Why You Should Join the #MillionStudentMarch: Adjunct Employment

Next Thursday, November 12th, the Million Student March will be held on campuses across the nation. There are now over 90 marches scheduled! To find your local event and sign-up, visit studentmarch.org.

We have three demands:

• Tuition-Free Public College
• Cancellation of All Student Debt
• A $15 Minimum Wage for All Campus Workers

Angry Millennials fully endorses these demands and each week, we will cover one major reason why every young person across the country should be in the streets on November 12th. So far, we have covered many issues currently facing our generation, including the rising cost of education, the explosion of student debt, and decades of stagnant wages. This week, we explore how even though our tuition rates are rising every year, schools are actually spending less on instructional staff, with many part-time staff across the country struggling to make ends meet due to the lack of adequate pay and job security that comes with Adjunct Employment.

LOW ADJUNCT PAY

Many people traditionally associate low-income assistant programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicare, and the Earned Income Tax Credit with low-skilled jobs such as food service or retail work. How many politicians and pundits do we hear dismiss the concerns of the poor, simply telling them to stop being lazy and complaining? In their view, if these low-skilled workers acquired marketable skills by going to trade school or college, or maybe even graduate school, their entire life would turn around. They would certainly be earning more money without having to demand a $15 per hour minimum wage.

Unfortunately, earning a sufficient wage in today’s economy is not as simple as some might think, especially with the rise of flexible independent contractor positions such as Uber or the spread of temporary office positions in lieu of full-time employment. Nowhere is this more apparent than through the struggles of adjunct professors who are working part-time on college campuses throughout the country.

A recent study by the University of California–Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education found that 25% of “part-time college faculty” and their families now receive some sort public assistance, according to recent Census data.

As we can see from this chart, home care, child care, and fast food workers are still struggling the most in our post-industrial service economy. However, part-time college faculty are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on graduate degrees and doctorates, only to find out that they still cannot support their families without government assistance.

NBC News breaks down the data from this study, and finds that close to 100,000 part-time faculty members are enrolled in public assistance programs. 20% receive Earned Income Tax Credit payments, 7% rely on food stamps, 7% of adjuncts and 6% of their children receive Medicaid.

When the numbers are broken down by state, we see an even worse situation, as between 30 to 55% of all part-time faculty members are receiving public assistance in a majority of states:

While these statistics should certainly concern you, it doesn’t fully represent the difficulties of this highly-educated sector. For instance, consider the story of Ms. Bruninga-Matteau, a 43-year-old single mother who teaches two humanities courses at Yavapai College, in Prescott, Ariz. She is on both SNAP and Medicare:

“She started working as an adjunct in graduate school. This semester she is working 20 hours each week, prepping, teaching, advising, and grading papers for two courses at Yavapai, a community college with campuses in Chino Valley, Clarkdale, Prescott, Prescott Valley, and Sedona. Her take-home pay is $900 a month, of which $750 goes to rent. Each week, she spends $40 on gas to get her to the campus; she lives 43 miles away, where housing is cheaper.”

Or what about Tanya Paperny, who used to work at multiple campuses in the Washington D.C. area before leaving academia to become a writer and editor at Bellwether Education Partners:

“I taught as many as five classes each semester at four campuses in D.C. and Maryland, crisscrossing town by bike and public transportation during work days that sometimes lasted 13 hours. I never knew what my employment would look like the following term and constantly applied for part- and full-time teaching positions in case I didn’t get rehired. Many of the courses I taught — composition, professional writing and journalism — were required for undergraduate or graduate students, yet those programs ran almost entirely on the backs of adjuncts.”

How did we end up in this situation where Americans who spend 6 to 10 years in higher education end up on public assistance with a median income of $2,700 per class, and between $20,000 and $25,000 per year with no benefits?

ADMINISTRATION OVER INSTRUCTION

According to a USC Rossier study, 78.3% of college faculty members were tenure-track in 1975. Almost four decades later, only 33.5% are tenured, and 47.7% were part-time employees, unable to receive benefits or job stability.

While public and private institutions are relying on part-time underpaid adjunct faculty, they are still hiring certain full-time employees, but these are Administrators who don’t teach classes. According to Benjamin Ginsberg, author of Fall of the Faculty, total spending by higher education institutions tripled to more than $325 billion per year between 1975 and 2005. Over this period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained consistent, with around 15 students per instructor. In contrast, the administrator-to-student ratio has decreased from one administrator for every 84 students to one for every 68 students. In just the past 15 years, Universities have increased the number of administrative positions by 60%, and just between 1998 and 2003, their salaries have also increased by 50%.

A Delta Cost Project study from 2010 also corroborates this trend, finding that between 1998 and 2008, private colleges increased spending on administration and staff support by 36%, while only spending 22% extra on instruction.

Colleges are increasing the number of administrative positions on their payroll while Presidents, CEOs, and other senior staff members are making more than ever. Meanwhile, tenure track positions are disappearing, forever replaced by underpaid adjuncts. How can these part-time faculty members fight back to stop these troubling trends of our higher education system?

ADJUNCTS FIGHT BACK

Earlier this year, adjunct professors joined together with SEIU and the Fight For 15, to create Faculty Forward, a coalition demanding an accessible and affordable quality education, for-profit college accountability, and fair compensation:

“We are putting forward a bold demand for higher pay that ensures proportionate and fair compensation for all faculty by establishing a national standard of $15,000 per course — total compensation including both salary and benefits. This returns the emphasis in higher education to instruction and student learning, core missions of our higher education system.”

Much like fast food, retail, and service workers who have been fighting for a $15 per hour minimum wage for the past few years, this will be a long fight toward dignity for all campus faculty who don’t have the benefits of a full-time professor.

The movement is already claiming small victories, as in just the past few months, SEIU faculty unions have formed at Ithaca College, Tufts University, St. Louis Community College, and Lesley University.

Graduate students, who are paying higher tuition rates for degrees that leave them with diminishing options for tenure positions, have also been organizing for better compensation and working conditions on campuses quads across the country. There are 31 graduate student unions across the country, including NYU, Columbia University, UMass Boston, and the University of California.

Chris Nickell, a doctorate student in music at NYU, explains why graduate students need to organize:

“The idea that graduate students should live in poverty during their time at school is something that we really chafe against. One of our goals all along has been to make sure we do all that we can to fight that misconception.”

Our education system is broken, and we are paying higher tuition each year for an education which is increasingly not helping us in the job market. However, we can’t give up. Students across the country must fight for a $15/hour minimum wage to rise the income of all workers. We must eliminate the tuition of public universities to provide an opportunity for all members of our society to obtain a higher education regardless of income. Finally, we must abolish student debt, because a large percentage of our generation has been robbed of our economic futures.

This isn’t impossible. We start on November 12th at the Million Student March. Sign up and find your local event at StudentMarch.org.

We are more than our degrees and job titles. We are not a loan. The time has come for us to stand up and fight back!

Related

Originally published at www.angrymillennials.com on November 5, 2015.