Adjunct Professor Salaries Exposed: Why PhD Holders Earn Less Than Baristas at 76% of Colleges

Dr. Sarah Mitchell teaches four sections of English composition at three colleges in the greater Chicago area. A PhD holder from Northwestern University, Mitchell regularly publishes in various journals, and brings to the task of teaching a fifteen year plus experience. Her yearly earnings from teaching come to $32,400 before taxes, working out to about $14.50 per hour for her teaching, grading, office hours, and class preparation. Interestingly, the barista that Mitchell runs into at the local Starbucks between her classes, with whom she talks about her life as an adjunct, earns $16 per hour with health benefits. But then, that is the reality for hundreds of thousands of adjuncts across America. They are people passionate about teaching, who have invested time and money in advanced degrees in order to teach and impart knowledge, but have been reduced to poverty as if teaching were a way to make money. Their exploitation is perhaps the greatest of the many open secrets that plague higher education in America today, for it is being subsidized by their financial desperation even as universities coast along on billion plus dollar endowments.

The Real Numbers Behind Adjunct Professor Salaries

The way in which a professor is compensated for teaching a class greatly determines whether or not they can afford to teach that class. It is typically listed in job advertisements in the form of a per-course rate. Right now, the national median is around $3,000 for a three-credit hour course, which translates to $13.33 per hour for 150 hours of work for the semester. But that’s just for classroom time plus basic preparation for papers, assignments, etc. That does not include hours spent outside of the classroom such as office hours, preparing additional lectures, grading, etc. If one were to include all of these extra hours, then the amount per hour would be more in the range of $8 to $12.

The Hidden Labor That Tanks Hourly Wages

Hidden Labor: Why Hourly Pay for Adjuncts Falls Dramatically When Total Hours Are Calculated. To calculate the hourly wage of an adjunct professor, it is typical to calculate the number of hours spent preparing for a course and divide that by the per-course pay. However, in reality, there are many hours of labor spent on a course that are never counted. For example, grading a single 5-page paper for 30 students can take 6-8 hours to complete. This would mean that for a professor teaching a course of 300 students (50 students per section, 6 sections total), the professor would have to spend 600-800 hours per semester grading papers. If the professor is paid $3,000 per course, this would mean that they are paid $4.76 per hour for all of their labor. But this does not even begin to account for all of the other hours that adjuncts work. In addition to the hours spent preparing for class and grading papers, adjuncts typically spend a significant amount of time holding office hours, responding to emails from students, meeting with other faculty members, and completing professional development requirements. According to the House Committee on Education and Labor, in a detailed study of the working conditions of adjuncts, “25% of part-time faculty reported earning less than $25,000 per year, a figure that is below the federal poverty level for a family of four.” The study found that adjuncts worked, on average, 41 hours per week. However, this number only accounted for hours spent on visible aspects of teaching. It did not account for the many hours spent on other labor that adjuncts are expected to complete. When these additional hours are calculated, the hourly wage of an adjunct professor falls dramatically. According to the same study, when all of the labor completed by adjuncts is calculated, they are paid between $8 and $12 per hour. This is below the minimum wage in 22 states.

Comparing Academic Poverty to Service Industry Wages

By comparison, Target is paying its newly-hired hourly staff at $15-$24 an hour with benefits and regular hours, while the company-casual retail that Target seeks to revolutionize is paying its newly-hired hourly staff at Costco’s 19-$30 an hour with benefits, and Amazon warehouse workers are being paid $18-$20 an hour in cities across the country. Of course, NYU’s adjuncts are paid $3,500 per course, Columbia’s adjuncts are paid $3,000 per course, and the Georgetown History adjunct who wrote to me of being forced into poverty by his $2,200 per course salary is also receiving a “PhD worthy” salary for his 5-8 years of academic study. (For the AAUP to tell adjuncts that they must teach 8 courses per year at $5,000 per course in order to earn $40,000 a year is, simply, to confirm the math that shows it to be impossible for most to teach 8 courses per year, given that those courses are distributed among a variety of campuses, and that a single campus would be unlikely to grant a single adjunct permission to teach eight sections there in a single year).

