No one in higher ed is fixing this overlooked crisis for instructors — from highereddive.com by Nina Huntemann
Adjunct faculty members are struggling. It’s time to treat them like the valuable contributors they are, writes Chegg’s chief academic officer.
Excerpt:
In higher ed, it is a much-discussed but little addressed fact that many higher-education faculty in the U.S. are paid below the poverty line. Approximately one-fourth of the instructors teaching at U.S. colleges and universities are earning less than $25,000 per year, though the median household income in our country is approximately $67,000, according to 2020 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Those outside the higher ed space often assume most faculty members in the U.S. are tenured or on a tenure track, with “jobs for life” and a comfortable income; however, this is far from reality. The fact is that contingent faculty, those who hold non-tenure-track positions and often work on annual or semester-by-semester contracts, comprise 75% of all faculty positions, according to the American Federation of Teachers.