I was told the other day by a student, after he found out how much we adjuncts make, "Oh, well, but you love your job." Does this make it okay that we are payed below the poverty line and not given health benefits? Apparently so.
Now, teachers have been getting this for years. I don't know one single profession that is viewed as more altruistic than education. You could argue that non-profits are right there with educators, but at least they are either full-timers or volunteers. Adjuncts are the worst of the worst. When I was a student in graduate school I was given health insurance (great health insurance), life insurance, I paid something like 10 dollars a month for dental and vision, my own desk, and my salary was on par with what I make as an adjunct professor. On top of all that I was getting an education and a degree. What does the adjunct position get me? No office, no desk, no health insurance, low pay.
Why be an adjunct? Well, we all hope that one day we'll find a full-time position that actually gives us those things we used to have as graduate students. Plus, this economy is rough. There aren't many jobs out there for highly educated people. There seem to be plenty of low wage menial labor jobs, but not good jobs. And now the second question. What do adjuncts do?
In short they keep higher education going. If adjuncts didn't exist, let's say tomorrow they all quit, community colleges would bust, big universities would break their budget, and higher education would collapse under the weight of itself. You see, adjuncts and lecturers are paid about a third less (or more) than their full-time equivalents. The difference in work? Nothing. They tell us that the full-timers are going to meetings that we don't have to attend, or that they have some extra duties; but the truth is we both teach the same courses. It's not like adjuncts don't have to grade or something. In fact, full-timers are usually the ones who get teaching assistants if they exist at that institution.
So if you are an administrator then why don't you just hire all adjuncts? Because you will lose your accreditation. So what do you do? You hire the max adjuncts while keeping the ratio on par with standards for the accrediting agencies. This keeps the budget low and everyone above you is happy. All the while the people at the bottom suffer. It has been called the biggest crime an institution can do to not give its adjuncts and lecturers health insurance, but for being the biggest crime it is also the most common practice. This also keeps the budget low.
You tell the adjuncts they can pay for health insurance if they want to. But 500 dollars for health insurance would put an adjunct on the street, seeing as how a paycheck could be 1600 a month. How are you going to pay those student loans, rent, and utilities and then somehow buy food if you're paying a third of your check to health insurance? I've known adjuncts who worked for 10 years and just never went to the dentist because they couldn't afford it. That's sad. These are our professors of students who want to become doctors, nurses, pathology assistants, and physical therapists and they can't afford to go to the dentist.
Teachers on the lower levels aren't faring much better than we are. Even though teachers have seen a dramatic rise in salary over the past 20 years, it has started to decline. Further, teachers are being asked to pay more and more for their health insurance. In fact, in some districts the administration has been giving itself raises and at the same time asking the teachers to forgo their raise for the year. In fact, they don't ask the teachers to not take a raise, they mandate it. So teachers are now being paid less and asked to pay more for the same or worse benefits. If this continues, teachers will have lost what they gained in trying to have decent salaries.
What do we do about it? I'm not sure. The government would need to step in and say that institutions have to treat adjuncts more like full-time employees for something to happen. Currently, adjuncts are all paid on semester-by-semester contracts. Because of this they are treated as seasonal or temporary. But they are far from it. Some adjuncts have worked at an institution for over 10 years (as I said earlier). They keep applying for that rare full-time position, and then don't get it. Very few adjuncts work for less than a few years at an institution, so why then treat them as temporary? Because it helps with the bottom line -- its always about the money.
In fact do we just do this because we love it? Not really. We do it because we ended up here, just like you. I ended up with the training to teach biology at a community college. They offered me a job and I liked it better than working a cash register, which isn't saying much. Now I do enjoy my job, don't get me wrong. And I've been told by people making 100k a year that they envy me, because they hate their job. But I'll tell you what, it makes no sense to me that people should have to hate their job to make a good living. This is a huge problem in this country. I have no idea how to fix it, but beginning to recognize that the two concepts of loving your job and making good money aren't mutually exclusive is a start.