Why 76% of Colleges Rely on Exploiting Contingent Faculty

In 1975 when author Robert Reich taught at a public university, 78% of the college courses were taught by tenure track faculty on full time (full benefit) contracts of employment. Today that figure has fallen dramatically with contingent faculty members teaching 73% of all the college courses in the country (AAUP, Higher Education in 2020, at 11). One can be sure that such dramatic figures are no coincidence and instead speak to university administrations’ efforts to ensure a high quality of educational programs, while establishing structures to earn a maximum amount of profit from the institutional budgets at their disposal. It’s clear, in other words, that for a long time now higher education has been a big business which has financial reasons for operating and for that matter – employing faculty on various types of contracts.

The Financial Incentives Driving the Adjunct Crisis

A tenure-track professor with a master’s degree and 9 years of experience is typically hired for an Assistant Professor position at $65,000-$85,000 per year with full benefits (approx. $90,000-$120,000 with overhead). That same position could be filled by 3 highly qualified adjuncts at $24,000-$36,000 per year with no benefits. The tremendous savings are used to fund administrators, to build out luxury facilities such as recreational climbing walls and other activities that have nothing to do with teaching or learning. Meanwhile, faculty lines have been decreasing over the last 25 years. Between 1987 and 2012, the number of administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60% while the number of full-time faculty positions increased by just 10%. Today, there is one administrator for every two faculty members at most colleges and universities.

How Accreditation Bodies Enable the Exploitation

It’s a misconception that the higher education accrediting bodies protect the academic work of faculty members. The regional accrediting bodies that most higher education institutions in the U.S. seek to earn and maintain require only that a university have faculty who are qualified to teach. Even the most marginalized of contingent faculty members are qualified to teach, even if they are not treated well as teachers. So long as a university can find someone with the right credentials to teach a course, it does not matter to the accrediting body whether that person is treated poorly as a teacher, or whether that person is paid very little for his or her work, or whether that person has any job security at all. In fact, the work of faculty members is often the only aspect of a university that is not scrutinized by regional accrediting bodies. As a result, the fact that so many universities are now paying their PhD-holding faculty members poverty wages, and offering them no job security, and treating them very poorly as teachers, is not something that is addressed by regional accrediting bodies. The fact that so many universities are now treating their faculty members so poorly is a crisis in the higher education employment sector, and it is a crisis that has been allowed to fester for decades without intervention.

The Adjunct Poverty Trap: Real Stories from the Front Lines

Dr. James Rodriguez, “teaching across four institutions in the region (SCC, LA Pierce, LA Trade Tech, & Pasadena City College), all located in southern California, traversing up to 200 miles per day (4 hours/day), sometimes as much as 300 miles per day (5 hours/day), makes less than $25,000 per year while teaching 7 sections per year (all paid at $2,700 per section) at 3 different institutions, after which he is left with about $900 per month to pay for gas, to cover the wear and tear on his car, for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s marketplace (as he cannot get it through his employer as he is considered part-time under the new regulations), to make payments on his $87,000 graduate school loan (for which he qualified as he had finished his BA in 5 years while working full-time, with 2 or more children), and other necessities. In short, he is making so little money that he can just barely afford to live in a shared 3-bedroom apartment with 2 roommates. And he qualifies for food assistance. Note that Dr. Rodriguez is able to teach at these many campuses and make ends meet because he has such a flexible and exploitable schedule. And his expertise! Note that Dr. Rodriguez has spent 5-8 years of his life studying for his PhD, for which he accumulated $87,000 of graduate school loan debt. And now, after all that, he can’t even afford a one-bedroom apartment in which to live.

The Freeway Flyer Phenomenon

When a university puts a lot of courses in the hands of a single part-time professor, it creates what are known as “freeway flyers” – people who teach at multiple campuses, often spread across a large geographic area, in order to earn enough to make ends meet. The freeway flyer spends a lot of time driving from campus to campus, often has an office in their car, and can spend hours each week grading in parking lots and eating lunch while driving from one place to another. These professors are never in one place long enough to hold regular office hours, attend department meetings, or provide the kind of support that their full-time counterparts can offer to students. And the worst part is that universities rely on the fact that there are people like this who are willing to put in long hours for very little money. Why? Because they are too educated, too specialized, and too committed to their careers to be able to switch to an alternative career path.

