Professors in Peril: Adjuncts in California Face Uncertainty and Financial Insecurity
This story was produced by Jathniel Coronado, Jericho Dancel, Briana Munoz, Martha Nerio, Catherine Valdez and professor Julie Patel Liss in partnership with Cal State LA's Community News and EdSource.
A Pasadena City College professor recently got certified as a bartender as he ponders leaving academia.
A professor who teaches in Los Angeles and Orange County spends more time on the road some days than he does getting paid to teach.
A professor lost his health care benefits when he needed them most after someone else was assigned to the class he taught for years at Compton College.
These educators work to make a difference in students’ lives. They teach because it brings them joy.
But there is a dark side to their profession: The meager wages have sunk some into debt while others have faced poverty and financial insecurity.
More than half of the nearly two-dozen adjunct and part-time professors interviewed by KCET said they don’t earn enough from teaching to make ends meet. Despite advanced degrees and union memberships, most have faced financial insecurity. Many rely on side hustles and the support of their family members or friends to avoid housing insecurity.
Part of the problem is that adjunct professors can't get enough work in one place to qualify for better compensation and benefits because of a state law that limits how much part-time faculty can work at a single institution to 67% of what full-time, permanent faculty work. To make ends meet, they teach at several institutions, sometimes in multiple counties, which is why they’re dubbed “freeway faculty” or “roads scholars.”
The bottom line: The uncertainty takes a toll on their physical and mental health and affects the quality of the education students receive.
“We all want to do the best for our students but the system is not providing the space to do that,” said Assemblymember Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, a former adjunct math professor. Garcia proposed legislation earlier this year to require the state to conduct a comprehensive study comparing part-time faculty’s compensation and credentials with full-timers’. “When a professor is being spread thin between going to different campuses and having no planning time, it takes away the ability to put in that extra time to meet students where they’re at.”
Higher education’s dependence on adjuncts
Temporary professors made up an average of 69% of faculty at the California Community Colleges and part-time professors made up about half, on average, of Cal State University systems’ professors. An estimated 19 percent of UC faculty in 2019 were adjuncts and part-time staff, according to a CCC employee headcount report, a CSU report, a University of California accountability report and information from a UC spokesperson.
Source: Data from CCC 2019 employee headcount data. *North Orange Continuing Education is the non-credit arm of the North Orange County Community College District.
Since many adjunct professors still work in their industry of expertise, they can offer students specialized or up-to-date skills.
“The way that part-time jobs are designed is that somebody who's a professional … can come in one day a week, and they can share their knowledge,” said Jeff Rowe, a freelance journalist who has taught the subject for two decades, previously at Cal State Fullerton and now at Fullerton College. “If you're teaching part-time architecture, or psychology, or whatever it might be, it keeps you connected with academia and … how young people see the world. That is priceless.”
Source: Headcount data from Fall 2019 CSUProfiles report
The problem is, experts say, that institutions became over-reliant on adjunct professors over time. As enrollment in public colleges and universities — and expenses for technology, facility upgrades and student aid — grew over the decades, the number of tenure-line professors didn’t keep pace. That’s due to funding issues, Baby Boomers retiring and their positions being cut, and other factors. For instance, some administrators appreciate the flexibility offered by adjuncts and the fact that they can be easier to hold accountable than tenured professors.
In some cases, unions at the various institutions have helped adjuncts, temporary or part-time instructors earn additional benefits such as paid office hours or more job stability but the professors interviewed say a lot more is needed.
Several higher education officials said there will always be a need for some part-time faculty because of enrollment fluctuations and even if there are more part-time professors, they tend to teach fewer courses overall so the students are often getting more time with tenured and tenure-track professors.
Part-timers’ paid hours often dwarf time worked
Most state compensation data for faculty doesn’t distinguish between adjunct and full-time professors and the categories are labeled inconsistently from campus to campus. That said, a narrower analysis of 2019 state data for seven community college districts that clearly labeled employment status shows that permanent professors’ average total wages were at least three times more than those of adjuncts or temporary professors at each district.
“Those numbers would be even more skewed if you include benefits because most adjuncts don’t have those...They can’t buy a house if they don’t know if they’ll have hours next year,” said Garcia, the state legislator.
