Just read in the NYT today that “90 % of the New School’s faculty are part time adjunct professors”. I’m stunned it is this high. Made me wonder if this is common at other places as well. Or is it just more common at large R1s than smaller institutions?
I didn’t know number of adjuncts had anything to do with accreditation. Adjuncts have the same level of education as everyone else?
I’m sorry, you probably don’t want this much detail, but hey, why not? We’re undergoing some accreditation review right now so these details are on my mind.
It depends on a bunch of factors, including the type of university and the size, and sometimes the subjects. My partner’s previous university is a large, public R1 in a major state system; and they required adjuncts to have completed their PhD or are ABD on completion within the next year in her department. So in that case, they do require an equivalent degree, but they don’t require equivalency in the other areas of full time, such as publication and professional recognition.
My current institution is a small/medium regional private school, and our requirements are lower. We require adjuncts to have at a minimum a masters degree in a related field to the program, but it does not have to be a terminal degree. I have an MFA which is a terminal degree, but we can hire somebody with an MA, if they have courses in their masters program that are relevant and/or professional experience in the area.
So we have somewhat lower standards. However: an adjunct with a terminal degree is paid more…
In addition to the points made by the poster below, regional accredition has a standard that includes the ratio of FT faculty to adjuncts in considering stability of the program and faculty governance. It isn’t just about the qualifications of the adjuncts.
How is snhu accredited then? It’s almost all adjuncts
Are they fully online with regional accreditation? It may be possible the ratios are different in that kind of institution.
I did time in administration doing assessment and accreditation at a traditional R1 that had online programs, but was not fully online.
They have an on campus program that is pretty separate from their online program. As far as I know, everyone teaching in their online program is an adjunct. They’re regionally accredited.
They might lose it then 😂
It's not about level of education, it's about investment in the program. Adjuncts tend to be less invested, they come and go, and often (rightfully) prioritize their other job. They don't develop relationships with students or get involved in shared governance. When the majority of faculty are adjuncts, there is no stability for students.
Accreditation pressure would only be relevant in businesses schools, no ?
[Edit: it was just a question. I do not understand where all this rage downvoting comes from.]
Oh no, absolutely not. Every school and department is affected.
Regional accreditation matters for the full school, and various other specialty accreditations matter for those disciplines. My (current) department is accredited with the university, and with a national body and we need to meet the expectations of both. We got a new full time position this past year purely because my department was out of alignment with the regional university accreditors due to our adjunct dependencies.
That makes me wonder how these online digital diploma mills with no full time faculty get accredited but I suppose that’s a post for another day …
I couldn’t tell you. Some of them may NOT be accredited; others may have different accreditation standards or exceptions, or there may be full time instructors in hidden spaces. Hard to know…
Many of those places will have what is known as national accreditation, which has less stringent accreditation standards. If a student wishes to transfer, attend graduate school, or attain licensure in a professional practice, many licensing bodies and traditional regionally accredited institutions will not accept transfer credits or honor degrees from nationally accredited institutions.
I couldn’t tell you. Some of them may NOT be accredited; others may have different accreditation standards or exceptions, or there may be full time instructors in hidden spaces. Hard to know…
Plenty of shady colleges are accredited by equally shady accreditation agencies.
Many of them aren’t
I think there are different ways to crunch the numbers. At made-up school: 3 FT and 30 PT. Is that 30 PT individuals or 30 FT equivalents? If FTE, it might be that the ratios are 3 FT to, say, 9 FTE. It also can be calculated by what % of required courses/not electives are taught be FT . . . Depends on the accreditation and the creativity of the report-writers to an extent.
Yes, all of that’s absolutely true.
the CC I'm at is like 95%
Seriously? One full timer in the dept and everyone else teaching music as adjuncts?
Cc humanities department head here- yeah, pretty much!!! We have 3 separate campuses. There’s one full time music faculty member at our “main” campus- the other 5-6 faculty are all adjunct.
Spanish- all adjuncts, no fully timers ASL- same French- same
Art- 1 full timer, rest adjunct.
Phil- me, one fully timer, rest adjuncts
speech- two full timers, 2 adjuncts.
I know for my sibling dept in Social Sciences, it’s waaaaaaaaay worse. Their entire “department “ is one full timer, the rest (history, Econ, poli sci, soc, anthro, psych) is ALL adjuncts.