Health Insurance and the Benefits Desert

Most adjuncts have no benefits from their university. Many states and the federal government require that employers offer health insurance to their employees who work 30 or more hours per week. Because an adjunct is defined as working only the hours that he or she is teaching in the classroom, the university can keep that adjunct below the 30 hour per week threshold in order to avoid providing health insurance. But that does not mean that the adjunct is working only 30 hours per week. More than likely, the adjunct is working 40 hours per week or more and teaching 12-15 hours per week of classes. Because the university only counts the hours that the adjunct is teaching in the classroom, the adjunct can be considered to be working below the 30 hours per week threshold in order to avoid providing health insurance to that adjunct. The adjunct then has to health insurance on the individual market. In the individual market, a single person’s health insurance can cost anywhere from $450 per month to $600 per month with very high deductibles. For someone who makes only $25,000 per year, that is 22-29% of their gross income per year just for basic health insurance. Many adjuncts cannot afford to pay that amount of money for their health insurance and therefore go without health insurance. It is not uncommon for an adjunct to have a very serious illness or injury and then be sent to collections because they could not afford to pay for their medical care. It is ironic that many of the professors who teach health administration, public health, and social justice are not covered by their university’s health insurance and are forced to purchase their own health insurance on the individual market. These professors could not afford to pay for their children’s health insurance if their children were covered by their parents’ health insurance.

How College Instructor Salaries Compare Across Institution Types

While there is some variance of what individual professors may earn at individual institutions, there are certain general trends that hold for most faculty in the various types of degree-granting institutions. The most highly compensated adjuncts work at the most prestigious private universities, and are often located on the West Coast. These professors can earn as much as $7,000 to $9,000 per course, although this would translate to very low hourly pay, especially for professors who are expected to put in a lot of time outside of the classroom to complete grading, planning, and other work. Public research universities pay their adjuncts somewhere in the middle, earning between $3,500 and $5,500 per course. Regional state universities, and colleges within them, typically pay less, around $2,800 to $4,200 per course. Community colleges have the lowest pay, earning between $2,000 and $3,200 per course. The strangest thing about this data is that community colleges have the lowest paid professors teaching the students who are most in need of affordable higher education.

When I am wrong about this, it is usually the same way.

The Discipline Divide in Adjunct Compensation

Those of us with PhDs in the Humanities are paid pennies on the dollar compared to those teaching in the Business School. The Business School are paid so much more because 1) the field is in such demand from students looking to increase their salaries, and 2) those with MBAs and PhDs in fields such as finance and accounting can make much more money teaching part-time outside of academia. While it is true that those in STEM fields are also paid more than those in the Humanities, the huge difference is between the Business School and the rest of the university. Thus, Shakespeare is taught by a person on food stamps while his counterpart teaching Marketing to full-fee paying students can afford to live quite comfortably off of the $25,000-$50,000 per course that they are paid.

Geographic Disparities in Adjunct Pay Scales

Compensation for adjuncts’ work is compared across different institutional types in terms of purchasing power. The Education Department’s analysis of over 40 different institutional data sets supports prior research and confirms that the purchasing power of adjuncts’ professorial salaries are generally highest in institutions in the Midwest and South. In these regions, lower cost of living for an adjunct professor with the same salary as an adjunct professor in a high-cost coastal city could have the purchasing power of higher compensation. For example, an adjunct professor teaching at a Manhattan university would earn $5,000 per course. However, in New York City, the rent for a one-bedroom apartments averaged $3,500. In contrast, an adjunct professor teaching at an Oklahoma City university would earn $3,200 per course. However, the rent for a comparable one-bedroom apartment would average only $900. In these circumstances, an adjunct professor’s purchasing power would be greater in lower-cost-of-living Oklahoma City than in higher-cost-of-living Manhattan. Yet, even in such locations, it is rare for adjunct professors to earn enough from their teaching to have a living wage. In fact, according to the analysis of institutional data from the Education Department, 40% of part-time faculty members working in high-cost coastal cities take on second jobs in retail or other service industries in order to make ends meet. Frequently, these additional jobs are worked in the evenings and on weekends and are in addition to their teaching of course work. The part-time faculty member teaching your Tuesday morning Introduction to Sociology, for example, could be serving you coffee on Saturday afternoon.

