This College Professor Has a Master's...And Is Living in Poverty

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

34. I've been working part-time as an adjunct for years now

and I've always regarded it as basically a volunteer position since it doesn't pay much. I've been doing it because I enjoy it, and fortunately I never had to rely on it for necessary income. However, it really is ridiculous that colleges and universities have come to rely so much on adjunct faculty because they are cheap. It used to be that adjunct instructors were people who worked in a particular industry or profession and were hired to teach a few courses that required specialized knowledge that, for example, an English professor might not have. This made sense, and it's how I ended up teaching (in a specialized, industry-related field that related to my "day" job). But now a lot of schools have adjuncts teaching just about everything and paying them crap so they can hire expensive administrators and fund expensive sports programs. And the tuition just keeps going up and up.