Budget Realities and Adjunct Hiring

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "On Hiring" blog, David Evans notes that at his institution, to replace adjuncts with full-time faculty would require a net increase in related expenses of $747,000, in an environment where the campus already faces $2.4M in cuts.

You can read his entry here:
http://chronicle.com/jobs/blogs/onhiring/1059

"I’ve done a little math on my own budget that I want to share to show the dilemmas facing my small university with regard to adjunct employment. For context, we have about 1,000 students on the campus and another 2,000 in professional and online programs in 14 locations around the state. For now, I am only discussing our operations on our home campus."

"Numerous critics of practices surrounding adjunct employment accuse hiring institutions of “administrative bloat” which, if eliminated, could enable a solution to the overall problem. I’m probably not very credible on that matter since I am part of the administration, but at least at my institution, we run quite lean already. If we are to maintain operations and compliance with various regulations, accreditation requirements, and other external compulsions, even the most ruthless cutting of administrative costs wouldn’t get us more than perhaps $300,000 in budget relief. So it’s not likely that we can fix our adjunct situation merely by deflating a bloated management structure."