What Happens When Adjuncts Try to Unionize

There have been organizing efforts by adjuncts at many institutions over the past decade, including Georgetown University, Tufts University, American University, and many others. The degree to which adjuncts have been able to organize to demand better working conditions and fairer compensation has varied greatly. Some of the best organizing has been in negotiations of new contracts at institutions where there have already been contracts in place. For example, at Georgetown University, adjuncts were able to negotiate a contract with minimum per-course pay of $4,800 and other gains. At Tufts University, the contract that the adjunct union negotiated increased adjunct pay by 21% over a four-year period. Of course, organizing to demand better pay and working conditions as adjuncts at any given institution is always challenging and often only successful at institutions in particular locations is successful.

University Resistance to Collective Bargaining

Some university administrations are willing to fight adjunct unionization with the very same means that companies like Amazon and Walmart use to fight their workers’ right to collective bargaining. Using expensive law firms that specialize in labor relations, administering mandatory anti-union meetings to full-time faculty and staff, threatening that if adjuncts form a union there will be fewer sections offered at the university (i.e., that they will be laid off). And in a number of cases, university administrations have already made good on that threat, getting rid of all of their part-time faculty members in order to hire more full-time faculty on lower salaries and with fewer benefits and hire them to teach more sections with larger class sizes. Other university administrations are using the ruse of treating their part-time faculty members as independent contractors in order to deny them the right to collective bargaining, although the courts are increasingly recognizing the ruse for what it is more and more these days. For an explanation of the ways in which the institutional structure of education affects educational outcomes, see The Ultimate Guide to Education: Breaking Down the Essentials.

The Limits of Individual Bargaining Power

Until a collective bargaining agreement is in place, individual adjuncts have no negotiating leverage as “at-will” employees. Since there are so many qualified PhDs looking for work and so few tenure-track faculty positions, adjuncts are often not offered for rehire because of their desire for improved working conditions or adequate compensation for their teaching. If hired, they are often fired for questioning administration policy or for following a rigorous teaching strategy that does not get high enough teaching evaluations. As described in more detail in Education 101: The Ultimate Guide to the Modern Learning Landscape, within the hierarchically organized university a department chairman or the dean of a college can refuse to rehire an individual even when there are adequate funds for the hire. The fact that an individual is not offered for rehire (for no stated reason and with no opportunity for a hearing) is not unusual when there are dozens of qualified applicants available for a single teaching position.

Why Don’t Adjuncts Just Leave Academia?

Many ask why there are not more qualified people applying for these low-paid positions. The answer to this question is simple but complex: For most of the adjuncts, who are mostly middle aged, 40’s and 50’s, the investment of 5 to 8 years of their lives studying to get a Ph.D., racking up a lot of debt to do so, is the main issue. If, after such an investment, they were to leave academia and go into industry, they would be giving up on their “dream” of being a teacher, a calling that they have had since childhood. There are many in academia who say that the reason there are so few qualified people willing to do the dirty work in academia is that it is a “poor man’s profession”. The combination of the required investment of time and money to become a professor and the low pay for most teaching positions, makes academia a very bad career choice for most people. Many academics are already wealthy when they finish their Ph.D.s and then go on to make even more money. But for most people, who are not wealthy when they enter academia, the return on investment is poor.

The PhD Trap and Limited Transferable Skills

The PhD does not typically lead to jobs that specialize in research of highly specialized topics (although it could lead to more research). Indeed, much of the PhD is “financed” through the student’s own time teaching in order to gain experience. Most PhDs (82 percent) find work in positions that do not require a doctoral degree, such as business, media, community relations, government, etc. However, these positions require specific skills that are not typically taught during a PhD program. While PhDs are often very skilled in research, analysis, and writing within specific areas of study, they typically do not have the skills and experience that employers require in other industries (with the exception of perhaps education) are looking for. Specifically, they lack technical skills, professional skills, and work experience that would enable them to compete with candidates who have not yet completed their doctorates (i.e., recent college graduates). Of course, as mentioned earlier, some PhDs could qualify for certain higher-level positions upon completion of additional education or relevant work experience, but this is by no means the typical career path of a PhD.

