The academic employment turmoil on today's college and university campuses can be identified as a direct result of severely declining public education budgets that are needed to pay full time salaries for post-secondary instructors. Teachers still working on the traditional college and university campuses have a right to feel apathetic about their career trajectories. After all, there is real pain associated with declining faculty salaries and the benefits associated with them. While there is little hope of budgetary funds for public education increasing in the near term, there is an alternative available for clear-sighted academics with computers skills. To put a sharp point on this set of circumstances the act of searching for online teaching positions can cure academic apathy. This release from the despair of constantly worrying about the next round of teacher layoffs results as a growing awareness of the sheer number of online bachelor degree programs and online master degree programs being developed constantly by post-secondary academic institutions. The popularity of online college degree programs is high among academic administrators that are sincerely worried about successfully meeting the educational needs of the swelling student populations at community colleges, universities and for-profit colleges.
The reason the administrators and department heads of traditional college and universities are so eager to offer online college courses to students instead of physical classrooms is because their jobs and their state incomes depend on continuing to operate the academic institutions with fewer dollars each year from the state. The cost of providing online degree programs that can be enrolled in by students quite familiar with digital media is much lower than maintaining and building college and university classrooms and the absence of students on traditional campuses means lower cost to maintain the campus grounds. All of this means that the chances to become an online professor and actually make a real living from teaching online are better than ever before in academic history.