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Follow The Money (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

4 min read

The stories we report in Arkansas Business rarely hit as close to home as this week’s story on the pay of adjunct professors at colleges and universities. While I think Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s Adjunct Professors’ Low Pay A Savings For Colleges speaks for itself, I do want to be transparent about my own interest in the economics of higher education in this state:

• After a 30-year career as a reporter, my husband took his master’s degree in journalism and began a full-time (but not tenure-track) job teaching at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway in the fall 2014 semester. He loves it, and the hours and benefits are better than he had in the private sector while the pay is comparable.

• In preparation for making a career change, he had for several years taught as an adjunct, mostly for Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock but also for the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and once for Arkansas State University-Beebe. He continues to teach at Pulaski Tech one night a week and enjoys that work as well.

• Last fall, mainly as a favor to my alma mater but also just as an adventure, I taught an editing course at Harding University in Searcy. I don’t have a graduate degree, but the powers-that-be wanted me anyway.

Here’s what I’ve concluded: Adjuncts aren’t paid well enough.

Depending on the size of the class — mine had 24 students, and my husband has taught between five and 35 — and depending on the subject, the pay can truly be less than minimum wage.

Many adjuncts are like my husband and me — people with full-time jobs and benefits elsewhere who are willing to teach for reasons besides the money. But the fact that the pay is negligible — and I don’t think that’s too strong a word — means it is easy for adjuncts to drift in and out, creating an uneven educational experience for students who are all paying the same tuition.

My Harding class is a great example: Those two dozen students got some benefit from my decades of real-world editing experience, but the fact that I hadn’t been in a classroom in 32 years was a negative. If I taught it again, I would do a much better job.

But I won’t do it again. At least not while I’m still working full time. I enjoyed the students, I enjoyed the challenge, but ultimately, $2,300 just wasn’t worth the effort, not to mention the drive time to and from Searcy.

Similarly, my husband is willing to teach composition at Pulaski Tech for $2,000 a semester because it’s convenient to our home in North Little Rock, but he’s not keen on teaching for ASU-Beebe again because $1,650 isn’t worth the drive. Maybe an equally experienced teacher taught that class the following semester — or maybe not.

But there’s really a much bigger issue than whether an individual adjunct is paid commensurate with value. Reliance, to varying degrees, on low-cost instructors has not kept the price of higher education from more than doubling — even after adjusting for inflation — since I was a student.

College costs have inflated much faster than health care costs, let alone general inflation or wages, and it isn’t because the full-time professors and part-time instructors doing the actual teaching are commanding fabulous salaries.

Some of the inflation is tied to health insurance (which adjuncts don’t get, of course), and some is the cost of technologies unimagined 30 years ago. Nicer — sometimes downright luxurious — student housing has added to the cost of the traditional on-campus college experience. But the place where college costs have really gone crazy is in the arms race for the best-paid administrators — because the further one is from the actual students, the more valuable, right?

Last fall, Mark Friedman took a hard look at administrators employed by Arkansas state colleges and universities (Top College Officials See Sizable Pay Raises) and found that the compensation costs of individual administrators were growing fast (10-20 percent) between 2010-14 and that more than two dozen administrators had been added during that time. And colleges tend to give “across-the-board” raises, which means those who are already making the biggest salaries get the biggest raises — a perverse system that persists because it seems fair.

Which reminds me: UA System President Donald Bobbitt just got a 20 percent raise in his base salary, from $355,000 to $427,500. He already had total compensation of more than $500,000, which was more than 40 percent more than his predecessor, B. Alan Sugg, earned back in 2010.

I like Bobbitt fine, but his raise is bigger than the pay of many professors. And I can’t help thinking about that when I pay my son’s tuition at UALR.


Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com.
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