In my last post here, I talked generally about how adjuncts are employed and about the potential effects of their use and abuse on educational quality. I’m grateful for the responses to that post, which take up a number of important issues, including budgetary concerns, exploitation of adjunct labor, and some suggestions that colleges and universities might more wisely employ their budgets to increase the percentage of full-time faculty members (whether tenure track or not).
I’ve done a little math on my own budget that I want to share to show the dilemmas facing my small university with regard to adjunct employment. For context, we have about 1,000 students on the campus and another 2,000 in professional and online programs in 14 locations around the state. For now, I am only discussing our operations on our home campus.
First, some figures. Our total annual university budget is about $38-million. The salaries (excluding benefits) of every full-time employee who reports to me total about $7.5 million — that includes employees in the library, registrar’s office, institutional research, and several other small offices as well as the faculty and academic staff members. Our average faculty salary is somewhere around $60,000. Our teaching load is 24 credit hours a year, or the dreaded 4/4.
This year, we have spent $217,000 on adjuncts. Since we pay $667 per credit hour (which I don’t think is nearly enough), we have used about 325 credit hours of adjunct time, or the equivalent of roughly 13.5 full-time faculty members. To hire 13.5 full timers at our average salary would cost about $810,000. In reality, we would mostly start with entry-level hires, so for the sake of argument, let’s say we’d spend around $725,000 on them. In addition, we’d need to pay benefits, which we don’t now offer to adjuncts, and that would add another $239,250 in costs. Thus, hiring enough full-time faculty members to eliminate our use of adjuncts would cost $964,250. Minus the adjunct expenses, that would be a net increase of $747,250.
For perspective, next year, we will have to cut our budget by approximately $2.4-million because of the economic climate.
Numerous critics of practices surrounding adjunct employment accuse hiring institutions of “administrative bloat” which, if eliminated, could enable a solution to the overall problem. I’m probably not very credible on that matter since I am part of the administration, but at least at my institution, we run quite lean already. If we are to maintain operations and compliance with various regulations, accreditation requirements, and other external compulsions, even the most ruthless cutting of administrative costs wouldn’t get us more than perhaps $300,000 in budget relief. So it’s not likely that we can fix our adjunct situation merely by deflating a bloated management structure.
I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to provide more full-time faculty slots, and to ensure that our use of adjuncts is appropriate professionally and educationally. But the numbers refuse to add up, and while my small and reasonably agile institution can move in the right direction, that movement is going to be slow no matter what we do.
