Colorado’s
Community College System (CCCS) continues to pay 75% of its faculty (the
so-called “adjuncts”) poverty-level wages. To help these hard-working teachers
make ends meet, the Front Range Community College chapter of the American
Association of University Professors is hosting the first-ever Adjunct Survival
Workshop. The event will take place on Friday, Sept. 18, 2015, 2:30 – 5:30
p.m., Room C0403, on the FRCC Westminster campus, 3645 W. 112th Ave.
The event is open to all CCCS faculty. State and county officials will be on
hand to explain to adjunct faculty how to access food stamps, subsidized
housing, Medicaid, inexpensive dental care, utility bill discounts, and other
taxpayer-supported programs. Officials from the state’s Public Employee
Retirement Association (PERA) will demonstrate for adjunct faculty how to
calculate what they will receive in retirement from their years of service in
the CCCS.
Because
PERA benefits are linked to salary levels during years of service to the state
of Colorado, it has been estimated that the many CCCS adjunct faculty who have
taught full-time teaching course loads for years will receive between $300 and
$400 per month in retirement. At that income level, many CCCS adjunct faculty
who have served Colorado’s economically disadvantaged youth will themselves
become economically disadvantaged adults qualifying for taxpayer-supported
programs for decades throughout retirement. Most alarming is how many devoted
teachers working in Colorado’s wealthy Community College System already qualify
for such assistance even while working for the most financially secure system
of higher education in the state.
The top-heavy,
well-paid CCCS administration (2,009+) outnumbers its full-time faculty (1,246),
while the largest group of community college workers is the part-time or
“adjunct” faculty (3,924), according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education
Data System (IPEDS), the national clearinghouse of higher-education reporting. Furthermore,
the Feb. 2015 CCCS Financial Statements and
Compliance Audit reveals
the CCCS net position at the end of June, 2014, was $617,915,276
million. This represents an increase of more than $30 million in three years,
as the 2012 Basic
Financial Statements and Compliance Audit reported CCCS net
position at the end of June, 2011 was $586,996,147 million.
“The CCCS is taking in $20 million more per
year than it spends,” explained Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP Collective
Bargaining Congress, during his presentation at the July Mini-Institute
sponsored by metro-area AAUP chapters of the CCCS. “That should be going to
you, the teachers, instead of going into their reserves,” he said. “The mission
of your college system is instruction. That money isn’t going to instruction, so
that’s wrong,” he explained. “When they tell you they can’t afford to pay you
even double what they are paying you now, they are lying,” he added. “Why does
the CCCS need to have even more than $100 million in reserves?” he said. Bunsis
is one of the nation’s foremost experts in analyzing higher education finance. He
earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, his J.D. at Fordham Law School,
and teaches accounting at Eastern Michigan University.
Although
the mission of the system is to use those funds to provide instruction, as
Bunsis pointed out in his July 2015 report, "The Legal and Financial
Landscape for Community College Faculty in Colorado", just 14% of CCCS revenue goes to the
instructors teaching 60-85% of all courses its 13 colleges offer.
Bunsis
explained that CCCS administrators employ fear tactics in spurious statements
to adjunct faculty about budget shortfalls and declining enrollments, but data
refute the statements. For example, very few CCCS adjunct faculty, many of whom
work two or three jobs to make ends meet, understand that the CCCS takes in $20 million more than it spends annually, and has accumulated more
than a quarter billion dollars in reserves . The tired phrase adjuncts hear,
that “enrollment is down,” provokes the question: Down from what? Student enrollment has risen dramatically from to 144,783 in 2011 to 163,000 in 2015, according to
CCCS statistics, even while, semester-to-semester, there have been small
fluctuations. The system continues to bring in so much money, for example, that
it recently gave its full-time teachers a
20% pay increase (approximately $1,000/per course), plus
a cost-of-living pay increase, while giving its part-time faculty a pay
increase gesture (approximately $240/per course), and no cost-of-living
increase. The part-time faculty, who rarely are allowed to move into the decreasing
number of full-time positions, continue to earn poverty-level wages, even with
the tiny pay increase. Meanwhile, the CCCS building boom continues apace; the
system has added scores of new programs and pays thousands to lobbyists to
fight equal-pay legislation that adjunct faculty bring forward. The wage
inequality is so severe that in the Denver metro area, for example, the few
hundred full-time faculty are earning, on average, $6,800 including benefits to teach a course while their
adjunct counterparts teaching that same course are earning, on average, $2,500 with
no benefits. The CCCS Board on Feb. 11, 2015, determined that, in spite of its
fantastic financial picture and its ability to put $20 million each year into
reserves, it cares so little about the financial difficulties facing adjunct
faculty that it un-recommended its own Adjunct Task Force Recommendation to
give to its impoverished adjunct faculty the 28% pay increase the Task Force determined was
needed. To add insult to injury, to skirt Affordable Care Act compliance, many
of the 13 CCCS colleges are cutting adjunct-faculty course loads to force the
adjuncts out of the teaching profession altogether. This is leaving many of
Colorado’s most economically disadvantaged students without the stellar
teaching that has long been the hallmark of Colorado’s community colleges.
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