This is actually getting to the point of affecting students due to not having available, focused faculty that aren't running from/to a different gig all the time.
Yes, I absolutely agree, 100%.
Furthermore, it limits what kind of advising they get (no one knows music like the music faculty, and the part timers don’t know the system as well as a TT faculty), what courses they can take (how do I know as a PHL faculty member, what classes an ASL student NEEDS), and quality assessement, program growth, and retention.
I bet it's going to cause grade inflation too. Adjuncts are under perverse incentives to get good evals and make the customer happy.
The other thing is colleges often are completely financially dependent on adjuncts, yet they get no respect.
SUNY Potsdam in New York was financially viable due to Masters programs for teachers taught mostly by adjuncts. Grad tuition for the cheapest faculty members.
Except Potsdam has the Crane School of music, music faculty do not want to believe their jobs are dependent on adjuncts. Adjuncts in Education are yucky to them.
So they denied funding to grad programs, and everyone is losing their jobs.
I bet it's going to cause grade inflation too. Adjuncts are under perverse incentives to get good evals and make the customer happy.
I bet it is (not for me though. I failed two seniors and have no regrets)
Where I am, the full-time professors aren't doing more for students than adjuncts.
Its more about the professor's personality than anything else.
Even worse they are wanting EVERYTHING under the sun to be an 8 week course, online. Oh, and they want us to bend over backwards to offer concurrent enrollment courses to the point where, in a meeting with my dept head: "With these concurrent numbers I don't think they realize we are going to run out of reasons to have a campus for college students at all. They literally won't be able to maintain full time status at this rate."
This will, of course, make the adjunctification even worse. A complete lack of foresight. My students I've been teaching are already getting pissed about the empty halls and lack of college experience.
How do you teach music online? I was constantly pushed to teach science labs online.
Not very well. It was a beyond failed experiment
Where I have taught, in STEM it has been an even mix of adjunct and full time, with those adjuncts being pretty fully loaded. That said, adjuncts in my region are unionized and after a time have a certain guaranteed course load, retirement benefits and at some schools health plans. At least at the state funded schools.
Adjunct life varies from almost like 1/2 of a FT TT job to being as replaceable as someone who works at Burger King while making less money on a per week basis.
What makes it worse is I was teaching the only four "core" music courses (Music Theory) alternating two per semester.
At my CA CC in my department we have 3 ft and over 30 pt instructors. So maybe 80-85% adjunct.
I believe Vermont community colleges have no full time faculty at all. Well, one of them doesn't. Do any in VT have full time, never mind tenure lines? https://docs.ccv.edu/CCVPolicyFiles/Faculty_Hiring_Criteria_and_Conditions_of_Employment_CCV_Policy.pdf
Unless something has changed, I’m pretty sure CCV is the only CC in VT. Wouldn’t surprise me if they’re all adjuncts. Higher Ed outside UVM seems to be in absolute crisis mode. I suspect in large part because the population is aging and the housing market has been out of control since Covid started the flatlands moving up.
That campus sounds like a terrible place to work.
I interviewed for a full time gig in Vermont,with all the usual benefits, so there are good community colleges there.
Good to know!
We are an urban, public CC with 20% full-time, tenured/TT faculty and 80% adjunct faculty. (We don't have full-time, non-TT positions.)
That adjunct number, though, includes our workforce development/community ed staff and that's a fair number of people. We also cap the number of credits our adjuncts can teach, so most of our adjuncts only teach one or two courses per semester.
I suppose the maximum of two courses per semester is to avoid having to offer any health care benefits after Obamacare was passed, right?
You betcha!
That rule comes from the statewide contract that’s been in place for well over 25 years at this point, so it precedes Obamacare.
Given that both the FT faculty and adjuncts are represented by the same union, my guess is that the FT faculty side had more of a say in that than the state.
I’m in a similar setup and we are 33% FT and 66% adjuncts. The one thing I like about my school is they often hire adjuncts full time. I believe at least 5 of my FT colleagues started as adjuncts and 1/2 of our new hires was an adjunct.
I wonder how you manage to keep them then? No one can survive on that. Do they have other jobs?
