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ABSTRACT
Over the past 30 years, the profession of college professor in the US has been changing from a high-status occupation, where faculty have extensive control over their job responsibilities, to a low-status contingent job in the peripheral labor market. This change mirrors the drift toward nonstandard employment in other sectors of the economy. Contingent and part-time faculty have grown at 10 times the rate of growth for tenure-track faculty, leading to a fundamental transformation in the nature of the professoriate. We review data related to these changes as well as the conventional explanations for this transformation. We conclude that the current system of academic labor is best understood within the core–periphery model of nonstandard employment. We conclude with some brief prospects for the future of the academic labor market and higher education.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 See also Katz and Krueger (Citation2016). The Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of contingent work arrangements was discontinued in 2005.
2 Marx was undeniably the first to recognize the importance of the ‘employment relationship’ under capitalism and provided many insights which informed later institutionalist economics. We have chosen not to include Marx’s analysis here, primarily because the complexity of his analysis is beyond the scope of this relatively brief section of the article. In addition, the point of this section is the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs. In Marxist analysis, arguably all jobs under capitalism would be considered bad jobs.
3 Kalleberg, Reskin, and Hudson (Citation2000) define standard employment as full-time and classify part-time work as ‘nonstandard.’ The definition used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Contingent Worker Survey did not include ‘part-time’ work.
4 Unfortunately, data on the types of nonstandard employment relationship in the US economy is hard to come by. As Capelli and Keller (Citation2013) note, understanding contingent employment requires information on employer motivations and strategies; yet most studies are based on surveys of workers.
5 See Katz and Krueger (Citation2016, 11).
6 For-profit institutions have not been included in the discussion, since virtually all of their faculty are contingent (98.2 percent).
7 Full-time contingent faculty are typically hired for one academic year. In some cases, the positions are temporary, non-renewable contracts used to replace tenured faculty on leave. However, full-time contingent faculty are increasingly hired on the basis of one- to three-year ‘renewable’ contracts with no promise of tenure or long-term job security. These full-time contingent faculty positions have increased in recent years but are still much less common than part-time adjunct faculty.
8 The part-time, adjunct model is most advanced at public community colleges, where over 80 percent of faculty fall into the contingent category (Curtis Citation2014). Contingent part-time and full-time faculty account for 59.4 percent at private baccalaureate and 62.5 percent at master’s institutions (ibid.).
9 The Coalition on the Academic Workforce report that the median adjunct pay per course is $2,700 (cited in Erwin and Wood, Citation2014, 9).
10 Data comes from the AAUP Annual Compensation Survey (2014–15, Table 13).
11 According to Kezar and Maxey (Citation2013), 70 percent of full-time, non-tenure track faculty are hired primarily to teach and have the same ‘work profiles’ as tenured and tenure-track faculty. Research-only appointments are more common in the sciences. Hiring full-time, non-tenure track faculty to provide institutional service only has increased as the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty has declined.
12 Several studies have compared online teaching and face-to-face teaching (see footnote 19).
13 Personal experience of author. Since adjuncts are hired for one academic term only, the assessment of teaching for an adjunct may simply be the hiring decision.
14 See Archibald and Feldman (Citation2014).
15 At some private institutions, gains in funding from gifts, investments, and endowments have significantly reduced the share of tuition in total operating revenue. Net tuition provided 33.3 percent of net operating revenue to private research institutions in 2001, but fell to 21 percent by 2011. Similarly, reliance on tuition at private bachelor’s institutions decreased from 45.7 percent in 2001 to 36 percent in 2011. The proportion at private master’s institutions has not changed significantly (Desrochers and Hurlbert Citation2014).
16 On the other hand, administrative hiring has increased significantly, mostly in the area of professional support for non-instructional student services rather than in highly paid executive or managerial positions. ‘The average number of faculty and staff per administrator declined by roughly 40 percent in most types of four-year college and university between 1990 and 2012, and now averages 2.5 or fewer faculty and staff per administrator’ (Desrochers and Kirshstein 2015, 3).
17 Full-time contingent workers receive benefits, but the majority of part-time workers do not.
18 The Babson study tracks faculty attitudes toward online education. It does not indicate the proportion of online courses taught by different ranks or classifications of faculty (Allen and Seaman Citation2012, Citation2014).
19 An intensely debated question is whether online teaching is comparable in quality to face-to-face teaching. A US Department of Education report reviewed more than 1000 studies of online and hybrid instruction in a variety of settings. It found that most studies reported ‘better than average’ learning outcomes for online and hybrid courses (compared to face-to-face) for undergraduate and older learners (but not for K-12); however, the authors cautioned that these were not controlled studies and that the comparisons included a number of differences, including pedagogy, content of the curriculum, and time spent by the learner (Means et al. Citation2010). In addition, information was lacking regarding the employment status of those teaching these classes. While the growth of online instruction and the growth of contingent academic labor are related, there is insufficient data at present to know if these are related phenomena.
20 The college wage premium does not adequately explain the current disparity in incomes in the US. Gould (Citation2016, 15) notes, ‘The story is not one of a growing differential of wages between college and high school graduates, but increasingly one of growing wage inequality overall and within various education groups.’
21 Following Veblen, Raines and Leathers (Citation2003, 221) discuss the commodification of instruction, focusing on the potential for instructional technology and courseware to deskill and displace the faculty, and described this trend as ‘driven by commercial interest rather than student needs and demands.’
22 Donoghue (Citation2008, ch. 1) provides a compelling history of corporate America’s dissatisfaction with the liberal arts as useless for success in business. This dissatisfaction, in part, led Veblen to write The Higher Learning in America.
23 Veblen’s focus was the increasing dominance of university governing boards by those made wealthy in their pursuit of business and management by the administrators of the university with an eye toward pecuniary rather than intellectual interests, but he also addressed concerns that faculty would be selected ‘on grounds of businesslike fitness’ ([Citation1918] 2005, 109).
24 Raines and Leathers (2003) note that when Veblen revised The Higher Learning in America after World War I, he advanced a reform proposal for developing institutions primarily devoted to disinterested academic research. This proposal stemmed from his concern that American universities had been diverted from this work due to their management by business principles, and this proposal would return the universities to their primary function, in his view. Raines and Leathers continue by noting that even such institutions could eventually be diverted by
‘pressures of instant need’ to ‘turn their forces to instruction as well as to inquiry’ [and would eventually drift] … into the same equivocal positions as the universities, and the dry rot of business principles and competitive gentility would presently consume their tissues after the same fashion. (142)