Housing is so expensive that a community college finds its faculty can’t live in the community
Students at Foothill College typically live in the well-to-do towns that surround the two-year institution’s suburban campus. Many of their professors, however, can’t afford even a down payment there.
It’s not that faculty salaries here are shabby: A new assistant professor with a Ph.D. can expect a starting salary of $47,000 a year. But in Santa Clara County, where Foothill is located, the average asking price for a modest, three-bedroom home is $450,000. And in the nearby cities of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, the average rises to $650,000.
Foothill sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, which has the nation’s most expensive housing market, according to a recent study conducted by the National Association of Home Builders. Salaries for community-college professors and administrators -- which were never lavish to begin with -- have not kept pace with the area’s rapidly rising cost of living. As a result, a growing number of job candidates are rejecting offers from Foothill and other two-year institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Gene Seelbach, Foothill’s division dean for physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering, says he recently found the perfect candidate to fill a faculty opening in his department. “We offered her a $45,000 salary, but she said she could not afford to buy a house here with that,” he says. “I practically begged her to come, but she said the cost of living was just too high.”
Bernadine Chuck Fong, Foothill’s president, says the housing situation has both “handcuffed our recruiting” and hampered the college’s ability to retain professors.
The average salary for professors on the campus is about $62,000. But people who join Foothill’s faculty find themselves in a housing market where prices are driven to dizzying heights by the area’s growing class of high-tech millionaires, whose salaries and lucrative stock options give them unrivaled purchasing power. They routinely enter bidding wars that drive the cost of a house well over the asking price.
Community colleges in the Bay Area are not alone in feeling the housing squeeze. In other high-cost cities, two-year colleges have found their employees priced out of the housing market. For example, 7 of the 15 community colleges in Massachusetts are within a 40-mile radius of Boston, which ranks among the nation’s most expensive cities to live in.
Faculty wages at public institutions in Massachusetts are set statewide. That means that community-college professors in the Boston area are on the same pay scale as their colleagues in outlying regions, where the cost of living is much lower, says Philip H. Mahler, vice president of the Massachusetts Community College Council.
In and around Silicon Valley, high housing costs have also posed challenges for professors at wealthy, four-year institutions. At Stanford University, where the average salary of full professors is about $117,000 and the average salary of assistant professors is roughly $64,000, one solution has been on-campus housing for professors. Almost since its founding, Stanford has had homes on its campus for some of its faculty and staff members. Of the more than 800 campus homes now, most were built from the 1950’s to the 1970’s, to prepare for projected increases in housing costs. Stanford plans to open about 600 new apartments by 2002, and faculty and staff members will have preference for those units.
Here at Foothill, President Fong says her college owns no vacant land on which it could build faculty housing, and lacks the money to buy property. “The cost of the lot itself would be just exorbitant,” she says. “It costs $1-million per acre, and that’s with nothing on it. If we did have excess land, it would probably be better for us to sell it.”
There are few, if any, areas within a 25-mile radius of the college where the average cost of a home is less than $400,000. For most professors -- unless they have money from other sources -- that means commuting long distances from towns where they are able to purchase affordable homes.
Donald E. Dorsey, director of student activities at Foothill, bought a home in Oakland, more than 50 miles away. Although his commute takes about an hour and 15 minutes each way, he says he still comes out ahead financially.
“If you spent the money in Oakland that you spend on a home near the college, you could have an acre and some columns in front of your house, and a long driveway circling the house,” he says.
In many major cities, extensive public-transportation systems make it easier to live in outlying areas, and affordable housing is often just a bus or subway ride away. But Foothill is in the suburbs, where many of the highways have just two lanes and wind through hills and mountains. Public transportation is “abysmal,” says one Foothill administrator, adding that “people here buy nice cars because we spend so much time in them.”
Silicon Valley is known for its mild weather, its well-regarded public-school systems, and its proximity to culturally rich San Francisco, which is about 40 miles away. But all of that is often not enough to overcome the economic reality facing professors here: Their bucks don’t have much bang when it comes to buying a home, and some spend nearly as much time on the highway as they do in the classroom.
Some professors at Foothill travel more than two hours from their homes to the campus. For a faculty member who teaches three days a week, that adds up to 12 hours a week, and 48 hours a month, on the road. That time can diminish faculty productivity, decrease the amount of contact they have with students, and cause problems at home for professors with families, says Warren G. Hurd, Foothill’s dean of faculty and staff.
“It’s always better when professors live in the community where they work,” Mr. Hurd says. “Facing that commute impacts how professors feel about hanging around for things after class, and if they live way out, they are not likely to come back to campus for events on weekends.”
Nicole P. Henley, a newly hired math instructor at Foothill, is renting a two-bedroom apartment near the college for $1,275 a month, but is searching for a new home with her fiance, who works as an engineer at Sun Microsystems. “We’re trying to get something where we will be able to have a child or two, but getting a three-bedroom will be hard because of the prices,” says Ms. Henley, who makes about $47,000 a year. “If we want to live well, we would need two engineering salaries.”
The steep rise in housing costs coincides with a crescendo of vacancies in the Foothill-DeAnza Community College District, which includes Foothill College and DeAnza Community College. Sixty-two faculty positions are open in more than two dozen departments, including accounting, child development, English, and physics, and the district would like to fill them all by September.
So many jobs fell vacant at once, in part, because many professors retired and several new programs were started.
