Contingent faculty are no longer a temporary supplement to the American academic workforce. They are part of its foundation.
In fall 2023, 68.2% of faculty members at U.S. colleges and universities held adjunct appointments, according to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). That figure includes part-time and full-time faculty working in positions that are not eligible for tenure. Just 31.8% of all faculty held full-time tenured or tenure-track appointments, down from an estimated 53.1% in 1987.
Contingent and part-time faculty are not interchangeable terms. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that 44% of faculty members at degree-granting institutions worked part-time in fall 2022. The broader category also includes full-time lecturers, instructors, visiting professors, and others working outside the tenure system.
Together, those figures reveal a workforce that has been transformed through decades of budget pressures, enrollment volatility, rising benefit costs, and incremental hiring decisions. Colleges now depend heavily on employees who are contracted one semester at a time, have little control over their schedules, and lack access to the benefits available to their full-time colleagues.
“The reason half our psychology classes are taught by adjuncts isn’t anything other than budget,” says Matthew Reed, vice president for academic affairs at Westmoreland County Community College in Pennsylvania. Reed, who also writes about higher education under the name Dean Dad, has served in academic administration at several community colleges.
The challenge is not merely that colleges employ adjunct faculty. Part-time instructors can bring valuable professional expertise into specialized courses, fill temporary vacancies, and help institutions respond to fluctuating enrollment. The problem is that a staffing category originally designed to provide flexibility has become a budgetary baseline.
The Hidden Cost Behind Contingent Hiring
A lower wage is often described as the central financial incentive behind contingent hiring. Reed argues that another expense receives too little attention: health insurance.
“Health insurance is sort of the 800-pound gorilla of a lot of institutional budgets,” he says.
At public community colleges, rising insurance costs can collide with stagnant revenue. A college may be managing flat state support, wage pressures, technology costs, and facilities needs at the same time that employee healthcare premiums continue to rise. Because health insurance is commonly tied to full-time employment, colleges have a financial incentive to divide instructional work among employees who do not qualify for the coverage.
“As long as healthcare is tied to full-time employment, employers are going to have incentive to offer part-time instead,” Reed says.
The shift often occurs quietly. Rather than eliminate tenured positions through layoffs, institutions may opt to not replace full-time professors who retire. Their courses are then redistributed among adjuncts or added to the overload assignments of remaining full-time faculty.
“There are no headlines and no political pushback, and people almost don’t notice,” Reed says. “So it becomes a default setting, just because politically everything else is harder.”
Adjunct compensation is typically computed as a flat amount per course or credit hour. That calculation can conceal much of the work teaching requires. Faculty members must prepare lessons, communicate with students, grade assignments, update learning management systems, respond to accommodation requests, and, in many cases, attend meetings or complete mandatory training. When compensation covers only classroom hours, much of that labor is effectively going unpaid.
National compensation data are difficult to compare because adjunct faculty may teach different numbers of courses across several institutions, and institutional pay structures vary considerably. Survey data nevertheless show persistent financial strain. In a 2023 report, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) found that three-quarters of adjunct respondents had employment guaranteed for only one academic term. Two-thirds of part-time respondents said they wanted full-time employment but were offered only part-time work. Only 45% had access to employer-provided health insurance, while nearly 19% relied on Medicare or Medicaid.
An earlier AFT survey of 1,883 adjunct faculty members reported that approximately 25% earned annual salaries below the federal poverty line, and 38% were using government assistance. Because the findings came from a voluntary survey rather than a nationally representative sample, they should not be generalized for every adjunct instructor. Nevertheless, they do illustrate the conditions reported by a substantial group of contingent faculty.
Some colleges have created seniority-based adjunct ranks, increasing per-course pay after instructors complete a number of years of service or demonstrate continued effectiveness. Reed supports acknowledging experience but says tiered systems create difficult internal comparisons. Full-time professors who teach beyond their regular course load generally receive overload pay. If an institution has several adjunct pay levels, it must decide which rate will determine full-time overload compensation.
