Jason Azayev ; Kamar Ledgister

11/14/18

 

Student Educational Penalty : Death of Tenured Positions

** Note: We are trying to target universities, with a focus on the analysis of CCNY. Although we focus on universities, we explain why it is important for government action and encouraging students to take action, and the university’s role.

**Note: Unless we write that something is assumed, it was gathered from a reference. We keep reference notes as (#).

 

Imagine a world where credentials, experience, and extensive education leads to a job where you have to worry about paying rent, living paycheck to paycheck, and wondering whether a pay raise could ever be in sight. This is the reality for many adjunct (usually part-time) professors in these United States – people who are tasked with educating the future American academic and high skilled workforce (AHSW). The median adjunct professor earns about $2,700 per course taught (3), not per the hours of effort they put into these courses they are teaching. Adjunct professors’ salaries are determined by the department and not based on their class sizes or experience in teaching which leads to negative incentives for professors, namely to teach as many courses as they can solely to survive (Append 2). This leads to a large portion of the adjunct community dependent on government assistance in order to survive (Append. 1). This sad reality is also coupled with the fact that the majority of professors now teaching at state and community colleges are adjunct professors(3), making up over 50% of the faculty(1), while a falling number of adjuncts are being placed on the tenure track (1). In fact, 75.5% of college faculty looked at by source (1,2) have no access to the tenure track, leaving 1.3 million out of 1.8 million faculty members with no hope in salary/status advancement. This leaves AHSWs with professors who have to work multiple jobs and take government assistance to survive, leaving little time for professors to actually focus on their students and the courses being taught. To fully understand this problem, it is important to understand just how dire this situation is by looking at a few best cases.

About 30 out of every 100 professors had three weeks or fewer to prepare for their lectures. 34 out of every 100 professors do not have access to a university phone, and 21 out of every 100 do not even have an office. Usually, these best cases come under the condition of unionization. These are dire numbers that highlight just how little adjunct professors are given to educate their students. Such a short duration to prepare for a course could lead to an incomplete syllabus and gaps in the education of the course as there is not enough time to properly reason the timescales of each lesson. This is a big problem assuming that adjunct professors are part-time professors, which means that the way the current system stands, it seems like it is almost purposeful to set up professors to fail at teaching their courses. Possibly, it could also mean that the lines between part time and full time are blurred with adjuncts with the administrations responsible for paying them knowing this, which seems like the likely case. 80% of which responded to half worked for over 3 years as adjuncts, and 50% of which have responded to working for over 6 years. These numbers prove that adjuncts are not just temporary employees at their respective campuses, but that they tend to stick around for a long time. Despite this experience and possible greater credit, adjuncts still tend to be paid similar in wages and overall, greatly underpaid compared to their tenured counterparts.

Lack of office space could also have serious impacts on the students. With a lack of location to gather and discuss class assignments, exams, or other works, students are penalized access to their professors outside of the assigned class hours. Even when adjuncts have office spaces, it is likely that they would not be able to make it at a time the school announces as they tend to juggle more jobs to survive. This penalization is a lack of resources to the students who may be struggling to understand the content they have read in their assigned textbooks, exams, or class lectures, which disproportionately affects lower-income families who could not afford tutors.

This problem isn’t niche: adjunct professors have been speaking up for a long time. Mrs. Masito (6) says “All of these conditions affect the quality of teaching and convey the idea that adjuncts are substandard and unimportant. It’s a very precarious employment situation on lots of different levels, and our concern is what that does to the quality of education.” Mrs. Masito is the president of the New Faculty Majority (7), a foundation which “engages in education and advocacy to provide economic justice and academic equity for all college faculty.”

Yet, this educational tax burden on students does have a solution. In fact, it has multiple. One possible solution is to increase the wages of all adjunct professors to at minimum, livable wage. A second possible solution is to drastically increase enrollment into tenure tracks while raising standards for adjunct professors. Both of these are viable actions that schools could take, but the second one seems optimal.

It is important to recognize the responsibilities of a tenure professor first. They are full time professors who are more specialized in their field, and appropriately teach a higher number of classes with a standardized pay rate. It is important to make a distinction between certain professors who want to focus on research and those who want to focus on education as both are important to the school community. Professors who are more focused on teaching should be initially more sought out after from the adjunct community, and advance to teach a higher number of classes. This does not necessarily mean that there will be less adjunct professors, but that could possibly be an outcome. This does not mean those adjuncts should be fired, but trained under tenure until they themselves can become tenure professors. Research focus professors should also teach classes, but not as many as those required to be taught be education based professors. This is where adjuncts could play a large role, in taking over those classes while the students are provided the opportunity to conduct research with the tenured professor.

