The University of Memphis has given adjunct professors their first raise in three decades. Now, an adjunct teaching a full load could earn up to $12,600 a year. Yay.

This will be the eighth and final installment of our series highlighting true stories from adjunct professors, the best-educated low-wage workers in America.

Before you go into great debt to send your kid to college, you should hear from the low-paid, ill-treated workers who will actually be educating them: adjunct professors. They are sharing their stories with us. Their view is much different from the one you’ll find in the college brochure.

America’s colleges and universities are out for the summer. For students, it’s a time to party. For the low-paid adjunct professors who make higher education function, it is a time to wonder whether they made a terrible mistake.

American universities spend half a trillion dollars a year. Very little of that money goes to the people who do a huge part of the teaching: the adjunct professors, academia’s hidden underclass. They are telling us their stories. They’re not pretty.

Adjunct professors have the honor of being the most highly educated workers who are paid poverty wages. The American higher education system rests on their backs. They are telling us their stories.

America’s well-manicured universities are supported by an entire academic underclass of very smart and very poorly paid people: the adjunct professors. They would like to tell you about the “insanely bleak” job that keeps academia chugging along.

America’s bloated higher education industry is supported by the work of an immense pool of well-educated and very poorly paid workers: the adjunct professors. They are telling us all about it. And they have a few ideas.

Adjunct professors are the most highly educated low-wage workers in America. And they told us all about it.

Being an adjunct professor at a college may be the job with the single biggest discrepancy between the (high) education level required to hold it and the (astoundingly low) level of pay. How long until this system blows up?

Duquesne is a Catholic University in Pittsburgh with nearly 10,000 students. The school’s adjunct professors would like to unionize. Conveniently, Duquesne does not believe Jesus would be in favor of that.