Too many online adjuncts?

So many of the people I talk to are hoping to be an online adjunct that it leads me to this question: Is the market flooded with them? Is supply so huge that demand is going to drop to nothing? To many people it would be a dream job; stay home and work in you pajamas. Sounds too good to be true to me. What's your opinion?

 

I don't know anything about the market neither; however, hope to land a teaching position once I earn my higher degrees. As for me, from the student vision that instructors with campus based would be more interesting than only online adjunct.

 

It's definitely not too good to be true!

I did it for 4 years at Kaplan and have to say that it's far from a dream job. My guess is that there will always be online adjuct jobs because the work can be very demanding for very little pay. It can be enjoyable and rewarding, but it requires a lot of time. For a while I was teaching 3 courses at a time and looked forward to my police job to get away from my computer.

 

LOL Go to your day job so you can rest? That adjunct job must have been tough. I thought it was too good to be true.

 

I've been teaching online for 8 years already in IT and IS.

The issue is that most of the same graduates that finish online programs want to become online instructors. Given the increase in access to graduate education due to online programs, you have more people available to teach online classes than before.

The other issue is credential creep, most schools require a PhD to teach while before an MS was more than enough. As for lack of online teaching jobs, I know that Devry has a hiring freeze for CIS instructors and so other schools but there is also a shortage of instructors in health care fields and accounting.

Salaries for online instructors have gone down or have stayed the same for years. I work for few schools and salaries have stayed the same or with little increases in the last 5 years but they demand more from the instructors. It is a sellers market where the employer has the power.

 

I did the online thing full time for few years. It is crazy, most schools require you to grade work within 48 years and reply to students within 24 hrs. I had one school that required me to write a two page feedback report each week per student. I had to teach 7 classes at the time in order to make a living and this was taking about 80 hours a week. I thought I could bring the time down after time but schools just keep demanding more (online meetings, faster feedbacks, more participation, etc.) so I just gave up.

I still do this but only for few schools and no more than two courses per term. It can be a good supplemental income but I wouldn't do it as a career.

 

I don't know RF, I think 48 years is plenty of time to grade work, I'm sure I could do it in 10 years. Just kidding you, I know you meant 48 hours. Couldn't resist, sorry.

All joking aside, you have supplied me with some very good info. I had a feeling that online teaching is a lot tougher than the online students would imagine. If something seems too good to be true then, as they say, it probably is.

 

You can average about $15 per hour consistently with online adjunct work (after training, faculty meetings, and curriculum churn, etc.) taking every class you can get to achieve high volume, so if you can work 5,000 hours a year (96 hours per week), you should have no trouble making 75K per year. No vacations. No benefits. Little interaction with your peers. So if that is your dream job, go for it...

 

Wow, that sounds fantastic, Dave. How rewarding and satisfying! I can't decide which would be more fun: Being an online teacher, a prison guard or maybe a toxic waste handler (preferably one who uses no protective gear).

 

Wow. No wonder sometimes it takes me a while to get a grade back.

 

The good news is that there is still substantial demand for online adjuncts, despite the oversupply. If you want to stay at home and work in your pajamas, there is a good chance that you can, in fact, find an online school that will pay you to do so.

Well, there is some bad news too. The compensation for online adjuncts is "dropping to nothing", due to the oversupply of potential instructors. Pay for online teaching was never particularly generous, and it has steadily eroded over the years -- or at best has stayed constant, which means that it has eroded due to inflation. Benefits are already nothing.

Teaching does seem to be a dream job for many people, and so they are happy to do it even for very low pay. I've literally seen posts from instructor wannabes who have offered to teach online courses for free, just to get a foot in the door.

Most online schools are for-profit, so they aren't going to pay instructors any more than they have to. And these schools are well aware that they don't have to offer very much to attract teachers. There are no signs that this situation is about to change.

 

Sounds similar to college teaching jobs in general. More and more schools are using adjuncts who they can pay almost nothing as compared to tenured faculty. Schools are cutting their tenure staff to go with the cheaper model of adjunct instruction while charging students the same.

 

Do some online classes require more time to teach/facilitate than others? For example, do you think that classes such as accounting or math that generally have student responses/answers that are more or less right or wrong would require less time to manage than classes that require a lot of qualitative grading (such as grading a lot of lengthy papers)?

Thinking back to some of my accounting classes, I really couldn't see that the professor really did all that much. He would grade my homework and exams (either correct or incorrect). He was always quick to respond to e-mail questions but never really gave much feedback beyond that. Not that I'm complaining; I was a motivated self-learner who didn't need much feedback. I'm just observing that my accounting professor didn't appear to do all that much.

