Those who worked at campuses that were represented by unions generally enjoyed better pay, benefits, and working conditions, the authors write. More than 40 percent of respondents who worked part time said they had access to retirement benefits through their academic employer, with both the faculty member and employer sharing responsibility to pay such benefits. Opportunities to save for retirement were more plentiful. Less than one part-time faculty member in four reported receiving health benefits through his or her academic institution. The coalition’s study also examined other areas of working life that have long frustrated adjuncts and their advocates.

“In short,” the authors write, “little economic benefit accrues with part-time faculty members’ experience in the classroom.” Benefits and Support Those who have taught more than 30 terms made $3,000. A part-time faculty member teaching his or her first class earned a median of $2,700 per course. Length of service, however, helped very little. A faculty member with a master’s degree earned a median of $2,400 per course, while those with a doctorate made $3,200. The level of degree held by a faculty member also accounted for differences in pay. And, in contrast to the stereotype of the “freeway flyer'-a faculty member cobbling together a portfolio of courses at multiple campuses-more than three-quarters of the respondents taught at just one campus during the period studied. The majority taught two classes or fewer at the time the survey was taken.

The vast majority of part-timers, about 70 percent, were in their prime working years, 36 to 65. Women earned a median of $2,700 per course, while men reported being paid slightly more, $2,780. While nearly 62 percent of the respondents who worked part time were women, the researchers did not find evidence that gender was a determining factor in pay. Private, nonprofit doctoral institutions paid a median of $3,800 for-profits paid $1,560. The differences in pay per course correlated most strongly to the type of institution. Two-thirds of the part-time respondents, however, earned an annual income of less than $45,000. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents described their part-time teaching positions as their primary occupation, and the income from them as essential or very important. They coincide with emerging data from other sources, while also adding substance to accusations that the edifice of higher education is increasingly being maintained on the backs of an academic underclass.

These insights are likely to be cited as support for a growing litany of grievances on the status of contingent faculty. Despite their limitations, the data offer important insights, the authors write, into the working lives of part-time and contingent faculty. The findings do not purport to be statistically representative, though they encompass a range of disciplines, geographic areas in the United States, and types of institutions, including two- and four-year, and for-profit and nonprofit colleges. The contingent academic work force represents approximately 70 percent of the faculty. They answered a 160-question survey made available online from late September 2010 until late November of the same year. The researchers based their findings on the responses of nearly 20,000 contingent, or non-tenure-track, faculty members, of whom about 10,000 worked part time. The median pay, $2,700 per course, and limited access to health insurance “stand in stark contradiction to higher education’s claims about the value-including the economic value'-of higher education, write the authors of “A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members.” The study was conducted by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group of 26 higher-education associations, disciplinary societies, and faculty organizations. Part-time faculty members work for low pay and scant benefits relative to their level of education and training, according to a long-awaited study, released today, of this fast-growing sector of the academic work force.

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