Despite emails, most of the seven districts could not be reached for comment and one wrote back to confirm that the numbers are consistent with what they reported to the state. Another, Kelly Avila, Merced’s associate vice president of Human Resources, said factors such as prior experience and education can influence faculty pay and at Merced, “the hourly rate for adjunct faculty is actually higher than for full-time faculty, but they teach fewer courses.”
At many universities, adjunct professors are typically paid for the time they spend in the classroom and sometimes, for office hours. Most adjuncts interviewed said many additional hours are spent each week preparing for classes, grading and helping students outside of class.
“You're soaking up evenings and weekends correcting papers, doing lesson plans and all that stuff,” said Rowe, the Fullerton journalism professor. “I really love doing this, but it can be hugely time-consuming.”
Like many adjuncts, Rowe relies on his other jobs since teaching one class each semester only provides about 10 percent of his annual income. The rest comes from freelance work, his responsibilities as a business coach and project leader for a nonprofit, and his job leading a teaching farm at a University of California program in Long Beach.
Conversely, Morgan Woolsey earns most of her income from teaching but her side gigs — singing and writing reviews at $100 a pop for the “Los Angeles Review of Books” — also help bring in cash.
In the most recent academic year, Woolsey — who has a doctorate and teaches LGBTQ studies and musicology at UCLA and remote classes elsewhere at Chaffey College and Binghamton University in New York — said her nine classes would earn her about $50,000 to $60,000, which is a fraction of what her full-time colleagues make and is just enough to cover her expenses.
“There’s no way to plan a future,” Woolsey said. “I’ve been in L.A. for almost 12 years now and I don’t feel like I can settle down.”
Another source of aggravation for adjuncts is commuting to various campuses.
“You have to hustle,” said Giovanni Hortua, who lives in Southeast L.A. County and has taught since 2013. “It's really difficult to know that you're spending more time in traffic than you are getting paid.”
Hortua has had to drive hours per day between multiple campuses he teaches at, including Cal State LA and others in Orange County like Cypress College.
Plus, with up to 80 students in some classes, Hortua said that the toughest part is grading their work “especially if they're essays.” A grader he had at Cal State LA was helpful but others were not.
“I'm not that professor who says, ‘That's a good job,’” he said. “I'm the one that's like, ‘Hey, what do you mean? Or like, what are you talking about? We didn't cover that. We didn't even talk about this,’ because that tells them that I do pay attention. I read everything.”
Officials from UCLA, Fullerton College and Cal State Fullerton declined to comment.
An official at Cal State LA said faculty with classes over 75 students are given a teaching assistant and effectively, more compensation -- going beyond what's required by the CSU system.
It's similar at Cypress College. Mark Posner, the director of communication there, said most of its courses are in the range of 30 to 35 students and if faculty are offered a double section or a section-and-a-half, then “they are compensated for the extra grading.”
Ryan Yarosh, media relations director at Binghamton, said the university has increased its tenure track faculty positions by 25 percent since 2011. He added that its adjunct jobs are intended to give people who just earned a doctorate or those finishing up their dissertations some experience and to give folks with careers in the field a chance to enjoy teaching while earning some extra cash.
Alisha Rosas, Chaffey College’s associate superintendent of student services and strategic communications, said faculty pay is negotiated by the district and the faculty union, and is based partly on comparisons to similar districts.
Rosas said the college paid faculty extra to cover the cost of new equipment and supplies for online teaching and it supports its faculty and staff by loaning laptops, tablets, webcams, headphones and hotspots to them. “Although part-time faculty do have access to health insurance through state universities, this is actually not a part of the terms and conditions of their employment at Chaffey,” said Rosas.
Uncertainties abound for adjuncts
What bothers some part-timers more than the pay gap is the uncertainty they face.
For instance, Najah Abdelkader, who has taught philosophy and humanities courses for almost a quarter-century at Southwestern College, San Diego City College and San Diego Miramar College, still worries whether she’ll be assigned the three classes effectively required to earn healthcare benefits for her family.
“It’s just continuously on my mind, will I be offered the classes, you know, is my healthcare going to continue?” Abdelkader said in a phone interview. “I wake up thinking about that and go to sleep thinking about it.”
As the main breadwinner in her marriage, she often has to teach three classes on different campuses in the same semester to earn about $2,100 a month — enough to cover her mortgage and expenses but with little left to save.
