Heeee! Let us add to the list of dubious gratitudes. Here is what a Ph.D. with almost 20 years of university and college teaching and another 20 years of journalism and business experience earns for the task of teaching one three-unit lower-division college course.
Yes. That would be for two weeks of work.
Adjunct faculty are limited to nine credits (“load hours”) a semester, so the District doesn’t have to provide Obamacare. That actually is not as piddling as it looks. Consider: I’m carrying three load hours just now. The District regards one load hour as equivalent to two work hours.
3 load hours x 2 = 6 work hours/week
6 work hours/week x 2 weeks = 12 work hours/pay period
284.50/12 =$23.70/hour
Slightly more than half my editorial rate for academics and nonprofits. Significantly less than half my rate for businesses and professionals.
I suppose one should be grateful for whatever crumbs come one’s way, hm? And if you are a college student’s parent, or if you are a college student yourself, aren’t you grateful that the inflated tuition you’re paying goes to hire faculty whose skills and time are so highly valued?
DD2 was actually going to write a paper about where all the money goes at her institution…but her professor was cool to the idea. It seemed like a pretty cool project to me and one that may have actually benefitted the school. Hmmm….$23.70 an hour for someone with a PHD…aaaand the guy installing my well pump charges $125 an hour from the moment his boots hit my blacktop….Something’s wrong with this picture…..
I don’t know. He’s doing hard physical work that will wear out his body and leave him in pain for the rest of his life, after about the age of 50 or 55. IMHO, he ought to be paid a decent wage.
So should a Ph.D. If I hurt for the rest of my life, it won’t be from standing up in front of a classroom (unless one of the little darlings shoots me). But I should at least earn a living wage in return for trying to make your kids more or less literate.
Actually, let me amend that. Obviously almost $24/hour is a living wage, or it would be if one could earn it 40 hours a week. What I would like to be paid is a professional rate, comparable to what I earn as a writer and editor on the open market: anywhere from $45 to $120 an hour.
This wouldn’t be so bad if you worked only 2 hours per week.
True. But it’s much more complex than that.
Even if you spent only two hours a week on grading, correspondence with e-students, and announcements, all the pre- and post-semester work needs to be factored in. A course prep — especially when you have to use a required course template that runs to 18 or 20 pages(!!) — takes many hours. You not only have to design the syllabus (often redesigning it to fit yet another textbook “edition” whose sole purpose is to force students to spend as many dollars as possible on the texts), you have to move over and update the course in Canvas, Blackboard, or whatever CMS your institution uses, you have to check and double-check due dates and announcement dates, revise assignments across the board to fit any new changes, and adjust assessment criteria to accommodate new needs and difficulties encountered during the prior semester. These tasks can consume many hours. Then you also have to attend unpaid faculty meetings. The last one I went to consumed half a day, not counting the hour-long round-trip commute. Prorate these activities over a semester and, at least for writing-intensive courses, you end up with more than two hours a week, on average.
Oh, and that doesn’t count the phenomenal amount of extra time that must be devoted to a required district-wide assessment project above and beyond the assessment you express in your grades.
You have to go online and fill in this ELABORATE form for every single student in a class, describing his or her performance on what must be at least a dozen parameters according to a simple-minded set of rubrics that our chair does not allow us to use for our courses. It is the stupidest time-suck you ever saw, since your statement on these issues is made when you post semester grades. Oh well.
Whatever. It takes time to do that, too…for which one presumably isn’t paid, unless one is spending almost no time on the course week-to-week.
You’re preachin’ to the choir. I guess I should have mentioned I’m a fellow adjunct. I guess I’m lucky in that I don’t have as many administrative duties.
LOL! Maybe we could get a real-world choir of adjuncts going. Think of the potential for a truly heart-felt repertoire:
“Five Hundred Miles from Home”
“A Man of Constant Troubles”
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen”
“Bound for Glory”
“All You Fascists Bound to Lose”
“This Land” (Guthrie’s original version)
Heeeeeeee!
From my former background as an HR person, a company cannot require you to attend a meeting if they do not pay you WHEN YOU ARE AN HOURLY EMPLOYEE (as you are when you are part time)! It’s different if you are salaried (exempt) which is not your case. As well as the fact that you can submit mileage to travel to a site that is not your normal worksite. Now it’s been a while since I’ve done HR, but you can check federal law in terms of exempt/nonexempt rules. Another exception is if you are classified as an independent contractor. If that is the case, then you would be paying quarterly taxes (no employer withholding) and you would be paying double social security withholding.
That’s interesting, Barb.
Officially we’re carried on the District’s books as employees. They withhold taxes & FICA and threaten to withhold Arizona state pension fund contributions if we exceed 9 credit hours/semester.
Nevertheless, we are de facto contractors: we have no offices, no computers, no phones, no nothin’ except a classroom in which to meet students. If we teach online, as I do, we do not even have that. IMHO that makes us contractors, but that is not how we’re treated.
I do track mileage — which is nil now that I’m teaching 100% online. In the past, when I was teaching f2f my accountant has felt we could declare it for a deduction.