Salon Article on Turning College Into McDonald’s

“There’s a much clearer picture of government aid, however, which is where the story of adjunct professors once again resembles that of fast-food workers and employees at Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers, who’ve also been targeted in the Fight for 15. In all these different cases, low-wage work is partially subsidized by government assistance. According to a recent report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, poverty-level wages cost taxpayers $152.8 billion per year in public support. The cost for adjunct professors—$468 million–was a relatively small part of the whole. Nonetheless, it still meant that 100,00 faculty members, roughly one in four such families, received some form of public assistance. A state-by-state breakdown found poverty rates among part-time faculty ranged from a low of 9 percent in Nevada up to a high of 43 percent in Maine, for a national average of 22 percent. This is roughly 50 percent higher than the poverty rate for Americans as a whole (14.5% in 2013).”

That’s from a Salon article on how higher education has come to resemble the fast food industry. Read the full piece here.

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