Visualizing the Adjunctification of Academia
Part-time, temporary, contingent, on contract, and paid by the course. Enter the adjunct professor. Once reserved for covering the odd gap, or to bring in a practicing expert, adjuncts now dominate many campus faculties.
Naturally, the use of adjuncts varies with the kind of institution —a brick and ivy private college is not like a sprawling commuter school. I was curious about the variations in adjunct prevalence and pay — and whether collective (union) bargaining might matter. I examined these variables by looking at data collected by the College and University Professional Association for HR¹.
Looking across many variables, only two mattered greatly: whether an institution is public or private, and the kind of degree it offers (which has some correlation with its size). There were not enough data to do break-downs by discipline, which I’m sure would matter. This led to the creation of the graphic below:²
(Analyses and basic graphic output were done in R, with the full design executed in Adobe Illustrator; my normal workflow.)
Most obvious, of course, are the disparities in adjunct use. Some are as we’d expect, with over half of faculty members at two-year colleges being part-time. The same is true at private master’s-granting institutions (these are four-year colleges that also grant some advanced degrees). The public universities are the least reliant on adjuncts — but that’s relative, and still near 30%.
I was a little surprised at the range in pay (per credit hour), going from two-year colleges to doctoral-granting universities. But that does mirror general pay differences.
Also surprising is how little collective bargaining appears to matter for pay or adjunct prevalence. We start to see a trend from with more bargaining accompanying higher pay , but associate’s institutions break the pattern — although a union advocate could always argue that pay would be even worse if it weren’t for unions. I have no data to say one way or the other — but unions certainly haven’t converted adjuncts into permanent part-time employees, as many adjuncts would like.
- CUPA-HR 2017 Faculty in Higher Education Salary Survey: http://www.cupahr.org/surveys/fhe4.aspx
- The graphic first appeared here.