So, are some types of classes better to teach than others (as far as time)?

 

Maybe it's a wash. You'd think that classes that rely more on auto-corrected quizzes, exams, etc. would be easier but maybe those types of classes generate more questions for the professor as there probably are homework problem sets etc.

Classes that require papers to be submitted are a little more work as the teacher has to read them, give comments on them, etc. but probably have less questions as they are more about reading the material and then offering your own opinion and analysis to the question.

 

I can say that where I work (large online for profit university, with many campuses), for some of our popular subjects (business, technology, psychology, or education) we are literally getting about 300 to 400 applications per job posted, if its an online job. For our campuses, the numbers are much less but still there has been a spike at around 20 to 30 applications per job, when it used to be maybe 5 or 10. I would say that more people are looking for extra work on the side, so this may be why they are applying, while some of our applicants are new PhD graduates, looking to get their foot in the door with academia.

 

1. Bad economy leads to..
2. More college students leads to..
3. More grad students leads to..
4. More people with Masters degrees

More people with Masters degrees does not lead to
5. More jobs in the economy leads to
6. More applicants for adjunct positions leads to
7. Less jobs in the tenured market leads to
8. More PhDs taking adjunct jobs leads to
9. Less teachers with only a Masters leads to..

10. More unemployed people with Masters leads to..
11. More Doctoral students, leads to..
12. More PhDs trying to get adjunct jobs leads to
13. Fewer employed PhDs per capita leads to
14. Devaluing of the earned degree overall which will eventually lead to..
15. Higher levels of stratification above PhD having to do with grant funding over the long term resulting in..
16. A greater divide between the casual PhD with a career outside academia and..
17. The career academic thus potentially causing a greater divide between..
18. Career schools and Research institutions causing..
19. More debates on degreeinfo.

The pattern has already been seen in Europe (Germany specifically), where educations are largely subsidized. A tenured position over there is largely dependent on establishing a record of obtaining grant funding and being established as a distinguished level of PhD beyond basic degree conferral.

Granted we're not there yet, but I can smell it on the burner and the more "qualified" people there are, the push will be on to differentiate, even further than what we're currently doing with the B&M v. Online debate.

Nuff said.
ITJD

 

I don't know if I buy it because of one reason.

The 'explosion' of graduate degrees is not happening at Tier 1 - 3 universities but at unranked universities like NCU, UOP, Capella, etc.

I've mentioned this before but I adjunct at a small private college (Tier 1 - Masters level) and they wouldn't hire a person with an online doctorate (and I know because I was on an email chain).

So then the question is will the online schools (UOP, UMUC, etc) fill their ranks with their own doctorates? And my suspicion is that they will not. I also adjunct at the biggest for profit and I don't see many adjuncts with academic credentials from that school also working for the school. I'm not saying it never happens but it's just not all that common, especially given the number of graduates.

Employing too many of your graduates is really a red flag for accreditation any way.

I think what you're going to see is that many for profit doctorates end up being ignored in the working world. Sure, the most aggressive folks will make them work but, for many, I don't think they represent much more than a mid-level Masters might.

 

Points noted.

The reason why I believe that my assessment may make sense is two-fold (with shades of gray obviously).

1. It's already happened in some other areas of the world where education is more accessible than the US and I consider history to be the best indication of future events.

2. I'd argue that there are more people in part-time or for profit programs at this point than in the full time well tiered programs (and I'd love to be proven wrong here cause I have no data, it's a gut feeling). As a result the standards for getting the part-time adjuncting jobs are going to be PhD vs. Masters. Not PhD from T1 vs. Masters for access to the majority of students.

As someone who's been on search committees I'm sure you'll attest to the idea of academic diversity. Harvard doesn't want to hire Harvard grads, partially because of accreditation but also because you're just getting a clone of your existing faculty, minus the experience. Not good.

But will a Capella education get you into Dakota State? Yes it will. There are several on staff. Will a UOP Doctorate get you into Capella? Yes it will. Just as having a Yale PhD will get you into Harvard (all of the previous statements assuming academic experience and integrity appropriate to the job search).

So all things being equal and talking apples to apples, you're going to see the standards of scholarship and teaching rise appropriate to the verticals you're referring to. T1 schools are always going to be hiring to a different standard due to research capacity, but after seeing some trends at Capella (where dissertations are leading to PBS specials and media coverage) it's a difference that's going to mitigate over time (granted probably a long time).

Of course. I could be wrong. That's the great thing about being able to have an opinion. When you're proven right, it's a great feeling. When you're wrong, most people forget about you completely.