In my discipline area (STEM), almost all of our adjuncts either have regular full-time jobs (usually outside of academia; they teach at night/weekend classes), or they are retirees (either from higher ed or, more often, from K-12). The overall number of adjuncts in STEM has also been decreasing as a consequence of (1) contracting enrollments and (2) the desire of adjuncts to teach exclusively online, while we require all lab courses to meet in-person. We’ve lost a few to other schools who are still running COVID-era fully-online “labs,” and that’s fine with us.
We’re also in Massachusetts, so there are a gazillion colleges around and the privates probably pay more than the publics. (Also, our extremely HCOL probably makes being a full-time adjunct much more difficult than in cheaper areas, regardless of where you teach.)
Yeah, we used to have a lot of retirees too, but they are pretty much all gone after the pandemic- no one wants to teach in person any more! And online classes are not given to adjuncts at all, they are highly popular among full time faculty.
That makes sense. High cost of living would push people to teach online, where they can live somewhere cheaper.
This varies dramatically. It's been at least a decade since the Chronicle ran a story noting that the majority of all credit hours in the US were delivered by non-tenure-track faculty, and certainly many institutions are indeed majority NTT. But the opposite is true as well. At my SLAC we are about 80% tenure track, and of the remaining faculty virtually all are on full time, multi-year term contracts. I've been in my department for 25+ years and can count the number of courses taught by per-course adjuncts in that time on one hand.
I'm in a research/grant funding heavy applied field at an R2. Our FT faculty get buyouts and releases constantly meaning the bulk of our courses are adjunct staffed (I'm an Associate and taught one course this spring, for example, and that's more than many others). Other departments on campus that are less focused on external funding whose enrollments are largely students getting Gen Ed credits have virtually no adjunct faculty.
As you say, the circumstances vary so much that it's hard to define.
I don't expect you to know this number - but the most relevant number is *how many student contact hours are taught by NTT*. Those NTT are most likely teaching the larger intro courses and they don't get sabbaticals or administrative leaves. So what sounds like "20% NTT" could feasibly be "40% NTT"
On the other hand, students aren't interfacing with the professor much in large intro courses. There is less value in TT teachers there than in smaller upper level courses.
Implicit and incorrect assumption that TT are better than NTT in those courses
I suppose Slacs would be the exception as folks pay top dollar to experience small classes. Would be hard for admin to outsource this all to adjuncts…
We do not have a single adjunct in our department, we have a few NTT but that is by choice on their part, they have been that way for years. We have 0% part time or single term adjuncts.
I also think the New School is also sort of an outlier in that, due to their location, they're able to hire adjuncts who are the top of their field internationally in whatever their "industry" is who only want to/can teach a course or two per semester due to other professional commitments. In other words, they are not the typical adjunct model these days where people are forced to teach ridiculously high course loads for poverty wages and no benefits.
In addition, for a lot of the departments at the New School (fashion, music, etc) the professional connections you'd get from working with the kinds of adjuncts they hire are FAR better than what you'd get by having someone full-time with a somewhat less prestigious professional profile (like the average R-1 prof, who are still extremely well qualified but can't commit to the kinds of professional activities like the adjuncts at The New School can).
Also, as far as I'm aware, they have always hired their faculty on the basis of their expertise in industry and have always had a very high rate of adjuncts. In other words, they aren't largely adjunct because of the landscape of higher ed these days, they're that way because that model works VERY well for everyone involved. Looking at some of the faculty in music (my area), I'd be willing to bet they're very handsomely compensated as well.
The same NYT article mentions their part-time adjunct professors are earning about $6,000 per course so I would not consider that “very handsomely compensated”
I once interviewed for a position at the New School. The chair confessed to me that they could pay adjuncts so little ($1800/course; this was the late 90s) because it was New York and everyone was desperate to live there. There are a lot of grad students in NYC, so they have their choice of cheap labor. If every school could get away with primarily adjunct labor, you bet your sweet ass they would.
I will concede that point-I couldn’t access the article. However, at least in music, most of the types of adjuncts that teach at the New School see their students only a few times per semester-in between professional gigs. While $6000 isn’t much for an adjunct, if you’re only teaching a few times a semester, it’s a much better deal.
New School is clearly unique in its mission and mechanisms. A lot of free thinkers since its founding. Tenure is probably considered far too establishment for their ethos.
