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Certainly, there can no longer be any question about the negative impact shrinking faculty budgets on physical college and university campuses have on adjunct instructors and their economic futures. While the first analysis of this situation would logically be dire, there is a very bright spot emerging from the academic ruins, so to speak, and that bright spot is the growth of online faculty openings created by distance education technology. What is vitally important for any academic to understand, and this is especially true for adjunct college teachers, is that the state colleges, four-year universities and community colleges, the vast majority of which are funded by state tax revenue, are actively attempting the meet the swelling student populations with more online college degree programs and more online college courses. This ultimately means that any college teacher that wants to continue earning a decent living by delivering post-secondary instruction should learn how to use an inexpensive personal computer to locate and apply to online bachelor degree programs and online masters degree programs.

The post-secondary academic institutions are very busy implementing online degree programs because the administrators of these academic institutions fully realize that the cost of building and maintaining the campuses, which are actually large physical plants that require a small army of maintenance workers just to keep the buildings up to the local safety codes, can be significantly reduced by placing all of the educational materials on computer servers and allowing students to access that post-secondary instruction from their personal laptops at home or at work. Of course, there is a very strong argument to be made concerning the value of face-to-face instruction in the physical college classroom, but that argument is and will be overwhelmed by the economic reality associated with less budgetary funds to finance what is possibly an outdated academic landscape.

The new landscape for college and university students wanting to earn an online bachelor degree or online master’s degree, and, of course, the adjunct college instructors that will teach these students, is the Internet. It is almost as if the familiarity today’s college students have with their electronic devices and the need for a much more cost-effective delivery of post-secondary instruction is actually creating a new post-secondary landscape, and the academic labor market is changing to accommodate the new landscape. Basically, the schools will only hire adjunct college instructors in the very near future, and these new hires will be required to teach in online college courses instead of teaching in the physical classroom. The traditions of tenure-track appointments will succumb to financial emergencies that grow more inflamed with each passing semester.

Given all of this, now is the time for an individual with an earned graduate degree to start learning as much as possible about teaching online for schools that offer their students an online computer science degree, an online marketing degree or an online education degree because the new academic labor model will reward those college teachers that take the trouble to master the search for online faculty openings.