Yesterday I came across a shiny new blog over at WordPress.com by a young academic working in the South. She calls it Budget Glamorous: Living Well on Less. (hmmm… What is it about academia that leads its denizens to write personal finance blogs?)
BG, it develops, is presently working in exactly the same position at her university where I started at the Great Desert University: as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer. Apparently the idea is considered relatively innovative in Appalachia, as it was here (more or less) when I hired on at GDU, said idea being that the school would hire a small cadre of moderately paid Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s to teach four-and-four or five-and-five, with no research & publishing expectation.
These jobs are paid one helluva lot better than ordinary adjunct gigs: you get a full year’s contract at pay that would be laughable in the corporate world but that looks pretty darned good to an unemployed wretch fresh out of six years in graduate school. I started at the same figure as the assistant professors in my cohort. By the time I left to found and direct the editorial office on the main campus, I was earning the median annual salary for Arizonans—not very much, but as a lecturer I was paid for only nine months of work. My pay, however, most certainly did not keep up with my cohort’s, by then at the associate level.
GDU already had a full-time non-tenurable position, which they called “instructor” and for which they paid shamefully. These were held mostly by ABDs and by women hangers-on, academic groupies who were having affairs with faculty members or who simply wanted a career on a university campus but for one reason or another could not get a position elsewhere. Once an incumbent finished the Ph.D., he or she was out of a job. So in effect, accepting such a position brought your academic career to a halt, in real terms.
The lecturership, by contrast, may be held indefinitely—one colleague at the West campus retired after about 20 years on the job. It has no future: you are not going to get a promotion, you are never going to get a shot at a tenurable position, and the only raises you will get will be COLAs, except that when times are tough (which is most of the time) there are no COLA increases. GDU lecturers earn about half of what a community college instructor here earns, with a comparable course load and much larger classes. To frost the cookies, you have no job security whatsoever: annoy a dean, and you’re canned with no appeal. The university can refuse to renew your contract and does not have to give a reason. No joke: this happened to a friend who got crosswise with a dean.
The advantages for the university are obvious: One lecturer can be made to teach two or two-and-a-half times the number of lower-division students that can be foisted on a tenure-track faculty member. Accrediting agencies look askance at large numbers of undergraduate courses taught by part-time adjuncts, and so hiring anyone at “full-time” status helps hugely at accreditation time. This handles the scut-work courses at a little higher cost than hiring adjuncts who will work for sweat-shop wages and no benefits, but the crucial importance of accreditation overrides that added cost. A lecturer in a non-tenure-track position can be canned at will, giving administrators a little more control over department, division, and college budgets…and a convenient political shilelagh. This came in handy at GDU when, as the current economic depression reached its height, some 550 employees were laid off, and as the layoffs continue to this day.
The advantage to the budding academic? A job. Even before higher education was pinched by the fall of the Bush economy, graduate schools were turning out many more Ph.D.’s in the humanities than there were jobs to accommodate them. There simply are not enough jobs to go around. A full-time junior-college opening can attract two or three hundred qualified candidates. So, obviously, unless you enjoy waiting tables or cleaning house, it’s much to your benefit to grab whatever academic job you can get, if it pays anything like a living wage.
Like BG, I enjoyed teaching as a full-time nontenurable lecturer, at first. I like students and in time found ways to mitigate the obscene workload. It was great for the first seven years. After that, political infighting led to the disintegration of our department and morale went south, fast. I started looking for other work, in and out of academe; it was three years before I managed to get myself into an administrative position on the Main campus.
The question is, if you know what you’re getting into, can one of these exploitive jobs be made to work to your advantage?
Possibly so.
If I were starting that position now, knowing what I know today, I would use the job as a springboard to another job, and I would work as hard and as fast as I could to find that other job. I would not delay just because I liked the teaching or felt grateful to have broken into academia.
If I wanted to stay in the university environment, I’d be angling for an administrative position, even it it meant getting another degree. The Ph.D. in an academic subject may or may not help you get into administration, but certain vocational doctorates indeed will.
You can get these degrees online or in low-residency programs. At GDU, I watched people move from underpaid nontenurable jobs to administrative positions after obtaining advanced degrees in educational administration or online course design. Most of the coursework was done online. An Ed.D., it develops, is as good as a Ph.D. in the job market—maybe better, if it has something to do with administration or marketing.
Meanwhile, I would apply for every tenure-track position advertised in the Chronicle, no matter where it is. I also would not be too proud to apply in the community colleges, where the same workload is rewarded with better pay and job security.
If I wanted to work in the real world, I would be looking all the time for any job I could convince an employer I could do. And classroom skills translate magnificently to the real world:
• Communications
• Publications
• Management
• Human resources (here, too, think online courses: get an online degree in human resources or management)
• Personnel training
• Online personnel training course design (where do you think they get people to build those see-Dick-run employee tutorials—and those annoying courses for traffic schools?)
• Translator jobs (if you’re fluent in a second language)
• Executive director of nonprofit
• Development officer for nonprofit
Some industries that seem far afield of academia welcome academics as they welcome any smart, self-starting, ambitious individual. A friend of mine went into real estate as she neared the end of the doctoral program. She had a long and lucrative career selling spectacular high-end houses to the ridiculously rich. Another went to work for Peter Bogdanovich and became an executive vice president of Paramount Pictures. Two others went to law school—today one is a prominent immigration lawyer; the other went to work in the AG’s office. Another left a tenured associate professorship in communication to found a very successful personnel training business, for which she simply transferred what she had been teaching in the classroom into the corporate workplace.
