The invisible workers who pay my salary

Like a lot of other tuition-dependent schools, my institution is partially supported by money brought in by a distinct program for non-traditional students.  This creates some interesting problems due to the fact that the standards for the non-traditional program has lower overhead, lower salaries for its mostly temporary instructors, and arguably lower academic standards.  One of these problems is that the name of the institution remains the same.  Even though these students are not factored into things like US News rankings, it seems that these programs could dilute my institution’s reputation as it tries to do the opposite in order to increase the percentage of tuition that traditional students are able to pay.  The uneasy truth is that without a non-traditional program, the tuition that the traditional program brings in would not be enough to support the current standards of our campus, much less the improvements that the faculty would like.  As a result, the low-paid, non-traditional program instructors who arrive on campus after I’ve left for the day and are gone long before I return allow me to have a nice office and a decent salary.

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