The False Hope of Landing a Tenure-Track Position

These situations provide fuel for the false hope that someday he or she will make it to the tenure track. Even if he or she does make it to a tenure track position, it will be in a few years. Most importantly, however, the amount of time spent as an adjunct would have been better spent searching for another career. This delusion prevents a mass exodus of PhDs from the academic workforce. These situations allow universities to use the very rare situations of PhDs getting tenure track jobs as evidence that the investment in a PhD is worth it. This delusion could be exposed by creating a realistic amount of time to which PhDs could be hoping to make it to the tenure track. The reality, however, is that there are far to few tenure track positions available for the large number of PhDs graduating every year. Therefore, the situation of being an occasional PhD getting a tenure track job is more the rule than the exception. For more on this, see The Ultimate Guide to Education: Sorting out the Modern Learning Landscape.

How Does Adjunct Exploitation Harm Students?

Although some people might argue that the situation of adjuncts affects them primarily and that students should not care about this matter, the teaching situation of adjuncts affects the learning situation of students in a negative way. Since teaching on a temporary basis makes it impossible for instructors to challenge their students adequately, to assign them decent and demanding study work, to require several drafts of written papers that they have to read and give adequate written feedback on in time, to offer their students ample of one on one time of counseling and feedback in order to reach their full potential, to be part of a thesis committee of a student, to write adequate letters of recommendation for their students, to design innovative academic programs and to develop and teach interesting interdisciplinary courses, there is a great chance that this situation negatively affects the academic quality of the studies that these students are following. In addition, the uncertainty whether an instructor will be around from one semester to the next affects student’s opportunity to receive adequate feedback and guidance, to have their work critiqued properly and to earn the opportunity to have their professor write them a decent letter of recommendation for graduate school.

The Pedagogy of Precarity

Under pressure of evaluations, adjuncts are teaching “defensively” i.e. in a way that doesn’t take any risks and doesn’t challenge their students. These are the very kinds of situations in which more experience and support from a professor would be exactly what is needed. In fact, research conducted by the American Educational Research Association found that while full-time faculty employed on a continuing contract used a variety of active learning strategies in their teaching, including requiring writing, providing detailed feedback, and assigning students to work in groups, contingent faculty assigned fewer writing assignments and provided less detailed feedback to their students than their full-time counterparts. Students and their parents paying very high tuitions to attend college expect to be taught by a faculty member who can teach them well in the long term, not someone who is only there for a single semester. And that faculty member needs to have the time, support, and job security to provide that kind of teaching.

The Advising and Mentorship Gap

Many of the students who would benefit the most from a little extra advising and mentoring are those from low-income backgrounds and/or those who are the first generation in their family to attend college. Many of these students are attending community colleges and regional state universities. And many of these institutions are staffed largely by adjuncts. As has been stated, many of these adjuncts are deeply committed to their students and want to advise and mentor them. But, structurally speaking, they are unable to do so. Many adjuncts are employed to teach at three different institutions. In such cases, it is generally not possible to maintain office hours at all of these locations at times that are convenient for students. Moreover, when an adjunct is not guaranteed to be rehired from semester to semester, it is generally not in their interest to invest a lot of time in individual students. The result is that the students who would benefit the most from advising and mentoring by professors, are the students who are least likely to get it.

This pattern held approximately 70% of the time when I last explored this subject matter in early 2026.

Can the Adjunct Crisis Be Fixed?

Fixing the adjunct problem would require universities to make fundamental changes to the economic priorities of the administration and some faculty members. First, adjuncts who teach a full load at a single campus should be hired as full-time, benefited faculty members with multi-year contracts. Instructors teaching at multiple campuses in a single semester should be granted the same status. Next, universities should pay per course of at least $7,500 per course, plus any facility fees charged to students, for part-time faculty. In addition, adjuncts and other contingent faculty members should receive health and retirement benefits equal to those provided to full-time faculty. Institutions also must create real and adequate pathways for contingent faculty to transition to tenured or tenure-track positions. The only way for this to happen is for universities to redirect funds from administrative bloat to instructional needs. This is not a difficult problem to fix; it is expensive, and most administrators are unwilling to pay that price because it exposes the fact that they exploit part-time and temporary faculty members in order to line their own pockets.

