According to a new report from CUPA-HR, women are more likely than men to serve as adjunct faculty members, who make significantly less money and receive fewer benefits than their counterparts in tenure-track positions.
Adjunct instructors represent about 40 percent of the overall faculty workforce in higher education. They are nearly half of the faculty workforce at private institutions and over a third of faculty members at public institutions. Adjuncts are most common at associate’s degree-granting institutions (66 percent of all faculty members) and least common at doctoral institutions (33 percent). Across all institutions, women represent 57 percent of adjunct faculty and 44 percent of tenure-track faculty.
Despite being highly educated, adjuncts receive low pay for teaching college courses. The median pay per credit hour for adjunct instructors is less than $1,200, equating to a full-time annual income of $42,000, which is less than the median annual income in the United States. As many institutions consider adjunct instructors to be temporary, part-time employees, many adjuncts do not receive valuable employment benefits, such as health insurance or retirement contributions. However, the report estimates that roughly 7 percent of adjuncts use teaching as their full-time job.
Furthermore, adjunct positions offer little to no job security. Some 70 percent of institutions will cancel courses due to low enrollment, which can lead adjuncts scrambling to find alternative income streams since they are paid on a course-by-course basis.
In addition to adjuncts’ significantly low pay compared to tenure-track professors, there are gender pay disparities within the adjunct profession; White women and Black women adjuncts make 95 cents for every $1 earned by a White male adjunct.