Adjunct professors in North America

In North America, an adjunct professor, also known as an adjunct lecturer or adjunct instructor (collectively, adjunct faculty), is a professor who teaches on a limited-term contract, often for one semester at a time, and who is ineligible for tenure. Roughly 75% of college faculty are non-tenure-track. Non-tenure-track faculty teach college classes at all levels and are "typically tasked with the same instructional responsibilities as tenured faculty, such as assembling syllabi, ordering textbooks, and writing lectures." Non-tenure-track faculty earn much less than tenure-track professors; median pay per course is $2,700 and average yearly pay is between $20,000 and $25,000; in some surveys, most adjuncts earn less than $20,000 a year. Many adjuncts earn less than minimum wage and 25% of adjuncts receive public assistance.

Colleges and universities began to employ greater numbers of non-tenure-track faculty in the 1970s. In 1975, adjuncts represented roughly 24% of instructional staff at degree-granting institutions, whereas in 2011 they represented over 40% of instructional staff. In 2015, roughly 75% of college professors were non-tenure-track.

Various explanations have been given for this shift. Some "trace the practice of hiring part-time instructors to a time when most schools didn’t allow women as full professors, and thus adjunct positions were associated with female instructors from the start." Many non-tenure-track faculty were married to full-time, tenure-track professors, and known as "the housewives of higher education." The majority of non-tenure-track professors are still women.

Some have argued that the increase in the use of non-tenured faculty is the result of “financial pressures, administrators’ desire for more flexibility in hiring, firing and changing course offerings, and the growth of community colleges and regional public universities focused on teaching basics and preparing students for jobs.” Others have argued that while universities hire non-tenure-track faculty to "offset ... administrative bloat with cheaper labor" to the detriment of students: "while college tuition surged from 2003 to 2013 by 94 percent at public institutions and 74 percent at private, nonprofit schools, and student debt has climbed to over $1.2 trillion, much of that money has been going to ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats."

Colleges and universities such as Florida Atlantic University and the University of Vermont have instituted hiring freezes while paying substantial bonuses to presidents and administrators. Studies have shown that both student debt and low-wage faculty labor rises the fastest at colleges and universities whose presidents are paid the most and "[a]t state schools with the highest-paid presidents, permanent faculty declined dramatically as a percentage of all faculty." As colleges and universities hire more administrators, they hire comparatively fewer educators; "while keeping funding for instruction relatively flat, universities increased the number of administrator positions by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, 10 times the rate at which they added tenured positions."

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