By Stephen Thompson
Welcome to the first issue of College Labor News, a newsletter created by college and university employees in Baltimore.
Why create this newsletter? Consider the following example. A student taking 15 credits this fall at a local university will pay $23,670 in tuition for the semester, which translates to $1,584 per credit. So for each three-credit course with 30 of these students, the university will bring in a whopping $142,560 in tuition. But an adjunct teaching the course will make only about $4,000, which is less than three percent of the tuition students pay. And note that these numbers are not hypothetical—they are taken directly from the website of a local university.
Of course, tuition and compensation amounts will vary from place to place. But conversations with colleagues on different campuses, and tuition numbers that are easy to check online, reveal that the problem is widespread. While colleges and universities rake in huge sums of money, adjuncts struggle to pay their rent.
This is part of a national trend. As Paul F. Campos wrote in the New York Times, there is a widening gap between tuition and instructor pay. In real terms the average pay for people who teach college in the US is actually lower now than it was in 1970, while tuition costs are much higher (see “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much,” NYT 04/04/2015).
So where is all the money going? As Campos explains, administrative costs are a huge factor: “administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.”
And while administrative compensation soars, colleges and universities are relying more and more on adjuncts to teach courses. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, between 2003 and 2013, the share of faculty hired off the tenure track went from 45 percent to 62 percent at public bachelor’s degree granting institutions, with a similar increase at private institutions (“When Colleges Rely on Adjuncts, Where Does the Money Go?”, CHE, 01/05/2017).
It should be no surprise that as colleges increasingly rely on hiring adjuncts, who are frequently excluded from faculty governance structures, administrators are free to spend more and more money on themselves. This highlights a deeper problem: the fact that adjuncts have little or no say in how their institutions are run.
We created this newsletter because we know that things don’t have to be this way, and we are excited about the work people are already doing to change the status quo. We want to build stronger links between these efforts, and compare notes to see which strategies have been most effective. And although this newsletter was founded by adjuncts, we recognize that in many ways students, service workers and instructors are all in the same boat. We know that by organizing to build power together, we can create less stressful and more fulfilling lives, and gain a real say in running our institutions.
Read the rest of Issue 1 here.
College Labor News 