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

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

42. If she'd majored in accounting or engineering,

assuming she also wanted to teach, she'd probably still be an adjunct and would still be getting the same shitty wages. The issue isn't whether this particular person should have chosen a different career; it's that the universities won't pay decent wages to their highly-educated professional staff, whether they teach English or accounting or physics. The states have cut the budgets of state universities, and at the same time university administrators prefer to spend money on themselves, on fancy buildings and on sports. The point is simply that colleges should be hiring full-time faculty and paying them well, instead of relying on horrendously underpaid part-time instructors, for all courses that don't require the specialized knowledge of someone who works in a particular field (which was the original purpose of having adjunct faculty in the first place).