“If a full-timer takes an overload and finds out that an adjunct is making more than they are, you’re in for a very awkward conversation,” Reed says.
The administrative complexity is real, but it should not obscure the larger question: What would equitable compensation look like if it accounted for all of the work required to teach a course? Meaningful reforms can include transparent pay scales, compensation for required meetings and professional development, cancellation pay when courses are withdrawn after preparation has begun, and raises tied to experience. Colleges can also evaluate whether long-serving instructors should receive multisemester contracts, prorated retirement contributions, or pathways into full-time positions.
Scheduling Commitments Are an Economic Issue
Predictable scheduling is sometimes treated as a “courtesy.” For contingent faculty, it is an employment condition with direct financial consequences. An instructor who receives a course assignment shortly before a semester begins may have little time to prepare, arrange child care, modify work commitments, or coordinate travel to different campuses. A course canceled because of low enrollment can erase months of anticipated income after the instructor has already completed planning and preparation.
The AAUP found that 76% of part-time contingent faculty members held nonrenewable, short-term contracts in fall 2023. A separate AAUP analysis of fall 2022 data found that 89% of part-time contingent appointments lasted only one or two academic terms.
“To the extent that they can be offered predictable schedules, I think that would help,” Reed says.
Departments can improve stability by publishing schedules earlier, establishing clear reappointment timelines, offering multi-semester commitments to proven instructors, and compensating faculty when late cancellations leave them without expected income. Predictability also benefits colleges. Departments that cultivate a reliable pool of experienced instructors may be less vulnerable to last-minute staffing emergencies.
Reed says some institutions continue to operate under the assumption that there is an unlimited supply of people willing to teach for adjunct wages. That may have been true when the academic job market produced far more PhD graduates than tenure-track openings, but recruitment has become more difficult in high-demand fields.
“It’s much easier to find adjuncts for English or psychology than it is for nursing or engineering or welding,” Reed says.
In those fields, colleges compete with industries that can offer substantially higher salaries. Institutions often depend on professionals who teach because they enjoy mentoring students or feel an obligation to prepare the next generation of workers. Passion, however, is not a sustainable compensation strategy.
Missing Benefits Don’t Just Include Health Insurance
Health insurance coverage may be the largest benefit separating full-time and part-time employment, but it is not the only one. Contingent instructors may also lack employer retirement contributions, paid sick leave, parental leave, tuition assistance, unemployment protection between semesters, professional development funding, office space, technology, and access to employee assistance programs.
The consequences extend beyond the individual instructor. A faculty member without paid leave may teach while ill. An instructor without an office may struggle to meet privately with students. Someone teaching at several campuses may have little time for advising, mentoring, or departmental collaboration.
These conditions should not be confused with teaching ability. Contingent instructors may be excellent educators, and some bring current industry knowledge that full-time departments cannot easily replicate. The student concern is not that contingent faculty are inherently less capable. It is that unstable employment can limit the conditions under which good teaching occurs.
Students may be unable to locate former instructors for recommendation letters. New instructors may receive little orientation or pedagogical support. Faculty members juggling courses across institutions may have fewer opportunities to hold office hours, participate in curriculum planning, or develop long-term mentoring relationships.
“I have not noticed a one-to-one relationship between faculty pay and student success,” Reed says. “That does not exist.”
What full-time faculty can offer, he says, is “consistency of presence.”
Unionization Is About Respect
Low pay and non-secure appointments have fueled contingent and non-tenure-track faculty to organize and, in some cases, unionize. Union activity across higher education has expanded even as union density has declined in much of the broader U.S. workforce.
A 2024 report from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions found that the number of unionized faculty members had increased 7.5% since 2012, reaching more than 402,000 employees at more than 600 institutions.
