Pros
Good direct supervisor. She cares about employees and is fighting to make things better for the department. The Program Manager is really great. She is incredibly kind and hard-working.
Cons
We've always been paid horribly for the amount of work that we do. But I enjoyed my students and my department and I felt as if I was making a difference in the world. Last year, after close to a decade of working at ASU, and receiving high marks on both my teaching evaluations and on my annual instructor evaluations, I finally received a merit pay increase. This merit pay increase was .5% of my annual salary. However, THIS year, we are being asked to teach two more classes per year and, while the salaries are being "bumped up" to $36K (for a 5/5 teaching load of 25 students per class), the merit pay has "vanished" from the equation and some of us are actually being paid LESS for this teaching load than we were previously. I've always been more than willing and able to find time to help students in my off hours, to counsel them about how to navigate the increasingly-large university, to urge them to continue on with their dream of completing their education. Given this new teaching load and the fact that, in order to make up for that missing salary, I will be forced to teach somewhere else in addition to teaching at ASU, I won't be able to hold as many hands. And no matter what people think, beginning college students are practically children. They need extra help and encouragement to find their path. First-generation college students are even-more so, and, increasingly, this is ASU's college population. They need MORE help, not LESS. In addition, tuition keeps increasing. This raises the question. Where is the money going? It's clear now that ASU does not truly value students, or student retention, simply the number of students rolling in the doors and their tuition dollars. Even if those students don't manage to complete their degrees, in part because classes have become so big that they cannot get any personal attention, ASU still gets the student-loan funds. ASU is the Walmart of education. If you can avoid teaching here, do so at all costs. You won't make enough to pay your bills, or your own student loans, and you won't be able to help students as effectively as you would elsewhere.