When I started teaching as an adjunct more than a decade ago, I felt as though my wish to become a college professor had been granted, but I hadn’t worded the wish carefully enough. Apparently, when I had talked about my dream of teaching in higher ed, I had not specified — to the unseen academic gods listening in — that as part of this dream/wish I also wanted semester-to-semester job security and full-time benefits, including health care.
Roughly 38 percent of college courses are taught by part-time instructors, according to the most recent data from the American Association of University Professors. As one of those part-timers, I learned quickly that I was expected to manage my classes and mentor and grade students with the same rigor as my full-time colleagues, but at a fraction of their salary and with more limited institutional support. One university I taught at provided a rare offer for part-time faculty members to buy into its health-insurance policy. The catch: The annual cost was more than I would earn there.
Initially, I was disillusioned with the adjunct lifestyle. But over time, I’ve learned how to manage the uncertainties of the part-time faculty job market, find institutions that pay me fairly, and fashion a successful career mixing adjunct work with freelance writing. Although it’s not a perfect career, it’s one I find deeply rewarding, and I’m no longer actively seeking a full-time teaching position. Here are the strategies I used to get here.
Rely on your network to find colleges that pay well. Adjunct work has as wide a range of pay as any profession I’ve ever been involved with. I’ve earned as little as $2,100 for a three-credit class and as much as $8,000 for a four-credit one — and, of course, some colleges pay even more (or even less).
When I was new to teaching, I jumped at any opportunity to build my résumé, regardless of pay. That arguably made sense for a semester or two to build up my CV, but it quickly became a recipe for burnout and what amounted to less-than-minimum wage-per-hour earnings. These days when looking for new adjunct work, I make sure to only touch base with colleges that pay sustainable wages for adjunct instructors.
While some institutions post that info, many others are not so transparent, and it can be hard to find. In my experience, the best way to find out what a university pays adjuncts is to ask friends and co-workers. Even today, people are still reluctant to talk about what they earn. But you can break through that wall of secrecy by explaining why you’re asking and why this information can help your career.
Refuse to be guilted into extra work. Because teaching is a calling for so many of us, it’s easy to treat it differently than you might another job and agree to participate in department-related work for which you are not paid. You wouldn’t do that if you worked at a restaurant, and you shouldn’t be expected to do it at a university.
Good adjunct instructors should — and often do — go above and beyond for their students. Your contract might require office hours, and it’s also reasonable to expect you to meet with the department chair before the start of the semester. But as a part-time instructor, you shouldn’t feel any obligation to do unpaid labor, such as serving on committees or attending department meetings. It’s nice to know people value your opinions, but if they want you to participate in these types of service duties and administrative events, they should pay an honorarium, at a minimum, for your time.
Send your résumé directly to a department chair and avoid application slush piles. One way I always keep my teaching slate full is by regularly reaching out to new institutions. In doing so, I avoid applying for posted adjunct openings, which tend to attract so many qualified applicants that the odds of you or me landing the position are slim, no matter how qualified we are. I also suspect many of those jobs are posted even though the department already has a preferred candidate in mind.
Instead, I tend to reach out to department chairs with a cold email explaining my credentials. This works surprisingly well. Part-time positions are inherently somewhat transient, as many candidates are actively seeking full-time employment and drop their adjunct courses once they get it. That means department chairs often have classes they need to assign and can frequently be willing to work with a newcomer.
Use your subject-matter expertise for other part-time work. That way, you’re not financially ruined if a course gets canceled at the last minute. One of the great frustrations of adjunct work is that you are often asked to commit to teaching a course before the chair knows for sure that it has attracted the necessary number of students. In general, I think more department heads should start reaching out to adjuncts after they know the course will definitely run.
I’ve learned that I have to create a financial plan for each semester that is sustainable even if a course gets canceled and I lose the anticipated income. One way to limit the stress and uncertainty is to have an income stream outside of adjunct instruction. For me, the other portion of my income comes from freelance writing, which pairs nicely with my adjunct work since I teach courses on journalism and writing.
How you use your expertise to generate additional income doesn’t have to be fancy. It might mean tutoring or working part time at a museum. What you do doesn’t much matter so long as you get some type of steady income outside of adjunct instruction.
Embrace the benefits of adjunct work. To build a successful career, the final piece of the puzzle, for me, was realizing that being an adjunct professor does have some benefits that full-time professors don’t enjoy. Those benefits are real, even if they aren’t as tangible as decent health-care benefits. And one of them is full control of our time. From conversations with faculty friends in full-time positions, I know that they have to deal with many time-consuming things — internal politics, grant writing, administrative paperwork, committee service — that aren’t clear from the outside.
Those are concerns we don’t have to deal with as adjuncts, for the most part. Instead, we can stay laser-focused on the best part of being a college professor: working with students. Realizing that has helped me come to appreciate the teaching career I have forged. It’s not the one I envisioned when I was starting out, but it’s one that, these days at least, I am thoroughly enjoying.