“If my livelihood goes below a certain level, I won’t be able to pay my bills or my mortgage,” she said. Despite the hardships, she said she’s hanging onto her career because “I love teaching. This is my profession...This is what I got trained to do.”
Similarly, Woolsey said constructing lesson plans and devoting time to students can be tough while teaching at different schools that vary between semester and quarter systems, but the alternative is far worse: When she isn’t assigned to teach enough classes, she has faced financial uncertainty and even lost access to health care.
“Not being employed full-time at UCLA means that my benefits are inconsistent,” Woolsey said. “I’ve had years where I thought I had health insurance but I went to use it and found out I didn’t.”
That’s why the beginning of every semester or quarter is anxiety-ridden for Woolsey.
“Sometimes you don't find out you got offered a class until a week before it starts [and] you have to rush and put it together at the last minute. And then there's no guarantee that you'll have one the next quarter or the next semester,” Woolsey said. “It's really stressful having to live in these little 10- to 14-week chunks.”
A UCLA representative declined to comment and officials at San Diego Community College District could not be reached.
Mark Sanchez, superintendent of Southwestern College, said the school has decided to give other assignments worth $2,000 per job to its part-time faculty members whose Fall 2021 classes are canceled due to low enrollment.
“The pandemic has disrupted enrollment patterns increasing the uncertainty of adjunct teaching assignments and the associated earnings that our part-time faculty depend upon,” he said.
In the long-term, he added, there isn’t enough funding to have full-time faculty teach all courses and part-time professors allow colleges to offer classes without having to commit long-term. He said state leaders know about the funding issues and have allocated an additional $100 million to California community colleges to increase full-time faculty hiring this year.
Professors consider leaving profession
Adjunct teaching wages are so low and costs so high in California that several professors interviewed said they have considered leaving academia.
Kolya Ludwig has already left the state and is also considering a career switch. He moved recently from Highland Park to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he recently passed a certification to become an alcohol server in the state.
“I might literally become a bartender very soon and just get out of academia entirely,” he said.
After graduating a few years ago with a master’s degree in psychology from Cal State LA, Ludwig started teaching the subject part-time at Pasadena City College.
The experience was a stark contrast to what he had done before, tutoring one-on-one.
“Adjunct professors are some of the most exploited employees in academia,” Ludwig said. “We're basically used to help the school hit its graduation and transfer targets, taking on large class sizes, not getting support in things like grading...despite having the most knowledge about the subjects we teach and the most direct contact with students.”
Ludwig said that he makes an effort to manage students’ expectations by being upfront about his temporary work status with students, telling them: “I am a gig worker like an Uber driver, except I teach classes.”
He added that he doesn’t teach because he wants to make a lot of money:
“I do it because I want to really challenge students to think outside the box and be critical thinkers and find meaning in psychology,” Ludwig said.
But the stress often gets to him.
“I'd say like, three or four times per semester, I'll go through a period where I'm just like, ‘I need to quit. I just can't do this,’” he said.
Aaron Dowell, who had been teaching at Compton College for about 10 years, is in the same boat.
The adjunct film professor said he never earned more than $35,000 per year and his income is often not enough to pay for his expenses: food, transportation, paying off debt, and when he qualifies, health insurance. Staying with his parents helps, he said, and it wasn’t the pay that motivated him.
“What I do care about,” he said, “is all the students that I serve in the community that I grew up in, and helping these students get access to certain things and teaching them how to make films.”
Dowell hoped, of course, he would someday become a full-time professor.
That day never came.
A full-time professor was hired to teach his course — a move that resulted in Dowell losing the health benefits he started earning about two years ago. And the classes he managed to pick up last semester at other colleges don’t earn him health care.
The timing was terrible. Dowell said in an interview earlier this year that he has hip bursitis and has been putting off seeing a doctor for it: “I’m so afraid to get this MRI because I don’t know how much it’s going to cost.”
He said the past academic year will be his last one teaching: “It just hasn’t proven to be worth it emotionally [and] definitely not financially.”
Disparities ultimately affect students
When great teachers leave or are too busy paying their bills with other jobs, that ultimately hurts students and the quality of education they receive.
The news about Dowell surprised former students like Daniel Trujillo, a freelance producer and sound mixer.
