UCLA: Go get your PhD, then come work for us. Salary: $0.00

Adjunct Professors make crap money already, but this takes the cake.

This is not a joke, although it’s laughable. UCLA — one of the top universities in the nation — recently put this job posting for an Assistant Adjunct Professor up on Inside Higher Ed and on their website.

The requirements?

A Ph.D. in chemistry, biochem, or equivalent.

The pay?

Zero dollars. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Do you know how much it would cost for tuition for those 8+ years of higher ed to obtain your doctorate?

In-state tuition per year without living expenses runs around $11,000 for just undergrad according to CareerExplorer.com and the most recent US census data.

Doctorate programs average about $114,300 according to Educationdata.org, but it’s even higher for a degree in the sciences.

And at the end of all that only to be offered a job with a yearly salary of $0. Pretty much volunteer work.

If you didn’t know, the average pay for an adjunct professor is between $1500 to $4000 per class per semester depending on the school — and these are folks who at minimum hold master’s degrees to teach at the university level. Although it’s said that adjuncts could be paid up to $7000 per class, that is rare.

If you put this into context of livable wage, adjunct professors would have to teach a full course load (around 5 classes, including labs) of 3 credit classes per semester to just barely make it above the lower income line. And since the corporatization and capitalization of higher ed institutions (from the 80s), universities and colleges rarely take on adjuncts for full course loads, meaning these professors have to have multiple classes at multiple universities, hopping from one uni to another every week just to make ends meet.

These hours would also include time for grading, labs, student conferences, etc. These professors who teach a minimum of 4 to 5 classes per semester work well over 40 hours per week — not including commuting time between universities. So you go to school for a minimum of 6 years, accrue over $100K in student loans, only to make less than $40K per year before taxes. Ouch.

With high compounding interest rates, it’s no wonder people are drowning in student debt.

In fact, according to Inside Higher Ed, it’s reported that many adjuncts make less than $3500 per course and only around $25000 per year. Your kid working at Costco full-time makes more than his professor. Just think about that for a moment. $25K is roughly $13 an hour on a 40 hour work week.

And now, here comes along big, powerful UCLA with their latest job posting, offering up $0 for someone who likely spent near $200K to get their degree to come work with them. Is it for the prestige? One of those “you should just be happy to work with us” kind of deals?

Last time I checked, prestige couldn’t buy you food or put a roof over your head.

Do better, UCLA.

Update: So after some conferring with some higher ed folks, I’m informed that this is not unheard of in higher ed STEM — especially in private institutions (although UCLA is public). More than likely, they already have a candidate in mind and this is just a legality before they can hire the internal person who very likely is coming in with their own grant money and whatnot. However I’m going to quote Professor Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College:

“I’m seeing a lot of people coming up with explanations that attempt to rationalize this: it’s for an internal candidate who has a funding stream elsewhere, it’s an attempt to help a candidate coming over from industry gain the teaching experience that will make them competitive, it’s some other insidery plan, it’s union-busting,” he wrote. “Even the ‘innocent’ explanations are disgusting because no matter what they are, the whole thing is a *lie*.

“It’s corrupting: it legitimates the concept of asking a Ph.D. to work for free, it mocks the idea that a nationally advertised search is meant to look for nationally qualified candidates. That this is coming from a state that supposedly has liberal politics and respect for public higher education, in a city that is liberal, in a community of allegedly liberal administrators and faculty, should tell roughly how much all those political alignments are worth when it comes to exploiting labor and corrupting rules.”

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