There’s a huge drama online about a young woman who has an adjunct job at Columbia. She says she lives in poverty, and people are blowing a gasket because nobody understands how academia works.
Those adjunct jobs are miserable. They pay a little over $30,000 a year, and you never know if your contract will get extended. There’s no chance of career advancement, so you are stuck for life, chasing these crappy temporary gigs. Adjuncts often don’t even get office space and have to see students for office hours at coffee shops. They don’t live a life of the mind because they never find out it exists.
And what most people don’t know is that the more expensive a university is, the less likely it is that an undergraduate student will ever talk to a real professor and not be stuck with these itinerant, hassled, uninterested adjuncts with zero intellectual life. Pay for an Ivy, and get nothing but these Molly McGhees for your money because real professors prefer to teach graduate courses.
Only at a cheap school like mine you are guaranteed to take every course with a real professor.
So yeah, Molly McGhee probably is as indigent as she says. She also sounds extremely shallow with not a thought in her head beyond the usual woke sloganeering. This is what you get for $30,000 in New York with New York’s cost of living.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. You want a real education, create good working conditions for the professors. And if you are looking for a college for your kid, the #1 question to ask is what percentage of courses in the program you are interested in is taught by NTT (non-tenure-track) faculty. Or resign yourself to paying for bitter Molly McGhees.
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