Academic Wage Suppression and the Economics of Part Time Work
by EW Wilder
As I found myself thinking the other day that a lot of colleagues have to take day jobs in order to pay for their teaching habits, a very real and seemingly inexplicable phenomenon became clear: at a time when there is more and more demand for experienced, highly-educated post-secondary educators, educational institutions are increasingly reluctant to pay for them. The number of full-time teaching gigs is in serious decline while the openings for adjuncts are spiking.
Just look at the HR page for any community college and you’ll see what I mean: they’re so hard-up for part-timers that they just keep the ads for adjuncts up permanently, and only once in a while does a full-time position even appear. I’m beginning to think that the only reason they keep a few full-timers around is so they can ask people to sit on committees.
The historical argument for why this is happening is that there are simply more people with advanced degrees than there are openings, so the colleges and universities are able to get away with hiring a bunch of semi-qualified part timers to teach the entry-level classes while reserving full time and tenure track positions for the brightest and the best.
The problem is that an advanced degree generally translates into a bundle of debt; Master’s and PhD level people simply can’t afford to take part time gigs, and a lot of part time work won’t leave enough time to gather the necessary publications one needs to vie for the full time jobs. So many people with advanced degrees just find something else to do, something that pays the bills, leaving those paltry part time jobs to the hobbyists who can afford to work them for fun, the moms looking for a few extra dollars now that the kids are in school, and the truly desperate.
Now, this isn’t to say that a bunch of good teaching doesn’t get done; all those demographics, even the desperate, can be outstanding teachers, but they can’t put in the time or afford the effort that a full timer can. And it fails to answer an important economic question.
Free market theory posits that the institutions of higher learning are supposed to open more full time positions when they see their labor force moving on; they have more positions than takers, so they have to “sweeten the pot” by offering more money, benefits, real jobs. They need people—that’s demand—which is supposed to increase the value of the ready supply. But just the opposite has happened: not only has the number of part time college jobs increased, the pay for these positions has remained laughably low and hasn’t noticeably increased. It may be enough for beer money if you happen to have the time, but mostly teaching classes part time is more hassle than it’s worth.
Complicating matters are the pressures of the Great Recession: many of the laid off are heading back to school for retraining. So you’d think that colleges and universities would redouble their efforts to open up more full time positions since more people enrolled also increases demand.
But you’d be wrong.
Granted, part of what’s going on here is also recession and policy driven: budget shortfalls at the state level created by decreasing tax revenue from decreased economic activity and the attempts to stimulate growth through tax breaks has impoverished state institutions. Since these places had been created to help people move into middle class jobs, they were heavily subsidized, and increases in tuition money won’t come close to bridging that gap until it’s truly on par with private colleges. Even if a state school wanted to open up more full time positions, it probably couldn’t.
The effect of this is pernicious on the rest of the market. Since a state school is generally the biggest player in a local higher ed market, its pay scale tends to set the standard, so when the big guys can’t afford to pay people what they’re worth, the privates and for-profits think can get away with the same thing even if, as in the case of places like the University of Phoenix, they could certainly afford to hire as many full timers as they’d like (and which, as near as I can tell, have no full time teaching faculty at all).
But there’s something else going on here, too, something deeply disturbing. The past decade or so has seen colleges and universities reorganizing themselves along the lines of businesses. The reasoning is that education is a service that is paid for; in the same way that a mechanic fixes your brakes, presumably, a college is supposed to fix your mind. And because money flows through the system, and students have a choice about where to go, the analogy seems to hold.
The flaws with this idea I don’t even have time to enumerate, but the effect has been that colleges have added levels of middle management to their structures. When I started in higher education more than 20 years ago, the idea that a college would have a “marketing department” was absurd; it would even have been thought crass. At the time, you would have had a “communications” or “relations” department that took care of everything from the college view book to the alumni newsletter. And IT was generally an offshoot of the computer science department; the institution created efficiencies by turning needed innovations into learning opportunities for students and research opportunities for faculty.
Management culture cannot comprehend this, of course; it doesn’t see learning and teaching as an important part of a business’s function, so when the great reorganization took place, these departments became their own separate entities along with their own separate layers of management and supervision. And a very dangerous idea was brought into the mix, which was this: your labor force is usually your biggest expense, and at a college or a university, most of your workers are people who teach; therefore, if you want to reduce costs, you must eliminate the costs of people who teach. And so one important reason that the market for faculty in higher ed seems to move in a way that contradicts market forces is that the administration wants it that way.
That this has not also severely decreased the pay of those others at colleges—like IT people and marketing people—is also not all that surprising: business people understand what those people do and understand the need for them. They fundamentally don’t understand what faculty members do, their needs for time to plan and study and grade, not to mention publish and do research, and so it’s much easier to take an ax to what seems like a money-losing item on the spreadsheet. To the mind of one steeped in management culture, full time teachers seem a lot like other front-line workers, such as those in retail or factory work: relatively replaceable, hard to identify with, and a major cost that’s probably not worth keeping if you can help it.
The larger lesson here is that certain very dear free market principles simply don’t work in the real world. There are a few highly-sought-after skilled workers, such as petroleum engineers, who industry is willing to pay a lot of money and to whom the concepts of simple labor supply and demand apply. But for most workers, the pay scale is a matter not just of market conditions but of perceived value, of the desires of management, and of the traditional value we place on certain kinds of work. Retail, for example, hasn’t traditionally paid well, so retail managers can, as one recently did on The Diane Rehm Show, complain that they can’t find people who can “present themselves” in a way that comports with retail work, and not even touch on the fact that maybe these are skills for which you have to pay a premium.
In Wichita, my home town, and the ostensible “Air Capital” of the world due to so many aircraft companies having a presence there, experienced aerospace engineers are being laid off at the same time that airplane companies are complaining loudly that they can’t find good people. What they really mean, of course, is they can’t find desperate people who will work for peanuts; they have redefined “good people” as those who are young and inexperienced, the ones who can’t demand a salary that matches their depth of understanding.
If you think that I’m suggesting that airplane companies will settle for cheaper and worse even when the lives of those who fly on planes is at stake, you’re absolutely right. Retailers will settle for worse service rather than pay people with the skills they seek. Colleges and universities will settle for crammed classes, harried teachers, and lower quality instruction rather than pay for full timers. This phenomenon is an offshoot of the supply side gone mad, the failure of current market theory to explain the most basic concept of current business culture: the bottom line beats all.