It is understandably difficult for professional academics to assimilate the current employment landscape as it is developing in front of them. The biggest problem may be that graduate school did not prepare educators with a masters degree or Ph.D. for the decline in public funds for post-secondary education. Certainly, there would have been nothing at all during graduate school to prepare future academics to understand how secondary education could be stripped of budgetary funds to pay faculty members. However, that is exactly what is happening in the physical classrooms, and it could be argued that the adjunct college faculty members teaching and physical college and university classrooms on traditional campuses are being hurt more than others by the loss of public money for income. After all, traditional adjunct college instructors haven’t been able to earn a full time salary for at least the last decade. There is a way to alleviate a good deal of the distress academics feel by being underemployed or unemployed, and the mechanism, so to speak, that can relieve the pressure from not earning enough money from teaching college and university students is distance education technology. In fact, any academic with an earned graduate degree can take advantage of the growing numbers of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs. Simply stated, the online degree program is the salvation of college and university adjunct instructors and secondary instructors with the appropriate academic qualifications because it offers a viable new career path that can generate multiple streams of online adjunct income from a portfolio filled with online college courses.
Every post-secondary academic institution today has available a fully functional website at and at least a few online college classes currently offered to its student population As time goes on, these colleges, universities, community colleges, for-profit colleges and technical schools will offer more online college degree programs full of online college courses that need an online adjunct instructor to teach them. The briefest glance at the current statistics for the numbers of college and university students either entering a post-secondary institution for the first time or returning to complete their studies demonstrates that student populations are larger now than they have been in many decades. The accreditation boards demand and that online adjunct instructors possess at least an earned graduate degree before being placed in the online college classes, so there is a distinct shortage of technically prepared and academically qualified adjunct instructors to take charge of the swelling numbers of online degree programs. The alert academic wishing to begin a new career path that involves teaching college and university students from a laptop computer that accesses the online degree program located on the Internet can certainly begin to earn a substantial income from this academic activity. The first step to acquiring an online teaching schedule is to use a computer to access the websites of the schools and locate the link on the first page of the website that leads to the faculty application section. Once there the prospective online adjunct instructor can easily submit evidence of classroom experience and documentation of academic achievement. It may take as long as six months to one year in order to receive a positive response individual community college or state university, but perseverance at submitting applications for online professor positions will certainly win the day.
