in a class. You're probably right. I know I usually get the 30-40 student classes. Adjunct faculty are most likely to teach classes that are "low-level" which nearly always have high enrollment and are a pain in the ass to teach (in the sense of grading especially).
One last bit about YSU, you may have wondered what the working wage comes out to. We get paid $800 per credit hour and each credit hour is 63 work hours, so that's $800 / 63 ≈ $12.70 per hour. That sounds great until you recall that it's required that you have a Master's Degree to make that much, there's no room for advancement, no hope of getting a raise based on performance or cost of living and the only benefits are discounted classes and paying into the state employees pension fund.
Now let's shift focus. Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division pays out $1600 per 3 credit class equivalent, which equates to $8.47 per hour.
National College pays out $600-800 per 3 credit class equivalent, which equates to $3.17 - $4.23 per hour.
At all of these jobs:
No hopes of benefits.The slight whiff of a carrot of maybe getting full-time if they ever open up another full-time position again is about the only chance that may someday become available.
No hopes of raises.
No hope period.
OK, this has been more than long enough for everyone to get the idea. I've been beyond bothered by all of this for the last 6 months, but really, I should have been questioning how hard I was working all along for the amount of money I was making even before the issues with the ACA came to light.
(One math equation I didn't do for you is the total work hours per week. It's too absurd).
A lot of information contained here. If you're curious where it came from:
The calculations came from me :)Thanks for reading!
www.thejambar.com/polopoly_fs/1.2801432!/2012Dec6.pdf
The Dec 6 issues of the Jambar, specifically the article titled, "Part-timers' Plight" contained the data on numbers of faculty and the budget.
www.thejambar.com/news/part-time-faculty-raise-concerns-1.2563946#.UVu-nFdknGb
" 'Part-time' Faculty Raise Concerns" included the I-thought-at-the-time-I-first-heard-it apocryphal "no raise since 1991" information.
www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-12-58.pdf
Some nice info on the ACA, specifically how to define the average weekly hours.
http://optfa.com
For the Ohio post-secondary institutions that have adopted 29 hour/week limits.
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/Memo.pdf
The Huffington Post for a copy of the memo all YSU faculty got last year.
And you can find tons of info on how much different institutions pay their adjuncts (including YSU, Art Institute Online and National College) at
http://adjunct.chronicle.com
If you don't like crowdsourced info, here's a more official study with the nationwide average salary per class I quoted above:
www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_release_06_19.pdf
No comments have been added yet.
