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    On Throwing Contingent Faculty Under the Bus (again)

    Several folks in last night's Republican presidential debate, including Marco Rubio, apparently decided to use philosophy as a foil for some of their typically ridiculous claims about education. In response, lots of people are citing an average salary for people working as professional philosophers — sometimes attributed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — north of 70k, much more than 'welders.'

    I would like to take this opportunity to ask folks to think about what they're doing.  I am, and the rest of you should be, extremely dubious of statistics saying folks working as academic philosophers are making $70k on average. There is, to be blunt, no way such numbers —if they are being correctly reported — are being arrived at without massively undercounting continent faculty working at multiple schools, all technically 'part time,' and almost surely making 'welder' salaries or less. None.

    At very least, let's not gleefully paper over the economic reality of many members of the profession just to score points against grandstanding right wing politicians. That would be to continue one of the worst patterns of the current academy, namely that of throwing many of us, and the most vulnerable of us, under the bus in order to reinforce the narrative that there isn't a problem with the economics of our profession — a position which is flatly wrong and only serves the interests of the most privileged subset of professional academics.

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    11 responses to “On Throwing Contingent Faculty Under the Bus (again)”

    1. james Avatar
      james

      so what rubio said was that “we need more welders and less philosophers,” which could be taken as those with advanced degrees or undergraduate degrees. i get the feeling at least this article — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/marco-rubio-philosophers_5642aa8be4b08cda3486a0f0 — lumps together anyone with any kind of philosophy degree, undergraduate or advanced (and, at least the last i checked, the jump in average pay scale from a ba in philosophy to an ma was gigantic, but didn’t go very far after that, and maybe even drops at this point). i’m not sure i can tell from the context what level of degree achievement rubio meant, or if he really cared.
      at any rate, if we’re including everyone with every level of philosophy degree, the article linked to above is probably a believable claim, considering how high a percentage of philosophy majors enter what at least used to be lucrative careers in fields like law and tech.
      and none of this is to say that it might not be the worst thing in the world not to stigmatize vocational training. my guess would be that doing so would damage business schools much more than the humanities.

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    2. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff being circulated. Some of it is comparing mid-career salaries of people with philosophy degrees and mid-career salaries of welders. I’m not sure that’s an apples to apples comparison (how about comparing people who completed some sort of vocational training as a welder to people who completed philosophy degrees), but it’s better than the other one, which does use a Bureau of Labor Statistics figure of $71k as the average salary for people working as teachers of philosophy.
      As for Rubio’s remarks. I’ve only got them second hand, and the point of my post isn’t to comment on the value of programs that provide vocational training or make it widely and easily accessible to folks who need it. I’m inclined to support that in general, though how it were done would be important to me. I would, for instance, be very concerned with possible credential inflation (requiring degrees or certifications for access to work that historically has not required them) and the corresponding extension of student debt into new areas of the workforce. I have little doubt, having said all of that, that Rubio was doing anything other than grandstanding.
      And in any case, my point wasn’t about Rubio, but about how we in the profession are talking amongst ourselves and to the broader public about the economic situation of professional philosophers. Which, in this case, is repeating the same erasure of actual working conditions of many if not most working philosophers that I’ve been writing about for some time here.

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    3. Derek Bowman Avatar
      Derek Bowman

      I’ve commented on this elsewhere, but it looks like these numbers might be based on full-time equivalent salaries for part-timers. It’s hard to tell from this language in the methodology:
      “For each occupation, respondents are asked to report the number of employees paid within specific wage intervals. The intervals are defined both as hourly rates and the corresponding annual rates, where the annual rate for an occupation is calculated by multiplying the hourly wage rate by a typical work year of 2,080 hours. The responding establishments are instructed to report the hourly rate for part-time workers, and to report annual rates for occupations that are typically paid at an annual rate but do not work 2,080 hours per year, such as teachers, pilots, and flight attendants. Other workers, such as some entertainment workers, are paid hourly rates, but generally do not work 40 hours per week, year round. For these workers, only an hourly wage is reported.”
      http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_tec.htm
      It’s clear from the report itself that these number for post-secondary philosophy and religion teachers are based on a report of annual salary, rather than a report of hourly wages (since there are no hourly wages listed). It’s also clear, from the technical notes that these numbers are supposed to include part-time employees.
      http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes251126.htm
      What is unclear is whether the reported data is based on actual salaries or full-time equivalent salaries. Their methods for calculating annual salaries for part-time wage labor suggest they are aiming for full-time equivalence (since there is no mention of reporting number of hours, and since there is no attempt to make calculations for hourly-wage industries that don’t have a standard work week). This is also suggested by the listed mean for “Junior Colleges.” Given that roughly two-thirds of instructional staff at two-year schools are part-time, and given how low those per-class wages can be, it’s hard to see how you could get a mean of $66,570 based on actual salaries.
      The two most likely explanations then are that this data is based on full-time-equivalence reporting, or else, as your post suggests, massive undercounting of part-time instructors. I’ve knocked around the BLS website, but so far I haven’t found any definitive indication of which it is.