Recent contracts show what contingent faculty are seeking through collective bargaining. At the University of Pittsburgh, a faculty agreement that took effect in 2025 established a minimum part-time pay rate of $2,500 per credit at the Pittsburgh campus, along with salary increases and ratification payments. A contract approved by non-tenure-track faculty at Skidmore College in 2025 included longer renewable appointments, higher salary minimums, increased part-time compensation, and paid parental leave.
The AFT says contracts for adjunct bargaining units have produced salary increases of 15% to 20%, along with health insurance, clearer reappointment processes, multiyear appointments, and stronger participation in shared governance. Those figures represent outcomes reported by the union, rather than an independent national analysis, but they illustrate the priorities driving organizing campaigns.
Reed believes college presidents and governing boards should pay attention to those priorities regardless of their position on unionization. He recalled civil rights leader and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young once observing that labor disputes ultimately come down to respect.
“I was expecting him to say it’s about money,” Reed says. “Of course, at some level it is. But, to the extent that people feel taken for granted, they’re likely to push back.”
Even the word adjunct reflects that history. One dictionary definition describes an adjunct as “something added to another thing but not essential to it.”
“If they’re teaching 40% of our classes, that’s pretty essential,” Reed says. “A category that had been created as a kind of afterthought became way bigger than that, but it’s still treated as an afterthought.”
An Old Structure Under New Pressure
The contingent workforce is also becoming more difficult to define. Dual-enrollment programs rely on high school teachers who teach college courses, often at their own schools. Clinical preceptors supervise nursing and health sciences students while remaining employed by hospitals. Apprenticeship programs depend on workplace mentors who perform instructional functions without becoming conventional college faculty members. Reed calls them “quasi-faculty”: educators who are connected to colleges but do not fit neatly into the traditional categories of full-time or adjunct employment.
The proliferation of those roles reflects a larger problem. Higher education has repeatedly added new forms of instruction to an employment and funding structure built for a different era.
Reed links part of that pressure to what economists call Baumol’s cost disease. The theory is attributed to economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, whose 1966 book, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, examined rising costs in labor-intensive fields with limited opportunities for productivity growth. Education faces a related constraint. Teaching, feedback, discussion, and mentoring require human time. Technology may improve some processes, but doubling class size or accelerating courses can alter the quality of the service being provided.
For years, one of higher education’s quiet responses to cost pressure has been to reduce the price of instructional labor.
“The only way to prevent a complete cost spiral is to really underpay people, which is essentially what we’ve done,” Reed says.
The theory does not mean higher education is incapable of innovation, nor does it prove that every institutional cost is unavoidable. It does explain why labor-intensive services can become more expensive relative to sectors that achieve rapid productivity gains.
State support remains crucial. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association reported that inflation-adjusted public higher education appropriations fell 1% per full-time-equivalent student in fiscal year 2025, to $12,082, after 12 consecutive years of increases. Public full-time-equivalent enrollment increased 3.6%, while net tuition revenue per student fell 3.5%. Those national figures do not show the substantial differences among states and institutions, but they underscore the continuing pressure on public colleges to serve more students without assuming that revenue will rise at the same pace.
What Leaders Can Do Now
Colleges can include contingent faculty in departmental communications, compensate them for required meetings and training, and open faculty development programs to employees outside the tenure track. They should also examine whether decades of contingent hiring have eroded their own leadership pipelines. Faculty members do more than teach courses. They chair departments, design curricula, mentor colleagues, conduct program reviews, and become future deans and provosts.
“If you neglect full-time faculty hiring for a long time and you go adjunct, when you need new deans or new academic leaders, you’ve kind of hollowed out your pipeline,” Reed says.
Most importantly, institutions must stop treating contingent faculty as peripheral while relying on them to perform core academic work. The financial forces behind the adjunct economy are real, and many are larger than any college president, provost, or board. But colleges still face a choice: continue managing contingent faculty through last-minute contracts and institutional improvisation, or build employment systems that reflect how essential these instructors have become.