The % of credit hours taught by adjuncts also varies by location. Rural locations (where SLAC's tend to be) do not have a labor pool of people qualified to teach on a contingent basis the way urban and even suburban schools do.
Yeah, it generally depends on presence of a large university producing lots of masters and PhDs nearby. People usually adjunct in the vicinity of where they live, very few would move far in order to adjunct.
I'm at a teaching-focused state university. In my department, I would say about 10-15% of courses are taught by adjunct faculty. This is actually much higher than the university as a whole, and is likely because our department is a popular but understaffed major, so they can easily fill the adjunct classes.
I imagine that the location, in which very few other universities are within driving distance (just one other 4 year university within a 2 hour drive) may have something to do with the university's low percentage of adjunct faculty compared to peer institutions.
It is surprising that these hedge funds that offer educational programs would attempt to reduce costs by compromising on their workforce.
The school I teach at delivers 80% of all contact hours NTT. Some departments only have one TN/TT faculty member, who is automatically the chair.
One thing you always have to be careful about with these stats is what the term "adjunct" means -- strictly speaking the term should only refer to part time, contingent faculty that are paid a (probably low) per-course amount. But I've seen the term carelessly used to refer to anyone not on the tenure-track. (The article you mentioned here at least does specify part-time).
In the Minnesota State system our contract says we need to be 70% full time as a system and at least 60% full time at each campus.
Out of curiosity, who teaches your evening and weekend classes?
FT faculty in my state are contractually forbidden from teaching our full-time load courses outside of normal business hours, so 100% of our evening and weekend classes belong to adjuncts.
Can you be assigned courses beyond the regular "work day"?
Schedules are determined by chairs in consultation with the faculty. Either can be in scheduled in the evening as long as the total daily elapsed time doesn’t exceed the maximum.
I teach fashion design and live outside nyc and always see the adjunct listings for FIT. Since they are usually looking for on campus professors the time it would take me to take the train into the city, walk to campus, teach and then come home is absolutely not worth it. I think the one full time position I saw was in the $60k’s.
We are AACSB certified so 40% minimum of all classes must be taught by Scholarly Academics. We have 2-3 PhD faculty per discipline which is about 95% of the classes.
In my department, we have 8 Tenure(-track), seven of us teaching a 3-3, and one (on phased retirement) teaching a 3-0. We have one professor of practice teaching a 4-4. Our need for adjuncts varies semester by semester, but this semester we had two sections taught by adjuncts. I'd say four would be more typical. So, that puts our percentage of sections taught by adjuncts at well under 20%.
I'm not a cc, semi rural. I think we have about 50% adjunct.
But that number is continually going up. As people retire or leave, very often departments try to cover their classes with adjuncts rather than hire somebody for the position.
Our pay for full timers is low. But the benefits are unbelievably good. For sure I can see the college, and State as a whole, preferring to cover courses with adjuncts.
We will see how it goes in semesters to come as adjuncts do no advising, no reporting of data, no meetings with marketing, etc. So some full-timers are complaining about their workload outside of teaching.
Just read in the NYT today that “90 % of the New School’s faculty are part time adjunct professors”. I’m stunned it is this high. Made me wonder if this is common at other places as well. Or is it just more common at large R1s than smaller institutions?
dunno how did you jump to that final sentence, especially when New School is not even R1, let alone a large one.
pretty sure most R1s have far more TT/tenured profs than adjuncts, at least in STEM departments that I am familiar with (I would say something like 70-90%). R2s/teaching oriented schools/ CCs/ etc. will obviously have fewer.
Our teaching-oriented regional has about 60% tenured/tenure-track, 15% who are full-time non-tenure line lecturers but who have annual contracts, and about 25% pure adjuncts.
CC here, about 75%
I think the percentage is going to be higher in places like NYC, Boston, Chicago. It is much lower where I am, in no small part because the pool of available labor is very limited.
Some of these numbers are blowing my mind, but I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. In California community colleges, we're actually required to have a certain minimum percentage of faculty at an institution be full time or else the college is penalized for every FT faculty member they are short. This is called the Faculty Obligation Number, or FON for short
Being stuck as an adjunct is why I moved to k-12
I’m at a state university that is around 80%.
I am really hoping the latest round of colleges closing helps this.