The recruiting troubles come at a particularly inopportune time, because enrollment is booming at Foothill and other community colleges in the area. Foothill’s enrollment of 16,000 has grown by about 500 students a year since 1993. With that growth has come financial pressure to hire new instructors, because under California rules, two-year institutions lose state dollars if they do not fill full-time faculty positions in proportion to their enrollment growth.
During the current fiscal year, the district is losing $160,000 for not filling 4 of 22 open positions last year. The failure to fill those jobs was a direct result of the area’s high housing costs, says Kathryn L. Blackwood, director of fiscal services for the district.
“If we don’t fill those teaching positions again in the next fiscal year, we will be penalized again,” says Ms. Blackwood, who estimates that a third of the 62 faculty positions could be left vacant, causing the district to lose about $800,000 in state funds.
“We’re recruiting like mad and trying to make sure that we don’t lose anybody,” she says. “It’s pretty frightening.”
Leo E. Chavez, chancellor of the Foothill-DeAnza District, says higher salaries would help the colleges fill the positions more quickly. The bottom line, he says, is that the state “is going to have to increase the salaries of faculty members.”
But that might not happen any time soon. Community colleges serve more students -- roughly 1.4 million -- than any other educational system in California, but their per-student state support is less than half that of the California State University System and only about a fifth that of the University of California.
While the salaries of new faculty members are negotiated by the individual community-college districts, the state gives flat cost-of-living adjustments to all districts regardless of their location. No mechanism exists to make higher adjustments for districts that happen to be located in high-cost areas.
Even if community-college professors at Foothill won sizable raises, however, they probably still wouldn’t have enough muscle to compete in the housing market here.
According to local real-estate agents, it is not uncommon for homes in the area to be sold for as much as 42 percent over the asking price. For example, last year, a three-bedroom, 1,292-square-foot home was listed at $623,000, but sold for $821,000.
“How can we compete with that?” asks Jon C. O’Bergh, an assistant to Mr. Chavez. “We can’t.”
Patricia L. Gibbs, an assistant professor of sociology at Foothill, recently found a home, after months of searching. She feels lucky to have paid $355,000 for the modest two-bedroom, one-bath home which is nearly 100 years old. Perhaps the best part is that the home is only about 12 miles from campus.
“Out here this is considered a steal,” she says, adding that she and her husband could afford the home only because the owner never took bids on it. “We made an offer and it was accepted,” she says. “The owner needed to sell quickly, and he let us have it for the asking price.”
If bids were taken on the home, it would have likely sold for about $430,000. She is thrilled that the hunt is over.
“It’s a total feeding frenzy,” she says, describing how more than a dozen prospective buyers would often converge on house that was up for sale. She and her husband, who works as a chef and food services manager, were outbid on five other homes.
“It’s devastating if you don’t get a home that you had your heart set on,” says Ms. Gibbs, who adds that she was fortunate to have earned a doctorate without incurring heavy debt. “So I tried not to get too attached to any one home, no matter how nice it was.”
Even some administrators, with salaries three times as great as those of professors, are deterred by the area’s costly real-estate market. Before Mr. Chavez was hired, in 1995, “two chancellors from out of state turned us down,” says Ms. Blackwood, the district’s fiscal-services director. “They said they looked at the want ads for housing and said they just couldn’t do it.”
Rose Myers, vice president for student development and instruction at Foothill, surveyed the housing market and opted to come here anyway in 1996. “Moving here required a major paradigm shift,” says Ms. Myers, who previously worked at Salem Community College, in New Jersey. “Out here, $400,000 buys a shoebox of a house. In some places on the East Coast, that could buy you a mansion.”
Ms. Myers loves the little things about life in California -- “like not having to scrape ice and snow off my car windshield on winter mornings” -- but she says that even with her $100,000-a-year salary, it is hard to save for a home here. Her rent is $1,600 a month, she has one teenage son living with her, and another is in college.
“I would need at least $40,000 for a down payment, and I can’t save that right now,” says Ms. Myers, a single parent. “I’m a V.P. living in a 1,000-square-foot home. We feel cramped. I just don’t feel like I’m making it.”
Some here think it’s a mistake for the college to try to recruit nationwide. Charles M. Lindauer, division dean for computers, technology, and information systems at Foothill, says the college should concentrate on attracting talent within the state. “I don’t believe we should be recruiting from places like Texas and Kansas, unless the candidates come here already rich,” he says. To tell a recruit that “I can pay you $40,000 a year in a place where the average house costs half a million dollars” is “a waste of time,” he says. “They’d just walk away.”
In fact, the college has been looking locally. It posts every teaching vacancy on the Foothill-DeAnza district’s Web site and mails job listings to all part-time professors in the district.
Still, some here insist that the college continue to recruit nationally. “It’s not a throw-in-the-towel situation, it’s not hopeless at all,” says Ms. Myers. “I’m here, from 3,000 miles away. It can work. We just have to be more creative.”
She has suggested that lower-paid professors rent space in the homes of veteran professors until the former can afford a down payment. But critics say that treating professors as if they were exchange students is not a solution.
Maureen E. MacDougall, an instructor in veterinary technology, came to Foothill from New York. Her husband works in the computer industry, and without his salary, she says, “I would have probably never moved out here.”
She has an unorthodox proposal. Maybe Foothill could create a dating service to pair low-paid, single instructors with the wealthy computer specialists who work in Silicon Valley. She is only half-joking.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A16