Currently, there is a lot of economic pain in public education, and a lot of that pain is distributed among educators with earned graduate degree unable to hang onto their teaching jobs as a result of the faculty budget cuts. Fortunately, online adjunct instructor positions take the academic cake in the sense that they are the best for unemployed or soon-to-be unemployed teachers needing to pay the bills with the delivery of post-secondary instruction. It is first necessary to earn a graduate degree, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, in order to be considered for an online faculty position with accredited online universities, but if the individual is willing to enroll in one of the many online master’s degree programs now in existence on the Internet it is possible to build a full time online teaching portfolio that will provide much more sustainable income that continuing to teach in the physical college classroom. It time to face the reality that academic administrators with public schools have decided that the costs of maintaining and building out the physical plants called college and university campuses, and this includes secondary campuses now, prohibit the employment of traditional faculty members, and the faculty that have graduate degrees are the first to go under these circumstances as a result of the higher costs of employing them. The remedy for this academic situation, and the one that genuinely takes the cake, so to speak, is to start applying to online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs.

When online teaching is viewed by the prospective online adjunct instructor as a marketplace for academic and technical skill sets, it is easy to understand that new and returning college students actually want to earn a distance learning bachelor degree, an online law degree or an online nursing degree from their personal computers. Further, higher education is a very deep marketplace in that new and returning student populations are higher than they have been since the middle of the last century. Current estimates indicates that these populations will only go higher in the next decade as unemployment continue to be a severe problem and education will be view as the way to improve one’s career opportunities. Of course, each of the online education courses will need a qualified online adjunct instructor to satisfy the accredited boards.

The most productive search strategy for discovering accredited distance learning programs that need qualified online college professors is to visit the thousands of community college, state university, for-profit college and four-year college website on the Internet. Each of these academic websites has a link on the front that will lead to the faculty application section. The more applications to teach online that go out every day increases the chances of landing multiple online college faculty positions. As with any marketplace, it is necessary to continue assessing the conditions of the market. This means that technical skill sets will need constant improvement and upgrading, which mean learning new academic interfaces such as eCollege and Blackboard. It also means being prepared to decline offered online classes in favor of new online adjunct instructor positions occurring at new online degree programs.