Cabrini College (which is closing) was over 60% adjuncts. I can't imagine Wells College was any less. Both of these schools were charging way more than state schools and were having most classes taught by adjuncts.
My school had an adjunct union effort.
They went to the ROSTERS AND COUNTED NAMES and said "we are over half your faculty."
Then the college threatened to sue them and they had to release a statement admitting to the fact adjuncts only taught 15% at that time.
The adjunct union did have a positive effect, the college they turned to hiring faculty for extra service classes and now less than 10% are taught by adjuncts.
Closing of colleges will continue more over ongoing demographic pressures than adjunctification imo…
The colleges in New York that are closing were run by adjuncts. St. Rose had a secondary ranking system. They had "senior adjuncts" whatever that means. Cazenovia, Wells & St Rose all were similar.
The percentage of classes taught by adjuncts is a huge predictor in schools that will close.
By that logic the new school should close soon. Don’t see it happening…
Do they teach the word anecdotal at your college
Do they teach the word collegial at yours ?
Yes, campus lawyers say "Collegiality is in no way a part of the tenure process"
not even kidding!
Anecdotal answers are not collegial.
Why not get adjunct administrators? They could work part-time (since they don't do anything anyhow) and we only have to pay them a third of what they usually make. Truth is they'd thankful for the position because they can't do anything useful in the real world
Page A18 “At New School, faculty set up encampment”
Just under 50%, but their classes are bigger 🤦♀️
Private R2 in the mid Atlantic. 60% of the university (660 out of 1050’ish faculty) are adjunct. My department in particular is about 70% adjunct. My university’s union refuses to allow NTT full-time lines, so it’s TT full timer or adjunct and no other faculty. Re:credit hours - adjuncts are limited to teaching 8 credits per semester (2 3cred + a remedial seminar OR 1 3cred + 1 4cred cluster class) whereas FT teach 9/10 credits per semester (3 3cred or 2 3cred + 1 4cred cluster). Very few FT/TT teach the intro classes in my dept - I’d say probably 80/20 adjunct/FT ratio for intro classes.
So VP lines do not even exist ?
None. No Visiting lecturers.
I have no idea what it is across the university, but my department has 10 TT/Tenured faculty and 5 adjuncts who are limited to a maximum of 2 courses per semester.
Math at a CC, 20 F/T and 80 adjuncts. At R1 math, 46 TT and 54 NTT.
Over half of faculty in the Cal State Uni system (I believe the biggest system in the US) are non-tenure track. I’ve seen various nationwide figures and hard to find a consistent number. At my campus and in our college non TT are around 70%. It really is the McDonaldization of higher ed (low wages etc). https://laist.com/news/education/california-state-university-csu-strike-2024-part-time-faculty
At my CC it's 85%.
Depends on the department, but we have no adjuncts. 25 TT and four full-time NTT.
is it to avoid giving benefits? i'm a graduate instructor recently graduated and now applying for teaching jobs and adjuncting is all i can find ...
I remember an older article (10-15 years ago) from Chronicle of Higher Ed that had some big Ivy and other schools at 67% adjunct. Wouldn’t be surprised otherwise these days.
My campus publishes part time vs full time at 57% full time. But that doesn't necessarily mean TT. I'm full time NTT.
but after 6 years I get entitlement for 3 year contracts with guaranteed renewal As long as there are courses to teach.
I honestly don’t know about institution as a whole, but in our department it’s definitely less than half. We lost A LOT of them after the pandemic- many were about to retire, so they retired, and many were already retired, so they just stopped doing it. In Philosophy right now 12 full time faculty and ONE part timer.
24%. In my dept specifically it’s 5%.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but we're only about 10% adjunct. That said, we do have a lot of "lecturers" who are not TT (20-30%, maybe?) (I'm in Canada, for perspective.)
At least you guys up north have free health care. Part time faculty down here rarely ever do.
Yeah. I feel for you guys down south. I did a post-doc in the States, and my biggest worry was healthcare the whole time I was there.
The proportion of adjuncts varies between the different colleges at The New School. Parsons School of Design certainly has more adjuncts than Eugene Lang College and whatever they are calling the grad college these days.
What is perhaps a more relevant measure is what percentage of classes are staffed by adjuncts.
Pretty much exactly 1/3 is ranked and the other 2/3 is visiting, lecturer, or adjunct.