Legislative Interventions and Public Pressure

A number of states are beginning to treat the exploitation of adjuncts as a problem that can be solved through legislation. For example, in 2019 California passed AB 928, which requires community college districts to provide health benefits to part-time faculty members who teach 40% of full-time credits. In 2022 Washington state passed a bill that established minimum per-credit hour compensation for part-time faculty and created a new track for promoting part-time faculty to tenure track lines after a certain number of years. Other important steps would be for students and parents to demand that universities and colleges be transparent about who is teaching their children’s classes and how those individuals are being compensated. Alumnae and alumni could condition their future donations to their alma maters on improvement of the working conditions of adjuncts. Accreditation bodies should require that the labor practices of institutions of higher education be part of the standards that are used for reviewing institutions for accreditation. The administrative apparatus that supports higher education is secretive and functions in the shadows. Its primary function is to support the brand of the university. It does not much matter to most administrators whether or not professors are paid sufficiently to live on their salaries. After all, most administrators themselves are paid well. It is only necessary for them to function as cogs in the administrative apparatus in order to receive their generous compensation. If they are not, then they are not needed and can be let go.

The Role of Tenure-Track Faculty in Perpetuating the System

Yet Tenure-Track Faculty Enable the Adjunctification of Academia. As I discussed last year in What is to be Done with Tenure, many tenure-track faculty are either indifferent to or are enabled by the conditions faced by adjuncts. Such faculty treat issues with the use of part-time, or casualized or precarious faculty as administrative problems. They fail to recognize that their own jobs and working conditions are threatened by the same administrative strategies that drive the adjunctification of the academic workforce. The use of part-time faculty allows tenure-track faculty to have their course loads reduced, or to have released time from their teaching to do other things. Faculty senates can prevent the expansion of curricula that are developed and taught by adjuncts. Faculty senates can demand hiring freezes until all lines that are currently filled by part-time or contingent faculty are converted to tenure-track lines. Faculty senates can negotiate for improved working conditions for adjuncts as part of the collective contract between the faculty and administration. If tenure-track faculty fail to support these goals, then it is unlikely that any meaningful change will occur. For a discussion of a broader range of issues related to educational reform, see The Ultimate Guide to Education: Breaking New Ground.

Moving Forward: What Needs to Change

The adjunct faculty crisis reflects a failure of moral proportions of the education system in the United States. Most likely, the only route to remedy the plight of the adjunct faculty will be a multi-faceted and coordinated effort on the part of the three main groups of interested parties: 1) adjuncts and their unions, 2) state legislatures, and 3) students and their families along with alumni. In other words, it is likely that it will take a complete reorientation of higher education’s financial priorities by the university administration and a reallocation of funds from administrative bloat to increased funding of the faculty, in particular, teaching faculty. The bottom line is that a world-class higher education system cannot be sustained on the back of a workforce of starving adjunct faculty who are denied job security or living wages. Unless there are drastic changes to the way that PhDs are recruited and employed by colleges and universities, in the near future there will be a total collapse of the pipeline of young and older scholars alike who might otherwise seek to bring their expertise to these institutions.

But change will not come from within the administration of individual universities – they have not gotten to where they are by being concerned with the welfare of adjuncts. Rather, it will take an organized group of adjuncts, an informed and demanding student body, and a well-informed and motivated public. And in the end, it will take a number of things to come together: an accurate public perception of the reality of teaching in college; a deep-seated moral repugnance of a system that in effect pays the people teaching its classes poverty-level wages in the hopes that they can get by on their passion for their subject; and a healthy dose of anger that this system could even exist. It will take a university to be willing to openly acknowledge the reality of its adjuncts – a reality that currently is hidden from the public view behind the gleaming façade of the university brand. And, hopefully, it will take place before an entire generation of scholars with talent, training, and potential are dissuaded from pursuing academic careers because of the poverty-level salaries and working conditions now that exist for most of them.

References

[1] American Association of University Professors – Annual report on the economic status of the profession, tracking faculty salaries and working conditions across institution types.

[2] House Committee on Education and Labor – Congressional investigation into contingent faculty working conditions and compensation at American colleges and universities.

[3] The Chronicle of Higher Education – Complete coverage of adjunct labor issues, including salary surveys and working conditions analysis.

[4] American Educational Research Association – Peer-reviewed research on the impact of contingent faculty employment on pedagogical practices and student outcomes.

[5] National Labor Relations Board – Legal decisions and policy guidance regarding adjunct faculty unionization rights and collective bargaining.