Jay Schalin of the John Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has a few words of wisdom for adjunct professors who think unionizing will increase their pay and decrease their work loads.

He suggests an alternative approach (hat-tip, Instapundit).

The labor market for college professors has long been distorted. Tenure is a major factor; another is the presence of a massive labor supply glut, in the form of too many aspiring faculty members for too few full-time jobs. In some ways, the faculty labor market now resembles the market for sports or entertainment performers: so desirable are jobs at the top level in such endeavors that many people aspire to reach such heights without attaining them, often struggling in poverty for years.

As is to be expected when such gluts occur, academic employers take advantage of the situation by replacing highly paid, hard-to-fire tenured professors with poorly paid, part-time, and temporary adjunct professors. Tenure-track faculty, who once dominated the profession, have fallen to only 24 percent of all new faculty appointments, according to the American Association of University Professors.

An adjunct’s existence can be grim. While tenured professors often teach a couple of classes at a time for eight months of the year in exchange for six-figure salaries and freedom to pursue their intellectual interests the rest of the time, part-time adjunct professors are paid a national average of $2,900 per course, for as many courses as they can get or handle….

The solution is not to protect academic workers from the market, but to encourage students to leave the academic cocoon and become part of the productive economy instead. Higher education was never meant to be a cradle-to-the-grave existence for a large swath of the population, as some perceive it to be today. Labor activists’ claims of adjunct exploitation are moot; there is a great difference between true oppression and bad individual career choices. One of the great hallmarks of a free society is that, if your current path is inadequate, you can choose another—that should be the logical conclusion for many struggling adjuncts.

…A better solution to the academic labor problem is to refocus higher education on education instead of research. This would help end the overproduction of Ph.D.s Eventually, as the pipeline leading from graduate assistant to “road warrior” diminishes, the supply of academics would come to approximate the demand for their services—and the potential for exploitation would end.