Double Bass Blues: A musician-adjunct tackles math

by Jason Heath

One would have to be crazy to go into music for the money. Dozens of career paths spring to mind (medicine, law, web development, programming, engineering, etc.) that have great salaries and benefits and ample opportunities for employment. Music
careers by and large lack these great benefits. Cream-of-the-crop jobs in the world of music (outside of international soloists) pay
what would be considered a fairly pedestrian wage in many other fields.

This basic assumption underlies everything else I discuss here. I know that we musicians did not go into this profession for the
money, and the purpose of this series is not to carp about how little we all make. My concern is that we musicians are compensated
fairly for our work and allowed to earn a living doing what we do. My experience, unfortunately, has been that the hidden costs of
the freelance life quickly erode any seeming profit from far too many gigs. Since teaching is a component of nearly every
freelance musician’s employment palette, I will analyze a university teaching position I held for the first installment in this series.

In my previous adjunct university position I was compensated at a rate of $35 an hour for each student I taught. This rate is
comparable to many other public universities in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana and is somewhat lower than schools in other
regions according to my research. Since this figure is a common hourly rate for universities in the Midwest it will serve as an
illustrative example for this article.

In addition to the $35 per hour, I was paid a $635 retainer fee each semester for recruiting and other activities. This list of
activities included doing seminar classes (requiring an extra trip), recruiting in local schools, attending juries, audition days, open
houses, and the like. For the purposes of this trip I will assume that two additional days per month were needed to be devoted to
these activities, although in reality the number of days was probably higher than that.

The resulting compensation varied from term to term depending on my
student load. My student load vacillated between four and ten students during my employment in this position. The resulting compensation (including
retainer fee) ranged from $625 to $1050 per month.

Before I go on I would like to note that both the hourly rate and retainer fee
never increased during my five years of employment. Tenure track faculty
members and lecturers at universities receive yearly cost of living salary increases. Adjunct faculty members do not typically receive any compensation
increase. The lack of cost of living increases means that adjunct faculty members actually get paid less each year regardless of their job performance. The
only way to increase compensation is to hustle for more students. For more
on this ethically dicey subject, please check out my pay-per-student post.

I will use a figure of $900 a month in compensation for hourly lessons plus
the retainer fee. This is on the upper end of what I was paid monthly for this
university position. If I were to make one trip per week to teach this would
break down to $225 per day of teaching—not bad. This boils down to about
6.5 hours of teaching if I could line up the students back to back. In reality, however, it was impossible to get all of those students lined up one after another, so my time spent on the job was closer to 8.5 hours, lowering my average hourly compensation to $26.50.

Now comes the kicker—mileage. I lived 93 miles from this
particular institution, making my round trip daily commute 186
miles. Much of this was on two lane highway, putting my commute time at a minimum of two hours on each leg of the trip
(four hours total per day).

Adding those four additional commute hours put my weekly
commitment at 12.5 hours, thus lowering my hourly compensation to $18 per hour. Considerably lower than the original $35
per hour figure (which is a fairly low compensation figure to
begin with).

Figuring in my mileage….oh wait, I got no mileage! 44.5
cents per mile must therefore be taken off of that $900 monthly
compensation figure. Years of brake jobs, oil changes, blown
tires, cracked windshields and the like has taught me that the
federal mileage rate really is what it costs you in the long run to
drive to gigs.

186 miles/trip x .445 = $82.77 mileage/trip

$82.77 mileage/trip x 4 trips/month = $331.08 mileage/month

$900 – $331.08 mileage/month = $568.92 monthly compensation after mileage

Ouch! Mileage takes quite a bite out of your earnings, doesn’t
it? Driving is what really destroys the earnings of freelancers. I
have driven 40,000-50,000 miles per year for the past seven years
working sometimes in six states each year to earn a living. My
pre-expenses income has been pretty handsome some years, but
when actual costs are figured the earnings always plummet to
coffee shop employee levels (if not worse).

Let’s break it down a little further:

If I were to travel only once a week (four trips per month):

$568.92 divided by 4 = $142.23 per day

$142.23 divided by 12.5 hours = $11.38 per hour

Note that this does not include those extra trips to fulfill the
requirements of the adjunct retainer fee. If I did only one extra
trip per month:

$568.92 divided by 5 = $113.78 per day

$113.78 divided by 12.5 hours = $9.10 per hour

If I made two extra trips per month (a more realistic assessment of the requirements of teaching, seminars, juries, audition
days, and recruiting activities):

$568.92 divided by 6 = $94.82 per day

$94.82 divided by 12.5 hours = $7.59 per hour

These figures do not count any preparation hours and are also
a low estimate of what it took to technically fulfill the adjunct
retainer fee. Making $8-10 an hour (with no benefits, no
raises….ever) is a lowly income for anybody in any field. I
made more than this doing paperwork in a law office in 1994.

Remember, this is pre-tax and has no pension contribution or
any other benefit. Also, this figure assumes that I earned $900
monthly from this job. I frequently earned less, but my commuting costs remained the same. This is another unfair drawback to pay-per-student teaching—when a student quits (or fails),
your hourly wage drops a dollar or two, putting pressure on the
pay-per-student adjunct teacher to lower their standards and pass
unqualified students to keep the wage from dropping from coffee shop worker scale to dishwasher scale.

This low figure is more disturbing given the required advanced
degrees an applicant is expected to have just to get an interview
for an adjunct teaching position. When I applied for this position I had two music performance degrees from Northwestern
University and had taken nearly $40,000 in loans (not counting
what my parents had to pay) which I was just staring to pay
back.

The sad reality of the state of this profession is even more
telling when looking at the highly qualified pool of applicants
interesting in filling my previous position. I was told by my
colleagues at the university that this particular adjunct teaching
position had received the most number of applicants for any
adjunct position in this institution’s history. People with doctoral degrees and people with significant ISCOM orchestra experience were among the applicants.

One may criticize my decision for accepting employment
at an institution that was so far from my home. It is true that
the compensation increases if I lived closer to this institution. It is, however, the only significant double bass university teaching position to open over the past seven years in
this area, and I consider myself lucky to have gotten the job.
Also, my mileage was actually less than some other faculty
members from this institution, and my student load (and thus
my compensation) was higher than most adjunct faculty members. Driving 50-80 miles one way for a job like this is very
common here in the metropolitan Chicago area, and my cost/
benefit breakdown thus serves as a representative model of
the true cost of this kind of employment.