[setgree]

Status and autonomy. Even an adjunct professor still gets addressed with a honorific. You rarely have anyone yell at you or look over your shoulder as you work. And, as a friend who has a TT job at a Canadian University recently observed, it is generally the adjuncts who most adopt the professorial look: sweaters, jackets with elbow patches, horn-rimmed glasses.

So long as these things are enticing to enough people, supply will outstrip demand and wages will fall.

[mycologos]

I think this is an underrated point in these discussions. There are three components to every job: how much value other people get out of you doing it, how much value you get out of doing it, and how many other people want to do it. Whether it's game development or adjunct prof'ing, employers know when the job their offering has benefits beyond pure salary, and they adjust that salary accordingly. The humanities grad students I knew weren't stupid. They could see the statistics in front of them. But staying the university world for a bit longer, and seeing other people do the same, tempted them down that path, and continues to tempt a surprising number of them.