The current employment landscape for academics is a debacle on more than one level. For example, traditional adjunct college faculty members are barely making enough teaching in physical college and university classrooms to pay for the fuel required to drive their vehicles to another physical university or college campus and apply for an extra one or two classes to teach. At a secondary level of the academy educators with decades of classroom experience and a graduate degree, masters degree or Ph.D., are finding themselves completely out of work due to budget cuts. The question now is what to do about the situation insofar as earning a living from the delivery of instructional material. First and foremost, every intellectual with an earned graduate degree should know that there probably will not be any return to the physical classroom. The reason for this is because the physical plant known as the campus has now become entirely too expensive to support with decreasing monies from the state level. To be brutally frank, the expense of maintaining physical college classrooms or even classrooms at the secondary level leaves little or no money to pay faculty members to teach in the physical plants. Make no mistake about it, there needs to be a rethinking of the career path for education and this new way of envisioning a career as a teacher must include distance education technology as a vehicle to be harness by the educator. Now, a teacher with a graduate degree is in a much better position to grapple with the changes in the academic labor market that are in play today. The reason for this is that a graduate degree provides entrance into the post-secondary academic level of education. A master’s degree, at least, is required to teach a college and university student who is enrolled in online college classes and is earning an accredited online bachelors degree.

It is not really all that difficult for an educator with a graduate degree in hand to build an online teaching schedule populated with a variety of online college classes. What is required is the discipline and focus to start making applications through the thousands of websites for community colleges, state colleges and for-profit colleges. Each one of these postsecondary academic institutions now has a website with a link on the first page of the site that will lead to the faculty application section. Once the prospective online adjunct instructor is in the faculty application section, it is a relatively simple matter to submit evidence of classroom experience and documentation of academic achievement. At this point the application process becomes repetitive in the extreme because it is only through the submission of hundreds if not thousands of applications for online faculty positions that academic will be successful in acquiring enough online college classes to generate multiple online adjunct income streams. This process of applying to schools that offer their student populations the chance to earn an accredited online bachelors degree goes against the received wisdom of graduate schools. For this reason, it is vitally important that underemployed and unemployed academics imagined that their new role is that of an academic entrepreneur. However, the academic that successfully transitions out of the physical classroom and into a variety of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs will wonder why they did not make the effort sooner.