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    4. Michael Avatar
      Michael

      Ed, you’re confusing ‘median’ with ‘mean.’

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    5. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      A former student of mine pointed out on Facebook that BLS methodology is extremely problematic for postsecondary educators, in particular. He said a bit more in a technical register that I didn’t quite understand, but I suspect that it may be similar to some of what you pick up on here.
      In any case, to the extent that this is based on university reporting, I’m betting it involves a considerable amount of undercounting, b/c they have this great tendency to drop adjunct faculty from any reports about ‘faculty salaries.’ Though really, as you say, the sources of all this remain obscure — and that is pretty commonplace. We get these numbers that don’t seem to correspond to any reality that our acquaintance with the institution would reveal, and no real explanation of how they were arrived at. And this is the state of workplace data about the academy.

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    6. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Not confusing, but assuming that we’re talking about mean values here. If they’re reporting a median value as if it’s useful information about what people are making, then they’re even more ridiculous than I thought they were.

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    7. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      To add, I’m also having a hard time with the idea that if they reported FTEs for folks like adjuncts that this would move the needle all that much. Assuming a 4/4 load as FT, most places around here would still be paying their adjuncts no more than about $32k/yr. Obviously, that fluctuates a bit, but given the sheer size of the Philadelphia metro academic labor market, and the prevalence of adjunct labor within it, I cannot see how an accurate count of adjuncts wouldn’t push a mean number way below $71k. If this is right, there simply has to be undercounting.
      It’s possible that adjunct pay rates are significantly higher in other parts of the country than I realize, but what I saw when the adjunct project data was still public in a big spreadsheet didn’t lead me to think so. Again, unless I’ve missed new sources of this kind of information, we just don’t have very good data on this (adjunct project is now basically useless for trying to generate overview types of data, alas).

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    8. Derek Bowman Avatar
      Derek Bowman

      The BLS data includes both median and mean. The 71k number is based on their mean reporting, as the median is lower, around $63k. Some reporting has relied on one and others on the other. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes251126.htm

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    9. Derek Bowman Avatar
      Derek Bowman

      I suspect there is also underreporting of adjuncts going on, but it can’t be the only explanation. For one, remember that while about 75% of faculty are contingent, only about half of all faculty are part time (based on the IPEDS data, reported here; perhaps not completely reliable, but it seems to be the most reliable available). So that’s lots of genuine full-time salaries to bring the average up.
      https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_315.10.asp
      Comparing the IPEDS numbers to these numbers from BLS for total faculty numbers (though I don’t understand the discrepancy of ~200k – perhaps it’s related to potential undercounting of part-timers?), they have to include substantial numbers of part-time faculty.
      http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/postsecondary-teachers.htm

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    10. james Avatar
      james

      if the bls is using some kind of full-time equivalence calculation, that really is an appalling and misleading approach. what may be worse from a statistician’s perspective, it’s at least a decade out of date (as is almost every discussion about academic labor).

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    11. james Avatar
      james

      well, yes, i think we can all agree rubio was just grandstanding and pandering to a friendly audience that does what it can or votes for those who do what they can to fuck over welders as much as philosophers.
      i kind of took the reaction from academics on facebook to be a variation on the selling points departments have for prospective majors, which is why i figured the salary claims included those bas as well as advanced degrees.

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