I would have thought the opposite - more common at smaller institutions than large ones. I don't know any large institution that hires a lot of adjuncts. My STEM department resorted to hiring one because a faculty member went on leave and it was very controversial. On the other hand, I see ads for community colleges trying to hire people all the time, they'll even try to recruit grad students in our department if they can.
I think also it may be much more common in the humanities than other fields.
I admit that my last sentence was entirely speculative based on the assumption that small Slacs would have fewer adjuncts and much larger (R1) institutions where research output matters more than teaching would resort more often to adjuncts. But enrollment of community colleges varies widely and from the comments so far adjuncts appear to be more widely used there than anywhere else…
70% in my program. I don’t know about college wide.
The New School is a very unusual place. I think it was originally designed to be less academic, more reflective of the practice in the field. They also do a lot of noncredit courses. I took classes in folk music from them for fun some years ago.
Administrators are turncoats to become part of the problem and want to get rid of the rest of us and make it just a business
~65 percent of undergrad classes are taught by part-time faculty in my department according to the recent accreditation report.
I don’t know, but I think it is comparatively very low.
However, the percentage of adjuncts we have as faculty is probably much higher than the percentage of courses taught by adjuncts. (Of the 25 -30 or however many courses our department teaches some with multiple sections- I don’t know, perhaps 3 sections (10% or fewer) are taught by adjuncts, but by three different adjuncts. So it may look like we have three adjuncts and 8 full time (27% adjunct) and we do, but students are almost always learning from full time faculty. Some students may have just one adjunct in our department their entire time there.
I’m at an SLAC in the NE and our division is 3FT TT, 2 interim NTT, and something like 20 adjuncts?
Maybe because I am in a state school and in a college of medicine, we don't have adjunct faculty in my department. We have nonTT full time positions only. I'll investigate if other departments have adjuncts and how many.
My CC's department is 72 percent adjunct.
The CC where I teach is about 75% adjunct. I honestly can’t tell you about the tenure situation at the CC. I don’t think there is “tenure” at my CC, but I have never heard of anyone getting fired who was full time.
The public uni where I teach is about 30-ish% adjunct, but that is only part of the story. They are definitely going more NTT. As the tenured folks are aging out and retiring they are being replaced, for the most part, with NTTs or adjuncts for certain courses.
The CC where I teach is about 75% adjunct. I honestly can’t tell you about the tenure situation at the CC. I don’t think there is “tenure” at my CC, but I have never heard of anyone getting fired who was full time.
The public uni where I teach is about 30-ish% adjunct, but that is only part of the story. They are definitely going more NTT. As the tenured folks are aging out and retiring they are being replaced, for the most part, with NTTs or adjuncts for certain courses.
I agree with others here who have pointed out that the adjunct number is not the whole story. You also have to look at the increasing NTT numbers and the decline in tenured faculty numbers.
There are adjunct professors and there are adjunct professors. Until recently I was an adjunct research professor at an R1 university. I got paid nothing, and I did (almost) nothing. But presumably I would have counted towards that 90%.
(I'm now a resource employee - because they needed to tell funders that I could be paid, if necessary. That way they can put me on grants and contracts. They still don't pay me*, and I still do almost nothing.)
*Oops, no. I was paid $140 last year.
Is anyone really surprised that New College is so adjunct heavy? You would need to have a pretty specific worldview to want to teach there full time; and how many academics are itching to work for a college that is bound to completely destroy tenure and academic freedom?
Tuition for the new school is 55k. Just surprised they can outsource almost all of their courses to adjuncts. I’d expect parents paying for this to object but then again all they may be interested in is the name of the school
A more useful number would be the actual tuition paid after scholarships for the students they are recruiting heavily to attend (athletes). I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I seriously doubt the average student is paying 55k/yr.
New school doesn’t have athletics. Avg cost after aid is 30k
They do now. Read the news.
You’re thinking of a different new school.
Not disputing that but still way more than your average state school…
True but it also is (well, was) really different from the average state school. Idk if the price is worth that difference now, but certainly many students and they families saw value in it.
That number is obscene. And we would have our accreditation threatened with that number. We are at about 55% part time I believe, but I don’t know the contact hours ratios. I would bet our part time faculty deliver more than 55% of the hours.