And if getting a real-world job meant I had to walk from a nontenurable academic contract in mid-semester, that’s exactly what I’d do. A university feels no loyalty to its NTTT faculty (it’s an institution: it feels nothing), and so there’s no rational or moral reason not to move on when a less exploitive opportunity comes your way.
I assume in the year 2025 it will still be “the bush economy” that failed to you.
@ hopeandchange: Holy mackerel! You think the Dems will be able to hang on until 2025? That scares even moi. 😀
Actually, I was planning on blaming it all on Newt or Mitt.
Well, I have an instructor’s workload with publication requirements…BUT I have it good compared to many, not least because MR FS and I are in the same dept!
More and more departments are relying on PhD-holding instructors (often spouses of tenure-track people) to teach not only lower-, but also mid-level courses.
I think this was a response to the downsizing of graduate programs. Without all those grad students, who would be the slave labor?
As for administration–very lucrative, if you want to do it. Most academics don’t. That’s why the jobs are so well paid!
@ frugalscholar: You both landed tenure-track jobs the same department?!?? That’s awe-inspiring. I only know of one case where that happened, and it happened because one spouse was interim dean when a TT position opened. Otherwise, in my ken the other three couples who share a discipline ended up with one spouse (male, in all three instances) adjunct.
What a terrible situation many academics find themselves in. A society who doesn’t sufficiently value education and learning is a very sad one indeed!
I’m not in academia, but you mentioned one career track that I totally agree with – Executive Director of a non-profit (or not-for-profit, as we call it here in Canada). Non-profits are increasingly HUGE enterprises, now that government has, rightly or wrongly, exited the public service industry en masse. The ED of our local Symphony Orchestra pulls down $100K easy, with nothing more than a regular liberal education, perhaps a diploma in nonprofit admin from a cow college, and a whole bunch of personality and dedication.
I tell all the kiddies I come in contact with, that non-profits are the BEST way to get into a long-term career path. You won’t work for one for ever, and it gives you ample exposure to members of the Board of Directors who are usually well-placed in industry and are ripe to be impressed by your moxie.
My sincere regrets to anyone in academia anywhere; from what I’ve seen it’s no way to treat a human being. Although the summers off (if you get them) may have a certain appeal.
I thought you knew that. It’s a way to get good people…and trap them forever. In any case, we’re both tenured and full prof. Of course, they fired all the French teachers last year–all tenured. Eliminated the major.
@frugalscholar: come to think of it, I do think you mentioned it. So far beyond the confines of the known universe, though, I must have spaced it.
LOL! Back in the day, my undergraduate major was French, and I went into a three-year Ph.D. program at Tucson, hugely funded by NEH and the Ford Foundation (a free ride from senior year all the way to ABD status!). But deciding to get married put the eefus on that: GDU, which was the only game in the Phoenix area, did not offer the doctorate, and its master’s degree in French was a hilarious joke. So I switched to English.
Probably a good move: as long as freshman comp is required, we’ll always have adjunct jobs in rhet-comp.
@ Vinny: Not all nonprofits pay well in this country, but some do. Many hospitals here are run by purported nonnprofits, but they make tons of money and pay their executives accordingly.
One of the jobs I applied for after morale headed for the sub-basement at GDU West was the executive directorship of the Arizona Humanities Council; their ad claimed the starting salary was 90 grand, twice what I was earning at GDU.
Some less altruistic outfits get themselves incorporated as nonprofits but also crank large revenues. I also applied for a job as an educational director at a credit counseling service. Most of these organizations operate as nonprofits, but as we know, some are regarded as a bit shady — though I didn’t know that at the time. The starting salary for that job was in the six figures.
Academic groupies…HAHAHA!
I’ve struggled with whether to pursue even more education at this point. Seems like I have the conversation with myself annually, and an EdD is something I’d struck upon as well. However, it would have to be entirely free to me, as I don’t plan on taking on one more penny of student loan debt! And like you mentioned, I started looking for different work about a year after I landed this job, especially as it became more and more apparent that upper admin were not that interested in what might happen to me next. I’ve managed to break into that illustrious “circle of three” for final interviews, but so far no dice. 🙁
I would love to go back into nonprofit. But here, the directors are also overworked and underpaid. It is Appalachia, after all. 😀 Those big salaried jobs are few and far between. Once you’re in that network, though, it becomes much easier to move around. Since so much of an ED or an Asst. D’s salary comes from fundraising and grant writing, I’d still want to be as close to debt free as I could possibly be. Both to deal with the lower salary and to deal with any possible shut down in services. When the economy tanked here, several long standing nonprofits had to shut their doors and lay off staff. The work is awesome, but it’s just as tenuous as an instructor’s position.
Thank you for the mention. 🙂 This blog is one of my daily reads. I’m scuttling off to grade those orientation courses while I’m handing back portfolios…
@ BG: Do you get a tuition waiver as a bennie? Some schools provide that for employees. That would be a way to get the EdD on the cheap…though given the FT/NTT workload, it would take a while. What the heck, though…what else have you got to do with your spare time? 😉
ONE MORE SET of 102 Fake Finals today, and grades will be DONE for the semester! w00t! Then all I’ll have to do is create new courses for next semester (free of charge to my beloved quasi-employer, of course…).