A Helpful Contingent Faculty Compromise: Equal Pay for (75% of) Equal Work

By Daniel Davis, Ph.D.

Pay parity between contingent and tenure-track faculty members remains a hotly contested issue. On one side, administrators seek cost savings through a minimally compensated and flexible instructional workforce. On the other side of the issue, organizers and union leaders often believe that contingent faculty members should receive pro-rated pay commensurate with that of their tenure-track faculty counterparts.

Bottom-line savings aside, a counterargument against the “equal pay for equal work” mantra is that it ignores the fact that contingent faculty members do not perform the same amount of departmental and institutional work that tenure-track faculty members do. Tenure-track faculty, for example, typically have student-advising responsibilities and obligations to departmental committees and institutional task forces—let alone other academic endeavors such as research, publishing, and grant writing.

But what if a formula for pay parity could be adopted that took this valid reasoning into consideration? In order to ponder a solution that makes sense, let’s take a look at the current compensation structure for contingent and tenure-track faculty:

The Contingent Academic Workers (CAW) Survey placed nationwide average contingent faculty pay at $2,235 per course at two-year colleges and $3,400 per course at four-year colleges and universities. The Adjunct Project, a crowd-sourced database of pay rates, lists the contingent national average at $2,987 per course, with variations by state, institution, and discipline.

For the sake of comparison to tenure-track faculty compensation, let’s assume a full teaching load is 10 courses per year. (This is a very high number, but one used in many community colleges and teaching-focused universities.) Using the CAW rates above, the result is annual pay for contingent faculty of $22,350 per year at two-year colleges and $34,000 at four-year colleges.

By contrast, the Chronicle of Education Almanac reports nationwide average assistant professor pay at public two-year institutions and four-year public institutions as $54,101 and $68,379, respectively. In other words, contingent faculty members make only about half of what tenure-track faculty members make. At many institutions, it is in fact a much lower percentage. According to a U.S. House committee staff report, “In order to garner comparable wages [to non-contingent faculty], an adjunct would have to teach nearly seventeen courses per year.”

Of course, obtaining such a schedule is not only impossible, especially across institutions, but it is an unmanageable workload. So, one side wants 100% equal pay, while the other side allows 50% or less to stand. What now?

Some institutions articulate a definition of the percentage of tenure-track faculty members’ workload that is covered by their teaching responsibilities alone. In other words, if a tenure-track and contingent faculty person taught the same number of in-class hours, some institutions have a stated proportion of the equal work performed. For example, data on California community colleges revealed that 55 out of 72 community college districts in California had explicitly defined such a percentage, sometimes called pro-rata pay. These ratios ranged from a low of 53% at West Hills Community College District to a high of 100% at San Francisco Community College districts. While the most commonly chosen definition by far was 75% by 19 of districts.

Applying that 75% definition of pay parity to the nationwide averages of assistant professor compensation found in the Chronicle of Education Almanac, then two-year public institutions would pay, on average, just over $4,000 per course, while four-year public institutions would pay just over $5,100 per course. At these levels, contingent faculty would make an income comparable to the beginning and middle tiers of compensation provided to teachers at elementary and high schools ($40,000–$51,000). Instead, contingent faculty members are paid less than many service workers. Robin Sowards, an adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh commented in a congressional report, “I have a colleague that works as [a] bartender, as well as an adjunct, and he makes far more money pouring beer than teaching.”

The cost of implementing a 75% pay ratio for contingent faculty members proves modest when compared to overall campus budgets. For instance, staying with the California Community Colleges example, the statewide California Community College Chancellor’s Office reported 42,049 contingent faculty members in its ranks for the fall semester of 2016. If each of those contingent faculty members received $1,000 more per course (getting close to that 75% ratio), and each one taught four courses a year (a frequent course load for adjuncts), the collective raise would cost $168.2 million. To put these numbers in context, the raise would constitute just over 1.5% of the total California Community Colleges’ annual expenses, set at $9.4 billion, according to the California Office of the Governor.

Although some fiscal conservatives may react against proposals to use more public funds to close pay equity gaps, in this case pay increases would likely save tax dollars. Taxpayers also suffer from the current treatment of contingent faculty, as revealed in a congressional committee report that found: “A family of three in California relying solely on the median adjunct salary would qualify for, among other things, Medicaid, an earned income tax credit, a child tax credit, and food stamps, costing taxpayers $13,645 per year.”

In short, while equal pay for equal work purists seek a 100% pay equity model, pro-rated for the number of units employed, the reality is closer to a 50% model, and much lower in some instances. And while declaring a middle-path parity definition of 75% may seem like the kind of compromise that is dissatisfying to both sides, it represents a logical and strong step forward that will help our swelling and struggling contingent faculty ranks, save tax dollars, and ultimately, improve the education for the students they teach.

Daniel Davis, Ph.D. is the author of Contingent Academic Labor: Evaluating Conditions to Improve Student Outcomes (Stylus Press, 2017). His Ph.D. is in sociology from UC San Diego where he is currently a visiting scholar at the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research. Davis is also sociology faculty at Point Loma Nazarene University. More information available at www.danieldavis.net.