Increasing the number of tenured professors also increases the base pay of the average faculty member at the university. This comes from the fact that with a promotion from part time to full time comes more hours and higher compensation for those hours spent. This full time focus on the one particular university will also come with the benefit of professors being able to spend more time on their students, being able to educate them further even past classroom hours for those who seek the help.

Increasing the number of tenured professors is also possible by looking at the statistics of how many “part-time” adjunct professors are actually seeking full employment as tenured professors. Although it might not be possible for all adjuncts to be promoted, that is fine as not all adjuncts are looking to get promoted to tenured positions. This population of adjuncts usually is constituted by those who don’t want to be tied down to any particular school, want to try different schools before they settle at one, or those who just don’t want to be full time tenured professors due to their seeking other jobs. These aspects should be accounted for, and should any of them decide to seek promotion to tenured, their qualifications should be considered.

This would greatly relieve the educational penalty on students. They would have adjuncts who put in a greater effort to get promoted to tenured, knowing that this route is open to them, while new tenured professors would get the chance to take on full time roles to educate their students. This knowledge of possible promotion would put people to ease, knowing that there will come a day they can focus solely on their professorships.

For this to become a reality, there needs to be funds to provide this increase. At The City College of New York (CCNY), there are approximately 16,000 students both undergraduate and graduate, 13,000 of which are assumed to be full time undergraduate students (Appendix 3 for correction). Increasing the average tuition by 1,000$ per semester (excluding summer and winter, these to be addressed) for undergraduates would bring in an additional $13,000,000 (not looking at financial aid gaps, to be addressed) per semester, being about $26,000,000 per year. By increasing graduate classes by $2,000 per semester, that would yield approximately $6,000 per semester. This would bring CCNY an additional $38,000,000 per year.  By making summer and winter classes cost $200 more each, assuming each student takes two classes and 20% of the undergraduate student body takes one or two summer and winter classes classes, CCNY can incur an additional $1,040,000 – $2,080,000 per semester. Assuming best case, this gives CCNY an additional $40,000,000 budget per year additional budget.

CCNY has 914 (8) part time, adjunct employees. On average, 75.5%(2) of professors have no track to tenure. In this scenario, we have approximately 690 professors who are not on a tenure track. Research conducted by CAW (9) has found that on average, 3 out of 4 respondents would take the opportunity to become part of the tenure track.  This leaves us with approximately 518 professors who would take the opportunity to become tenured given the chance. Note, this number also leaves out a number of adjunct professors who are part time students and are teaching a course, which means that the total cost we will calculate with actually be lower than the number we report.

If we were to give all 518 of these professors tenure tracks, we must first calculate how much we will save if they were to be fired and subtract that savings from their tenured salaries. First, we will assume that the average adjunct professor takes on 4 classes at the rate of the average salary, $2,700. Assuming they also don’t teach seasonal classes, we can see they make approximately $21,600 per year without taxes. Over the entire 518 people, this amounts to an average of $11,188,800 per year of expenses on adjuncts who want to be promoted. Putting these professors on tenure and bumping their salaries up to $90,000 per year starting, we get about $46,620,000 per year expenses going to new tenured positions. This means that after promoting up all adjunct professors who want to be tenured track, the school will still turn a profit of minimum $4,568,800. This number is likely to be larger ceteris paribus (all else equal), as there could possibly be even less professors seeking tenured tracks, and not everyone might want to transition into a tenure, yet this profit could also go down due to cuts from government tuition aid.

However, the sharp tuition increases could cause backlash. This is intended. People who can not afford that tuition raises are still covered under FAFSA and TAP, so there isn’t a disproportionate negative financial effect on low income students. Still, there are limits on financial aid, which could cause students to try and understand, or outright protest these changes. This could be a push for students to start petitioning their governments to a greater extend in order to reduce the TAP gap and other similar programs, which tend to cut the schools’ incomes.

The key to the survival of our community is to educate the people in their respective municipalities. To achieve this goal, we need large enough financial resources to develop and mold the mind of people in our communities. Institutions that help achieve college level education to the average American can improve the lives of millions people. To achieve this initiative, we need to lobby the government to allocate more money to educational institution. One of the steps that we propose is to lobby lawmakers to slightly increase the tax rates of high net worth individuals. This type of revenue can generate significant amounts of capital, which can then be used to alleviate problems that colleges and universities are facing such as an underpaid part-time faculty with no hope of promotion.

