Perhaps the most important concept for any individual with an earned graduate degree, a Ph.D. or master’s degree, trying desperately to earn a living teaching college and university students on a traditional post-secondary campus is the difference between an online instructor and a college faculty employee. As a mere faculty employee the traditional adjunct college instructor is now under tremendous economic pressure as a result of the rapidly diminishing academic budgets that must be distributed between faculty instructors and the maintenance of the physical plants knows as campuses. Obviously, given the many extra college, community college and university being packed into the physical classrooms in an effort to do more with less, the adjunct instructor on the faculty is losing what little financial ground that has been available during the last few years.

Of course, to say that an adjunct professors has been able to earn a decent living is something of a stretch, as college and university administrators grew comfortable employing an increasing number of low paid, temporarily employed intellectuals. Worse, even the very energetic adjunct continuing to teach on the physical campus has discovered that the opportunities to become a college faculty employee at several community colleges or universities is severely limited by the distance that must be traveled on a daily basis, and that option is completely contingent on living in an urban area that has the population needed to actually support multiple institutions of academic learning.

With that in mind, the best workaround, so to speak, for any person now teaching college students or wanting to teach at the post-secondary level is to discover how distance education technology is changing the academic labor force and how it is possible to earn much more from an online teaching portfolio populated with online instructor job openings than it is to try to grub out a poverty level existence by continuing to teach in the physical college classroom. By making the transition out of the physical classroom and into online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs that provide students with the chance to earn an associate degree in nursing online, an online mba degree or an engineering degree online, the college instructor can easily increase the income from teaching threefold or more.

This kind of income for college teaching is simply not possible by remaining a college faculty employee. The primary reason it is not possible is because there are just so many campuses within driving distance of each other every day and the cost of operating a motor vehicle to make the drive is going up with each passing semester. Of course, the very idea of university and college administrators actually paying a decent amount of money to teach even one college courses is laughable on its face because with as many potential adjunct instructors in the academic labor pool there is no need for these administrators to do anything but drive the price of the labor further down. It should be clear that since all of the online college degree programs are online and accessible from an inexpensive laptop computer it is well worth the effort to become an online instructor instead of remaining a college faculty employee without any chance of a real economic future.