"#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences"

I disagree. Why do people go to college? From what I've read, under the GI bill, a lot of people went to college because it was a place to learn. College was cheap - a minimum wage summer job was enough to pay for a year of college even for those without the GI bill. (Colleges were also much more discriminatory, including based on race, ethnicity, and class. But that's a different story.)

Starting in the 1970s colleges were increasingly defunded by the states, often explicitly as a way to stifle left-wing professors and students, who come more often from humanities than science. There's been a push since then to say that people should go to college for vocational reasons. "I'll get a better job with a college" was the thought. As you point out, this then gets turned into "I need to get a loan to get the degree, and the better job will pay off the loan."

(The college deferment for the draft no doubt also played a role.)

The hard sciences exception (and you should add engineering) has the twin advantages that 1) engineers and hard scientists tend to be less interested in history, politics, and the other fields which focus more on the human condition, and 2) the extra training actually is important for a job in those fields, so companies can outsource training to the colleges, who then demand money from the students for the privilege.

So, #1 could change if we (magically?) change our minds and insist that a college education is for higher learning, and that companies pay for job training, not students. It would also change if the government were to fund all higher education directly.

I'm not holding my breath.

In any case, even if #1 changes, I don't think it would change the adjunct situation.

FWIW, based on this article about U. Chicago http://chicagomaroon.com/2013/06/04/harboring-the-humanities... , the percent of humanities undergrad degrees has actually increased over the last 10 years. "In Spring 2012, 3.7 percent of all degrees in the College were awarded in philosophy, up from 2.5 percent a decade ago" despite that "Forbes Magazine ranks philosophy the fourth least lucrative major, with an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent for recent graduates". And the number of humanities graduate students is going down.

I don't know if that's typical or not. If it is typical, then it suggests that #2 is not occurring.

As someone who was in the hard sciences, I was told there will always be jobs for people trained in physics. Then near the end of my undergrad I started reading articles about how perhaps there were too many people trained in physics.

This graph - http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-... - shows "employment at graduation" for different categories of PhD. The trend seems to be that in the hard sciences there are fewer real jobs, and more post-doc (the research equivalent to the adjunct professor) positions.

So it's not clear to me that there's significant safety in the hard sciences. It looks like engineering is the best bet.

Regarding #3, what you said is of course true. Mine laborers are also easily replaced, as are garment workers, teamsters, shoemakers, and . There's a well-known solution; unionize and require it be a union shop. This of course won't work in so-called "right-to-work" states, which I consider them to be anti-free market laws.

You're right in proposing a #5, to "just limit the use of adjunct faculty in the first place and open more tenure-track positions to replace them." I'm pretty sure that those working as adjuncts now would be fine if there were more openings for tenure-track positions and fewer adjunct positions, just like post-docs would be happy if there were more tenure track positions and fewer post-doc positions.

Being stuck in limbo is frustrating. My problem with your #5 is that many politicians and members of the public already believe that the major increase in university costs is due to professors' salaries, when all evidence says this isn't the case. #5 does nothing to improve the dynamics. Neither does #3.

Any any case, #4/#5/passing a law seems only slightly more unlikely than #3/unionization.

Yes, my #4 is not going to work. But I think your objection is equally simplistic. The Washington Monthly article I linked to observes:

> While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses. They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time period.

You said that "you can easily get into a bubble where ...". The same is true of administrators. They can get into the same bubble regarding other administrators. Senior professors help pierce the bubble.

You're right though that if 10% of the non-teaching staff could be cut then there's no direct mechanism for "magic" transfer of funds. There's an indirect one, in that tenure/tenure-track professors and adjunct staff are much more likely to be co-workers, if not friends.

If those professors have a more direct role in the workings of the university then the same birds-of-a-feather mentality which currently keeps "armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants" with their funding suggests that a similar bubble kinship might improve the life of adjunct staff.

That may just be wishful thinking.