Confront Academic Downturn with Accredited Distance Education

Traditional adjunct college faculty members and educators with graduate degrees, a Ph.D. or master degree, need to take a hard look at accredited distance education as a way to actually earn a real living from the delivery of post-secondary educational instruction before they are at a last-ditch. It is not a coincidence that today’s college and university students are enrolling in record numbers in online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs. Further, it is not serendipitous that for-profit colleges have enjoyed for the last decade outstanding student enrollments and expansions of their various online college degree programs. Additionally, the very reason that massive layoffs in the education industry are occurring today is directly related to the soaring cost of building out in maintaining the physical plants known as college and university campuses. The simple truth of the matter is that the administrators at all levels of the Academy are now forced to make a choice between paying academics in living wage or maintaining the physical college and university classrooms and the university and college campuses all of which the classrooms sit. The reality is these administrators cannot do both despite their desire to act in a way that is economically beneficial to teachers of college students. Of course, the same situation is in play at the secondary level, so there are many more academically qualified intellectuals that need to make the transition from the physical classroom to online degree programs and begin to earn decent incomes as online adjunct instructors.

College and university students today are enrolling in various online college degree programs in unprecedented numbers. This is hardly surprising since they understand that using their personal computers at home and at work to earn a human resources degree online, a master’s degree in education online or a masters degree in psychology is a much more cost efficient and a much more effective way to manage their time than driving miles to a remote physical university campus and sitting for hours listening to a lecture only to have to drive back to work or home after class is over. These students would prefer to access their online college classes at any time of the day or night, and academic administrators realize that it is much cheaper to meet educational needs and demands of these college and university students by delivering post-secondary instruction on the Internet from a computer server that is to continue building and maintaining physical college classrooms.

For these reasons, the alert educator with an earned graduate degree will start looking as soon as possible to the thousands of community colleges, state colleges, four-year universities, for-profit colleges and technical schools that offer some form of accredited distance education to their student populations. As more students enrolled in online college courses in effort to earn an online college degree, the greater the need there will be for academically qualified and technically proficient online adjunct instructors to teach them. The agile online adjunct instructor with an online teaching schedule of six to ten online college courses to teach each day can achieve intellectual satisfaction, and the online adjunct income streams derived from teaching for these online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs could possibly be greater and more dependable than an educator would think possible at first blush.