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The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s
Ruthless labor exploitation? Generational betrayal? Understanding the job crisis in academia requires a look at recent history.
The humanities labor market is in crisis. Higher education industry trade publications are full of essays by young Ph.D.s who despair of ever finding a steady job. Phrases like “unfolding catastrophe” and “extinction event” are common. The number of new jobs for English professors has fallen every year since 2012, by a total of 33 percent.
In response to these trends and a longer-term decline in academic job security, the Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made a proposal. In exchange for federal funding to reduce public college and university tuition to zero, he said, at least 75 percent of college courses would have to be taught by tenured or tenure-track professors. Currently, that proportion is less than 40 percent and dropping.
How this happened is a story of a rupture in the way the academy produces and consumes people with scholarly credentials.
In 1995, roughly 940,000 people were employed teaching college. Of those, about 400,000 had tenure or were on track to get it. They enjoyed professional status, strong job security, relatively good pay (on average), and the freedom to speak their minds.
The rest were so-called contingent or adjunct faculty: some employed full time, others filling in a course or two per semester. They had lower pay, less status and tenuous job security, particularly if they spoke their minds. There were also thousands of graduate students, not counted in the numbers above, teaching as part of their training. (The University of California, Santa Cruz, which is known to be progressive even by the standards of academia, recently fired 54 graduate assistants who were striking for higher pay.)
The percentage of professors on the tenure track had been slowly declining since the 1970s. In the late 1990s came a demographic event that would ultimately throw the university labor market into a tailspin: the first college years of the so-called millennials, those born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.
Colleges swelled with students over the next decade and a half, with undergraduate enrollment increasing from 12.2 million in 1995 to a peak of 18.1 million in 2011. Colleges needed to hire hundreds of thousands of additional professors.
Administrators had options. They could have kept the ratio of tenured to nontenured about the same, using new tuition revenue to create more tenure-track positions.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the number of contingent faculty more than doubled, to 1.1 million. The number of tenured and tenure-track faculty, by contrast, increased by only 9.6 percent, to 436,000.
It is not the case that there are fewer tenured college professors now than there used to be. In absolute terms, there are more. But 94 percent of the net increase in college professors hired to teach the millennial generation were contingent, meaning off the tenure track.
For colleges, this was cheaper. The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market. Many adjuncts earn only a few thousand dollars per course, with no health insurance or retirement benefits. Twenty-five percent of part-time faculty receive some form of public assistance. Some adjunct postings don’t require doctorates.
At the same time as the contingent ranks were growing, a new generation of students was completing bachelor’s degrees, and enrollment in Ph.D. programs increased. Because doctorates can take eight years or longer to complete, many millennials were still in graduate school when the higher education industry took a turn for the worse after the Great Recession.
The 2008 economic downturn hammered state budgets, resulting in major cuts to public university funding that persisted well into the 2010s. At the same time, the millennial demographic wave crested. Undergraduate enrollment dropped by 1.2 million between 2011 and today. Universities needed fewer professors, and they had less money to pay them.
The timing of the recession surprised many experts. But universities knew that the business cycle still existed. They knew when the demographic tide would recede, it being a function of the number of births that had occurred 18 years earlier. (The total number of undergraduates declined significantly even after a huge increase in the number of international students from China and elsewhere.) And they understood the academic labor market, since they created and controlled its conditions.
Yet at no point did universities seem to consider slowing the flow of students into the Ph.D. pipeline. The opposite happened. In 1988, the number of doctorates in the humanities conferred was estimated to be 3,570, and it increased to 5,145 in 2018.
Tenured professors like having graduate students around. They teach the boring undergraduate sections for little or no pay and provide inexpensive research assistance. For many veteran scholars, training the next generation is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.
There was another complication. In 1994, a new federal law outlawed the widespread practice of requiring professors to retire at age 70. The effects of this accumulated as the baby boom generation aged. The oldest tenured boomers turned 70 in 2016, just in time to not retire and not create room for millennials hitting the job market with newly minted Ph.D.s.
Consumer preferences also shifted. Stung by ever-rising tuition costs and anxious about a treacherous job market, many students left the humanities for more job-focused majors after the Great Recession.
All of this resulted in a severe misalignment of supply and demand. Universities had spent the better part of two decades training more people for jobs that universities simultaneously decided they didn’t need, just as economic, demographic and legal conditions began further depressing the need for professors. It’s no wonder that many humanities majors are using their considerable creative and rhetorical skills to liken their job searches to various post-apocalyptic imaginings.
As competition for tenure-track jobs becomes more fierce, only the graduates of top-ranked programs have a realistic chance, and even they increasingly settle for positions at less prestigious institutions that emphasize teaching and service over research. For example, the University of Michigan’s English department is ranked in the top 12 by U.S. News & World Report. Of the approximately 50 scholars who have graduated from the department and won tenure-track positions since 2008, only one is employed at a top 12 department, and that is Michigan itself.
Senator Sanders’s proposed legislation would be a highly unusual federal intrusion in the way universities conduct their academic business, and would probably be attacked by the higher education lobby. Some have looked to the example of K-12 teachers, who have used mass strikes and protests to earn substantial wage increases in recent years.
But there’s a crucial difference between schoolteachers and college professors. Elementary, middle, and high school teachers all have versions of the same job. They sink and swim and bargain together. The academy is a two-tier caste system, split between those who won the tenure tournament and those who lost.
And the academic labor market crisis is, in many ways, good for the winners. When a flood of Ph.D.s desperate to keep a toehold in academia depresses adjunct wages, that makes it cheaper for universities to hire them to teach classes and free up time for tenured researchers to do what they enjoy: conduct research. The more tenure becomes a rare prize, the more the victors may see themselves as uniquely deserving.
Until that changes, the academic labor market will most likely continue to feel like a wasteland.
Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America. You can follow him on Twitter at @kevincarey1.
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