Spare A Thought For Your Broke Professor

Precarity has become the norm in academia. That’s bad for everyone.

Penn State, 2011. (Rob Carr/Getty Images.)

American universities have been shelled from all sides of late. Liberals want more equitable access and accountability for student outcomes. Conservatives see higher ed as Woke Central, a crucible of indoctrination and activism run amok. Many young people are opting out of college altogether, staking their bets on a trade.

In such a climate, it’s hard to feel terribly sympathetic toward professors, but there’s been an internal crisis brewing, too. I’m one of many faculty who gave up tenure during the Great Resignation, in part because I felt that corporate influences had taken over the profession I loved, but also because the more I was asked to prioritize good jobs for my students, the crummier my own job looked by comparison. A recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education addresses a question that most people never consider: Can professors afford the American Dream? It is alarming how many cannot.

How can colleges and universities continue to ask poorly compensated faculty or graduate students to help undergraduates land better jobs than their own? If the focus of an undergraduate degree is economic mobility, why does it seem that advanced degrees—particularly the PhD—appear to diminish earning potential, at least within academe? And if this is so, how can such a system possibly continue to operate as is?

The rising cost of higher education makes parents and students want to see a guaranteed return on their investment. The higher the financial risk, the more assurance everyone wants that they’re not just throwing money away. But I’m trying to square this reality with what seems like a fool’s bargain for people with advanced degrees.

Take, for instance, the case of Katherine Vance, a tenured mathematics professor at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. As an Associate Professor with nearly a decade of teaching experience, Vance earns just under $62,000 per year, roughly what one of her students could make as a personal banker immediately after graduation. When she first started out, her family qualified for Medicaid and WIC, even though she and her husband were both working full-time.

When a professor receives benefits designed for low-income families, something is deeply wrong with the system.

John Halbrooks, Associate Professor of English at the University of South Alabama, explains that stagnant wages mean faculty gradually earn less over time: “We have had only one small raise in the last ten years (which amounted to less than one year of inflation), and we do not receive cost-of-living adjustments, so while I have no desire for great wealth, I find myself in the process of becoming poorer and poorer every year as I gain seniority in my profession, as my spending power diminishes to the point that a middle-class life seems to be slipping away.”

The case is even more dire for lecturers and adjuncts. 25% of contingent faculty rely on some form of public assistance. More than two thirds of lecturers, instructors, and adjuncts earn less than $50,000 per year. But the “precariat,” as John Warner styles this population, now accounts for more than 71% of all college instructors in the United States. It is not uncommon to hear stories about professors who are homeless.

Whatever progress tenure-line faculty might make toward fair compensation or workload reduction (through unionization or other negotiations) is necessarily going to create externalities for graduate TAs, adjuncts, and lecturers. That is, if the tenured folks manage to earn what they think is fair, or reduce their teaching load, someone else with similar credentials will have to pick up the slack.

Based on the dismal job prospects in academe for most PhDs, there is almost no rationale for encouraging students to complete a doctorate, especially if their goal is to become a professor. These diminishing prospects mean that first-generation faculty like me are rapidly disappearing from faculty roles. The inevitable outcome is a gentrification of the professoriate—people who can afford to teach because they are subsidized by inherited wealth.

There simply is not enough money in the system, except at elite institutions, to privilege both the student experience and employee well-being. But even wealthy institutions often shortchange their teachers. Boston University reported $8.3 billion in total assets in 2024 and a $3.5 billion endowment, yet nearly 80% of its instructional staff are adjuncts or non-tenure track faculty with little job security from one year to the next.

My local institution, Penn State, relies on contingent faculty for roughly half of its instructional needs. While it offers benefits to many full-time teachers, the annual pay is shockingly low—beginning at $35K for humanities teachers not on the tenure track. That is less than the livable wage for a single person in Centre County and half the sustainable income required for a household with one adult and one child. A teaching professor at Penn State won’t be able to send their own children to college without considerable debt, despite devoting their career to helping other young people succeed.

Small wonder that graduate students have been striking with increasing frequency. Many of them don’t even earn the minimum wage for their state; it is not uncommon for graduate stipends to pay less than $20,000 per year. So it can safely be said that every institution with a graduate program benefits from exploited labor in some way.

Kevin R. McClure describes academe as a land of dead-end jobs—for both faculty and staff: “It’s hard to conclude anything other than that higher education has done a spectacularly bad job of managing talent. Campuses have evolved over centuries and dedicated resources to perfect the art and science of human development, while largely outsourcing or ignoring the professional growth and learning of their employees. Rather than draw upon their own experts to develop and retain workers, institutions let employees burn out, and then replace them.”

Colleges and universities are bad at managing talent because they recruit faculty with a mythology about passion and purpose that contradicts what those same institutions claim their graduates will receive as a return on their investment in tuition. But the more institutions justify themselves by helping students make a return on their investment, the more they cut the passion myth off at the knees. Put simply, colleges are asking faculty to knowingly sacrifice their own earning potential for the sake of helping students maximize theirs. Instead of making a difference, many college teachers are paying the difference.

A glance at national salary averages for faculty, averages by state, or the more specific breakdown of individual institutions shows a wide range. It is thus possible for Steven Levitt, host of the Freakonomics podcast and an endowed professor at the University of Chicago, to reply to a listener question about why college costs so much with the glib response that people like him are paid ridiculous amounts for not doing very much. But, in essence, top-earning faculty like Levitt require other faculty and staff to subsidize their high pay.

The average salary for full professors at the University of Chicago in 2021 was a little over $250K, compared to an average salary of about $70K for instructors and lecturers. Levitt might counter that his pay (likely north of the average, given his distinction) is simply a market rate—that he’d just move into finance if the university couldn’t make his position attractive enough. But enough lecturers have to be willing to be exploited at the University of Chicago to keep the big fish happy.

It is difficult for prospective parents or students to get a straight answer about the faculty workload at different institutions. But a reliable benchmark of fairness is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to contingent employees. If you see a lot of different titles—many “research professors” or “teaching professors” in a department with regular professors, or a high percentage of lecturers and instructors—that is a sign of a caste system. This does not mean that your child will not have a good experience there. Chances are good that all of those teachers are going to be giving their best, trying to make a difference. But chances are also good that your child will benefit from exploited labor.

Increasingly, families are opting out of college altogether, less for ethical reasons than for clearer paths to prosperity. But this is one conversation I’ll be having with my own kids if they go to university. I want to know that the faculty who will help my children chase a better life have a realistic chance at fulfilling the same dream.

Joshua Doležal is a book coach and editor. He is the author of Someday Johnson Creek, a book of poems, and The Recovering Academic. In 2021 he left a tenured faculty position at Central College, in Iowa, where he is now an emeritus professor of English.

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