Online Adjunct Jobs Proliferation
It is tough slogging away at teaching college students when the adjunct college instructor pay is so low, but there is an alternative to not making an actual living at the post-secondary level. This alternative requires making the commitment to thinking outside the traditional academic box, which sounds like a worn out phrase but is actually the very best thing an individual with an earned graduate degree can do right now. Obviously, there will be fewer teaching jobs at every level of education as time goes on, and adjunct instructors continuing to teach in a physical college, university or community classroom are especially vulnerable to the shifting mood of the economy. While it may be emotionally satisfying to lament the decline in the academic labor force as it manifests itself on the traditional campus, it is more profitable, yes, profitable, to acknowledge the proliferation of online adjunct jobs with online college degree programs.
As the cost of maintaining the physical university and college campus accelerates far beyond the administrators obtain an appropriate and necessary level of budget funds, the more adjunct instructors will be laid off and cast into academic darkness. This may seem counterintuitive since adjunct are paid so little to start with, but they will be replaced with full time college teachers that are required to teach more classes each semester. The full time instructor, including tenured professors, will not protest the heavier teaching load because they will be afraid of becoming unemployed themselves and not having the skills to transition into another non-academic career. So, they will gladly accept the large numbers of physical classes and pretend they are not drowning in work that is far beyond what they are being paid to complete it. In many ways the tenured and tenure-track professoriate will become adjuncts without realizing it since their denial of the emerging labor reality cannot be penetrated with logic.
Conversely, it is relatively easy for an adjunct instructor or for a prospective adjunct instructor to grasp the importance of distance education technology and its impact on the academy. For example, every online bachelor degree program in an online mba degree program will be packed with online business courses, which will each need an academically and technically qualified online adjunct instructor to teach it. This holds true for online degree programs that offer students a chance to earn online business management degrees or an online undergraduate business degree. Further, all online bachelor degree programs, regardless of discipline, will have a large number of first year online college courses that the enrolled college or university students must pass in order to matriculate. Each of these online college courses will require an online college professor to coordinate it.
What this means for the alert academic with a Ph.D. or master’s degree are an almost endless number of online adjunct teaching positions to apply for every day. Granted, each of these online adjunct jobs will not pay all that much by themselves, but it is possible for a technically adroit online professor to build an online teaching portfolio that contains multiple online college faculty positions. In the final analysis, it is possible to earn a generous online adjunct income from an inexpensive laptop computer and access to the Internet.