Trujillo, who took one of Dowell’s film classes at Compton College in 2010, said he connected with the professor almost immediately, unlike with many of his white professors.
“Having another person of color to look up to as I was starting my film career was nice. It's kind of a pressure reliever because I could go to him and he could understand that I didn't have the most expensive camera,” Trujillo said, who graduated from USC in 2014. “His teaching still meant a lot and carried a lot of weight as I went through those other programs too, because without him, I wouldn't have really learned how to make movies from the ground level.”
In 2015, while producing sound for a short film with Dowell, Trujillo got a call that his father had a heart attack and passed away.
Dowell “stopped everything [and] he took me to the hospital,” Trujillo said. That moment has stayed with Trujillo because he knows there are costs to stopping production when you’re on deadline.
Oshin Tudayan, another former student of Dowell’s from a course he taught virtually in spring 2020 at Long Beach City College, was impressed when he reached out to check in and share a job opportunity.
“I was like, ‘Oh shoot. It's been a couple months and you still remember me,’” Tudayan said. “I’ve never had a professor like Professor Dowell.”
Tudayan said that she appreciates that her part-time professors tend to be more pliable with deadlines, probably because they, too, need flexibility for their busy schedules. Plus, they often still work in the industries they teach about, and bring current expertise to class.
With one class taught by a full-timer, she said, it was “like, ‘Oh, I'm just going to give you 17 quizzes and you just have to finish it all on your own to pass the class,” Tudayan said. In contrast, she said, Dowell’s course “was one of my more memorable classes because it was very hands-on.”
The fact that Dowell is leaving teaching upsets Tudayan: “I feel really bad and it makes me angry.”
Advocating for adjuncts and helping them find full-time opportunities
Rowe, who teaches in Fullerton, said there should be a better system in place for helping long-time, experienced and successful part-timers become full-timers.
“That's totally absent in academia. You can be the best part-timer that anybody ever saw but when the full-time job comes up, you're going to have to be in the applicant pool like everybody else,” including those without previous experience at the institution, he said.
Cal State LA student Vincent Moc said he would like to see more adjuncts like his professor from Pasadena City College, who taught at multiple campuses, rewarded with stable jobs: “She always had a smile on her face and she just did her job. She was there for us.”
Ivan Cobian, a psychology major at California State LA, said he can think of at least several professors he has had who were part-timers: an adjunct speech professor on campus who also taught in Long Beach, a psychology professor who also taught at Pierce College and a statistics professor who also taught at UC Riverside. He said it may seem like a “David and Goliath fight,” but students should take action after they have a class with a great instructor by filling out a positive class evaluation and advocating for the professor with the university.
Representatives from Compton College and Long Beach City College could not be reached despite emails. Officials from Pasadena City College and California State University systems declined to comment.
Carmen Ramos Chandler, CSUN’s director of media relations, said that faculty headcounts don’t capture the impact of full-time professors.
“By definition, part-time faculty teach only a few courses, while full-time, tenure track faculty teach the lion’s share,” she said, adding that tenure-line faculty typically teach more than 55% of the classes. While university leaders deeply value the “real-world education” part-time faculty provide, she said “our tenured and tenure-track faculty are key to the educational experience of our students.”
Similarly, Cal State LA spokesperson Jocelyn Stewart said the ratio of students to tenure-line faculty is a better measure of who teaches. Plus, the university has 91 open searches for tenure track faculty, so the ratio will continue to improve.
“This means that more of our students are receiving instruction from tenured and tenure-track professors. Our wonderfully diverse faculty includes part-time instructors who play an important role in the education of our students,” she said. “Some are practitioners who work other jobs and teach on the side. Others may see the work as a path to full-time work.”
The community college system raised an issue with its faculty headcount numbers: Some of the same temporary faculty members are listed multiple times because they work at different community colleges so they’re counted separately at each, according to Paul Feist, the vice chancellor for communications at the California Community Colleges.
A University of California spokesperson said that its lecturers, who are not tenured or tenure-track, play a key role in providing quality education to students, are deeply valued, and have “some of the best pay, benefits and working conditions in the country, and a level of employment stability that only a select few universities in the nation extend to their lecturers.”
She added that the system continues to negotiate with the union on a contract that addresses faculty concerns while meeting both parties’ needs.
