For adjuncts, reliable information about potential workplaces has always been hard to come by. Many colleges don’t collect the data, and higher-education groups, such as the American Association of University Professors, haven’t been able to find a way to systematically track the pay that adjuncts earn. Over the past year, however, adjuncts across the nation have been turning to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourcing effort that started last February… a snapshot of what about 1,800 adjuncts at 1,050 colleges had reported about their institutions as of late last month shows pay disparities across types of colleges and disciplines and a dearth of health and retirement benefits available to adjuncts in general. Many adjuncts have also indicated that they are essentially shut out of participating in most forms of governance. The overall average pay reported by adjuncts is $2,987 per three-credit course. Adjuncts at 16 colleges reported earning less than $1,000… Seventy-nine percent of adjuncts reported that they didn’t get health insurance at their college. Only 14 percent of adjuncts said they had retirement benefits or the opportunity to buy into a group retirement plan. “I really think the only way that these issues are going to be tackled is by unionization,” says Mr. Feiden, who is active in the part-time-faculty union at Montgomery.

Read full article [here].
by Audrey Williams June and Jonah Newman, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: January 4th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.