Pears were all-you-can-take at the food bank, so Front Range Community College adjunct professor Caprice Lawless loaded up during a visit one Thursday.
Lawless set the plastic bag in her cart, where it joined manila folders of student homework she still had to grade, some canned tuna and peanut butter.
She has two masters degrees and almost 16 years of community college teaching experience. Yet she said she has to choose between incurring debt or visiting a food bank each month to survive on her approximately $20,000 a year adjunct instructor salary.
“It’s a spiritual challenge,” Lawless said.
In the State of the Union address earlier this year, President Barack Obama identified two years of free community college education as a means to help the middle class. It’s not only the students who could use a leg up, though.
Adjunct professors scraping by on assistance from charities, families and safety net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid continue to push for fair compensation and work conditions. Higher education institutions across Colorado employ part-time faculty, but adjuncts in community colleges say their situation particularly is dire.
Adjuncts currently represent 4,060 employees, or 78 percent of instructors at the 13 colleges in the Colorado Community College System, and are paid per class, largely without benefits, sick leave or job security.
Across the country, adjuncts staged a “National Adjunct Walkout Day” on Feb. 25 to protest wages and working conditions. Organizers held events on Colorado campuses, too, including around 70 people who gathered in the middle of Metro State College’s Auraria campus in Denver.
“These are qualified teachers, and I think we should be doing better by them,” said state Sen. John Kefalas, D-Fort Collins, who has championed legislation that would end the disparity between pay for adjuncts and their full-time faculty counterparts. “Ultimately, that impacts the quality of the education.”
The community college system contends that its funding ranks below all other higher education institutions in the state, and that it needs the workforce flexibility of employing part-time instructors. Creating more full-time positions would be cost-prohibitive for students and unresponsive to the state’s economic needs, said Colorado Community College System President Nancy McCallin.
“The two primary sources of funding – tuition as well as state funding – really restrict us from a financial standpoint from being able to operate in any other model,” McCallin said.
Adjuncts and full-time faculty are paid at significantly different rates. For “full-time” and “part-time” instructors teaching identical standard credit loads of 30 hours per week, this year the system estimated it would spend $20,828 on average in salaries for adjuncts and $53,693 on average for full-time instructors, who also receive benefits, according to budget documents.
Starting in July, adjuncts will be eligible for health insurance if they work 30 hours a week or more, according to the Community College System.
The community colleges assert only a third of adjuncts want a full-time teaching job. At current staffing levels that would represent 1,270 employees. Adjuncts trying to piece together a career and their allies in the legislature say the result of this “two-tiered system” of payment pushes highly educated and accomplished education professionals to the edge of financial disaster.
Locally, Southwest Colorado Community College has about three adjuncts to every full professor during most semesters, said Norm Jones, executive dean for the Durango and Mancos campuses.
A number of programs and courses – welding, for example – must be taught by adjuncts because it’s a trade, Jones said. There’s no meaningful difference between staffing at the two campuses because most professors teach at both locations, he said.
“It’s one and the same,” he said.
The Durango Herald brings you this report in partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS I-News. Learn more at rmpbs.org/news. Contact Anna Boiko-Weyrauch abw@rmpbs.org. Herald Staff Writer Chuck Slothower contributed to this report.
