RESERVATION WAGES ARE POSITIVE. A humanities Ph.D. discovers that freeway flying doesn't cover the daycare bill.

The community colleges take advantage of the overproduction of English and humanities Ph.D.s by paying extremely low salaries. One can argue that this is simply supply and demand, and there is some truth to this, especially since Ph.D.s are competing with those with master’s degrees for the same adjunct teaching positions. Many of us stick with it because we get into our heads the idea that teaching experience will help us to get tenure-track positions elsewhere. But that’s not true. The two are unrelated. Publishing papers gets you a tenure- track position, not teaching experience.

In the meantime, colleges that pay adjuncts low wages are getting what they are paying for. As any economist will tell you, higher wages will get greater productivity out of your workers (up to a critical level, of course, which varies from job to job), while lower wages will get you employees who do as much work as they think the wages are really worth. There are exceptions, but one has to look at the average; the problem is structural, not personal.

It's not quite "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" but you get the picture. The essayist hints that coolie wages come bundled with hints to teach to the test, which is not necessarily a test of higher level concepts.