Many traditional adjunct college instructors wind up eating stone soup during the summer months because any available classes are given to the full time faculty members so they can pad their generous salaries. As dire as this situation sounds for adjuncts, it is getting worse every day as budget funds for college and university faculty declines at a rapid rate. There is a very bright side emerging from this cloudy situation, and it is being brought about with the help of distance education technology and the online faculty positions it creates for college instructors. The simple fact of the matter is that administrators at colleges and universities are using what little money they have to maintain the costly physical plant known as the college campus.
These administrators, despite their best efforts to decimate the college faculty through layoffs and outright firings, are losing the economic battle because they can’t throw the adjunct faculty and many of the full time faculty under the bus, so to speak, quickly enough to cover the ever rising expense of old buildings surrounded by parking lots. At the same time, student populations are rising straight through the proverbial roof. The only way to meet the college students’ expectations for a degree is to deploy an academic armada of online college degree programs and hire as many online adjunct instructors as necessary to teach the online college courses in the online degree programs.
The technology used by online degree programs makes it possible to offer continuous classes, including during the dreaded summer months. Everyone concerned, online adjunct instructors, non-traditional students, who make up the bulk of new and returning college students today and the academic administrators who are trying to hang onto their jobs, benefit by the end-to-end online college classes. Specifically, online college teachers can literally have work for almost twelve months of the calendar year.
In order to find online adjunct jobs with accredited online college degree programs it is necessary to visit the websites of the thousands of technical schools, community colleges, colleges and universities and for-profit schools. It is paramount to visit the websites of the for-profit schools because they are much more forthcoming about the amounts they pay their online adjunct instructors and the length of the online classes they offer their students. Further, the for-profit post-secondary academic institutions are very aggressive about student recruitment, so there is always an abundance of online classes to teach during the calendar year. The traditional schools will catch up to the for profit schools soon so it is important to make a faculty application to those academic institutions early and often.
In the end, the very best way to beat the summer semester blues is to start analyzing the college education industry as, well, and industry, which it is regardless of what it says about itself in its public relations brochures. Earning a living as an online adjunct instructor is much more like being an academic entrepreneur than it is being an academic employee. The individual with an earned graduate degree who wishes to earn a decent living by teaching in multiple online faculty positions would do well to understand the difference.
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