A recent report by CUPA shows that adjuncts make up 46% of all faculty in private colleges. While the report dealt mainly with compensation policies, a major underlying question is – could private colleges and universities survive without the cost savings of using adjunct rather than full-time faculty? Given the current and future state of finances in higher education, a case could be made that private institutors are surviving on the cost savings generated by using adjunct faculty. The implication, if this is a fair assumption, is that in order to survive the grinding financial distress of the next decade the percentage of adjuncts will grow and the correspondingly the percentage of full-time faculty will shrink.
Of course, the wild card is AI which has the potential of wiping out a huge swath of adjunct and full-time faculty