It is important to understand why as an educational municipality dependent on government subsidies, it is important to encourage greater student government action, especially when it has a direct effect on the the municipal financial well being (Example lobby in appendix 2). It is easy to feel stuck in the corner as an institution when the same students that advocate for higher adjunct wages also advocate for lower tuitions. This is where the opportunity comes in for schools to start encouraging their students to put pressure on their local governments and vote for bureaucrats who are willing to invest more in helping their education, as nothing in the hands of the majority in these United States is ultra vires.

 

Appendix

• 1 in 5 families of part-time faculty receive Earned Income Tax Credit payments. 7 percent of families of part-time faculty members receive food stamp benefits. 7 percent of adjuncts and 6 percent of their children receive Medicaid. Families of close to 100,000 part-time faculty members are enrolled in public assistance programs. (10)
• We propose that the state integrate corporate America in their decision making to achieve goal of raising the quality of life of our adjunct professors. The state would implement economic policies such as companies that partner with colleges and universities would have their corporate tax reduced by half the initial cost that they are currently paying now, if they provide monetary funding to local colleges in the state.
• Including part-time student undergraduate enrollment is a difficult task, as there is not as much data available on the recent number of part time students at CCNY. CCNY does publish their own “CCNY Facts” paper (12), however that lists numbers from 2000-2009 for undergraduate part-time and full-time students. These numbers are likely to be different for our current day system, as the social climate and political environments change due to the political cycle and end of events such as the recession of 2008. Even between 2000-2009, we see a big change in the percentage of part time students. A more holistic approach would be to increase the cost associated with earning each credit, instead of increasing the cost as an aggregate due to a fee. By taking this approach, it is likely that there would be breakeven with the tuition raise proposed in this paper. $1,000 for undergraduates and $2,000 for graduates are not static numbers, but dynamic numbers that do need to be adjusted for inflation with time and cost of specific credits associated to particular majors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Biographies

Jason Azayev

Jason Azayev was born in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently attending the City College of New York under the Macaulay Honors College, where he is completing the Computer Science and Applied Mathematics major. Jason has served as Vice President of data-science in a startup called Centiment.io, where he managed and built a software as a service (SAAS) applications and consulted. He is also a former CTO at Xerxes, where he worked with strategists to develop financial trading applications, primarily in the crypto world. He is currently not working at a c-level position in order to have the time to prepare for his actuarial exams, pass his double-major workload, and serve on HackCCNY (treasurer at CCNY Hackathon hosting club).

Kamar Ledgister

Kamar Ledgister was born in Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica. He received his Associate Degree in Engineering Science from Bronx Community College in 2018 and he currently pursuing a Mechanical Engineering Degree at City College of New York. Kamar is support specialist at Catholic Guardian  Services since 2012. He is a member of National Society of Black Engineer. He was the recipient of the Peter Jennings

Scholarship Award of the City University of New York. He currently lives in Bronx, New York.

 

 

REFERENCES

(1) Bears, Z. (2017, June 30). Students Don’t Deserve Underpaid, Overworked Professors. Retrieved November 11, 2018, from (2)http://www.wbur.org/edify/2017/06/30/students-dont-deserve-underpaid-overworked-professors.THE DOE 2009

(3)Facts about adjuncts. (n.d.). Retrieved November 11, 2018, from

http://www.newfacultymajority.info/facts-about-adjuncts / Referenced the DOE (4)Deltacostproject.org. (2018). Home Page | Delta Cost Project. [online] Available at:

https://deltacostproject.org/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2018].

(5)Greenberg, I. (2014). Impossible Unity: Adjuncts and Tenure-Track Faculty. New Labor Forum (Sage Publications Inc.), 23(1), 11–13. https://doi-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/10.1177/1095796013512623

(6) Adjunct Professors Step up Their Efforts to Increase Pay. (2018). Retrieved from

(7) New Faculty Majority | Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. (2018). Retrieved from http://www.newfacultymajority.info/

(8)City College of New York. (2018). Retrieved from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_College_of_New_York

(9)Coalition on the Academic Workforce. (2018). Retrieved from

http://www.academicworkforce.org/index.html

(10) A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members | The Coalition On The Academic Workforce June 2018 http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf

(11)Your College Professor Could Be On Public Assistance | NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/poverty-u-many-adjunct-professors-food-stamps-n336596

(12)  City Facts | The City College of New York https://www.ccny.cuny.edu/sites/default/files/institutionalresearch/upload/City-Facts-Fall-2009-07152010.pdf