But nobody knows for certain if adjuncts are actually worse.

I know my personal experience with adjuncts has been good. They taught, not because they had to, but because they wanted to and they enjoyed it. I studied law these guys were partners making 1 million + a year. They had practical experience which is very useful.

My wife is doing a maters in international relations and she had Madeline Albright teach a class.

The article never really discusses the elephant in the room--adjuncts aren't meant to be full time professors. In fact many schools ban them from teaching more than a class or two at a time to prevent them from being full time. The job is designed to be a part time side gig. It's not meant to be a way to earn a living.

The people this article talks about are treating adjunct professors as a tenure track gig when the entire system is not-so-gently telling them the opposite.

The real issue is that PhD programs are like vampires on grad students and then pump them out into a world where they aren't anywhere near enough jobs. That's why these people are pretending adjunct jobs are full time professor gigs.

The people the article is talking about do not want to be adjuncts. They want the tenure-track gig. The problem is universities have stopped offering those positions in favor of only hiring adjuncts.

I agree there's a place for a few adjunct positions for people with unique experience to teach without being a full-time professor. If they were used appropriately, they would not be making up 65% of the faculty as they are at some universities.

The flip side of there being an oversupply of newly minted PhDs is that there must be a commensurately high demand for PhD-level courses. What's filling that demand when the university refuses to hire full time professors?

>The people the article is talking about do not want to be adjuncts. They want the tenure-track gig. The problem is universities have stopped offering those positions in favor of only hiring adjuncts.

Just because they want it does not mean that they should get it. This is like taking walk on roles as extras or bit parts in Hollywood and complaining you can't live on it. The world is saying you aren't going to be a professional actor.

Worse, tenure track positions aren't very rarely hired from adjunct ranks. So doing this isn't really increasing their chances.

The answer to this problem is for these people to come to their senses and quit.

>The flip side of there being an oversupply of newly minted PhDs is that there must be a commensurately high demand for PhD-level courses. What's filling that demand when the university refuses to hire full time professors?

PhD's don't typically have a lot of courses and they typically go to school for free.

Some should quit, certainly. I'm not saying there isn't an oversupply.

That doesn't change the fact that people who are paying up to $60,000 per year for an education should not be having classes taught by people who can't hold office hours because they don't have an office.

The demand for college education at all levels is the highest it's ever been, it should follow that the demand for professors should be high. Instead universities are charging premium prices and delivering a substandard product and administrators are pocketing the difference.

We're not talking about making a cheap cell phone and some of your calls get dropped, these institutions are charged with advancing and proliferating all human knowledge. It seems like the sort of thing we should care if they do a good job of it.

quit... and do what?

We keep automating the jobs for which they are well suited.

Nobody is trying to pretend adjunct jobs are full time professor gigs. Nobody believes that for a second. However, the glut in supply has allowed colleges to exploit the workforce who, in many cases, are in their thirties and don't have the work history their peers do. They could be just as effective (or more) within a few months (You don't get a Ph.D without being smart and getting things done) but it's hard to prove.

It's the question I love posing for people: we have a generation of people who are well trained in synthesizing information well, but are not well suited for technology jobs. We are automating the jobs that these people did well -- paralegals and law, white collar administrative work, etc... You name it, I'll find a startup or internal group trying to automate it to avoid hiring more people.

Where are the new jobs that these people are supposed to do? The world may not "owe them anything," but we have a crisis coming if nobody can figure it out.

I've thought about a similar issue myself.

The goal of technology is to make our lives better and easier. What's the endpoint of that? What's the goal? I'd imagine it's something like sitting on our asses all day doing whatever we actually want to do while robots tend to our needs.

The issue is, though, that so much of who we are and how we're seen in society is tied to our job - especially in the US. Those who don't have a job (often because they can't find one) are dismissed as 'lazy' or 'moochers'.

But what happens when there are actually significantly fewer jobs that need to be done than people to do them? What if we only need the engineers, scientists and mechanics to keep our robot slaves up and running, while everyone else can just reap the benefits?

Higher end jobs have not been automated to any significant degree yet. Accounting, something you'd assume is easy to automate with software, is still growing. There are more than ever. The only automation done in the legal industry is word processing software and legal search engines--which actually still really suck compared to google.

All these claims about the professional class being put out of work are based on a superficial view of the industries. Lawyers don't exist to spit out the law for you.

Any AI that can lawyer for you is advanced enough to write software itself.

We still haven't even automated repetitive jobs yet. Maybe these people's kids or grand kids will have to worry about it, but not them.

I'll give you an example. The entire justification for the ROI on three different systems I have built in the last 5 years was that they wouldn't have to hire the dozens of people required to do the job without automation. In my current job, we are currently looking for ways to automate currently manual processes for purposes of reliability, but they also have a side effect of reducing labor costs.

I have been personally responsible for automating dozens of jobs throughout my career. These weren't layoffs in most cases - these were people that would have been hired without this software.

Paralegals are becoming more rare precisely because lawyers can search more effectively, are they not? Due to the search , one lawyer can be more effective than two decades ago, no?

One secretary services multiple Vice Presidents and directors in many organizations, and handles extra duties on top of that.

It isn't eliminating all jobs - it's making one person as efficient as three, five, ten, and even more were a generation ago.

By reducing the cost of some things sometimes it is offset by using more of it. Sometimes you unlock a lot of latent demand. Ford created jobs for autoworkers despite increasing productivity by 10X. Uber is creating jobs by lower the cost of a taxi ride.

Word perfect revolutionized document production at law firms. Before you had to actually take a red pen to a document and write in changes. If someone else gave you a document, you'd have a secretary go word by word and underline changes. Now that stuff can be done in 3 seconds with a plugin in word.

So what happened? People exchange drafts like 10X as often because it is easier. Sure some sectaries have been lost. But it's increased the need for lawyers because more work is done that couldn't before. And laypeople produce probably 50x more documents than before email and word processing.

Legal research: before you'd look it up in a book that contained key cases. You'd find something or not. Now with Lexis and Westlaw giving you way more cases to look at it, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up researching more. People dig for a needle in a haystack.

And if you want to see how far we've got to go, legal research is still mostly done by having a human read the case and create keywords and classifications. It's still more accurate that Google is for legal issues. But I bet that won't last long. Frankly I'm shocked searching isn't better.

But most professionals aren't doing repetitive tasks a machine is better at. For lawyers, the only real easily picked fruit I see is document review. People are trying what we call "predictive coding" now. But those jobs were already outsourced to not-real lawyers who worked temp jobs.

I sure wouldn't want to be a data entry person or a secretary. I really really wouldn't want to be a worker in a factory in the third world.

But we are far away from software eating the professional world. Software has already taken the easy gains away from these types of jobs. The accountant isn't spending a lot of time crunching numbers.

To increase productivity by multiples now, you'll need artificial general intelligence. If you can do that, we are replaced anyway, I hope our corporate overlords are merciful.

Or taught by grad students. My undergrad had maybe 4 classes taught by PhD students and I'd say that half of them didn't really know the material they were teaching before the class started.