
“It’s bad, Laura. It’s not good at all.” Not exactly what we wanted to hear from the contractor who found massive rot under our bathroom floors.
Having completely blown the bathroom budget this week, I opened up a LinkedIn email advertising for an adjunct professor position at the community college down the road. After doing a little sleuthing, I figure out that this job was not going to be a great way supplement my freelance work. The pay was lower than what I earned as an adjunct in New York City twenty years ago.
Most people only have the vaguest notion of who is teaching their college kids. With some movie version of a professor in their head, they assume that a senior scholar is in the front of the lecture hall, and that he is well compensated for years of experience, education, and talent. They might think that the $80K college price tag translates to big bucks for faculty. Sadly, that’s not the case. It’s much more likely that your kid’s English professor is living in poverty.