How Professors Make Ends Meet

In June, for example, Mann, 48, received notice from San Francisco State that it had overpaid her by about $300 last year and would like the money back. Adding to her worry is the more than $50,000 in student loans that she took out, which can be hard to keep straight. Some of it is in forbearance, while other loan balances have been garnished from her income. “My finances are scary,” she says. “They scare me.”

Then there are other sources of financial strain: the several hundred dollars in tickets she’s received for having an expired car registration, even though she says she has paid for it multiple times; the notice from CalFresh, a program to help low-income families buy groceries, saying she owes them somewhere north of $1,000; bills for a few hundred dollars from the dentist for treating her daughter’s cavities; the high cost of summer camps.

Mann, who earned $65,000 last year in wages and another $6,300 in unemployment benefits, devotes a lot of time to dealing with these kinds of issues — something she doesn’t see the parents of her daughters’ friends doing. Without these distractions, she could be devoting more time to her research and writing. She’d love, for example, to write a feminist, cultural, historical, and personal narrative about the family court system. “There’s only so many things you could even deal with,” she says. “These are the kinds of things that slip through the cracks for the working class that you can only fight so much.”

Mann typically teaches four classes each semester, one class short of the five needed to be considered full-time at San Francisco State. (Tenure-track professors are required to teach three classes per semester.) As an adjunct professor, she is hired semester to semester; each summer and winter, she goes on unemployment, which allows her to spend more time with her daughters, who are 6 and 17 years old, but also underscores the precarity of her employment.

Mann loves her neighborhood and feels grateful for all that she has. “I’m living the same life in some ways as my wealthy neighbors who don’t have to work,” she says. She can go to the same local park and birthday parties, and enjoy the same beautiful flowers and foliage. But other things are different: She picks up all kinds of things, like toys for her younger daughter, from her local Buy Nothing group on Facebook. She is constantly stressed about money, and she has noticed that among all her neighbors, the ones who work in academe are “the only ones that are actually struggling.”

Mann lives in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, single-family rental, which she shares with her two daughters and partner, but says that she has felt insecure in her housing since she moved to the Bay Area in 2015. Gentrification is always pushing up the rent, she says. She’s braced for the next increase, or a notice that she needs to find a new place to live. “So many places I’ve lived [in] have sold or then been remodeled,” Mann says, “so I seem to always be paying maximum rent and then coming up with security deposits.”

Mann splits rent of $2,800 a month with her partner. She is also paying about $600 for her daughter’s aftercare. Living in a slightly more affordable neighborhood also adds to Mann’s commute, which takes about one and a half hours, whether she drives or takes public transportation.

A first-generation college student, Mann always did well in school. She thought, after earning more and more degrees, she’d eventually land a tenure-track position. It doesn’t escape her notice that the university has many programs to help students who are financially insecure but doesn’t talk much about faculty and staff who might also need help.

Mann is active in her union, the California Faculty Association, and open about her financial struggles because she knows some of her colleagues must be in similar positions, although very few people talk about it. She recently learned that her department will be cutting classes next semester, and she fears she won’t be able to teach the two classes she would need to keep her health benefits.

“It is worry,” Mann says. “Constant worry.”

— A.L.

The 1,900-square-foot, three-bedroom home fits the family’s needs a little less now that the Duperons have five children, ranging from age 4 to 14. They once considered moving to a bigger house, but because the family’s housing costs are so manageable — less than $1,000 per month, including the mortgage, homeowner’s insurance, and taxes — relocating would be a major financial hit.

Duperon, 43, a religious-studies scholar, and his wife, Jennifer, who’s trained as a law librarian, accumulated a collective $325,000 in student-loan debt. A third of his take-home pay regularly went to pay off their private loans, and Jennifer decided she wanted to be a full-time homemaker and homeschool their children — and even if she wanted to continue working in academe, the closest campuses with law libraries are at least an hour away. “That’s the way that we are able to enjoy the standard of living that we do here on just my salary,” Duperon says, “because we have a full-time person whose job it is to be a homemaker.”

Now, the Duperons are “out from under the shadow” of their debts. He had the remainder of his government loans, $67,000, forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. While Jennifer still has significant debt, the size of their family and of Duperon’s income, and the fact that she doesn’t have an income, mean that the income-driven repayment plan she is on doesn’t require any monthly payments. Eventually her debt will be discharged.

The couple’s early focus on paying off their high-interest private loans meant they weren’t saving enough for retirement — just the minimum needed to take advantage of Susquehanna’s contribution-matching program. When Duperon’s mother died unexpectedly two years ago, his inheritance became his retirement fund. “It’s certainly not extravagant,” he says. “We’re not going to be rich in retirement, but it’s at least enough that we should be OK.”

Until recently, the family owned just one car; Duperon bought a colleague’s used car to make juggling the kids’ extracurricular activities easier. He and Jennifer also held off on buying smartphones for many years, and they now subscribe to a third-party carrier that limits their cell-phone bills to around $6 a month. The family doesn’t eat out much and often shops at thrift stores and discount grocery stores. Jennifer buys fresh milk, fruit, and produce from local sellers, often in bulk.

The cost of living in Snyder County is almost exactly the national average. Duperon describes the college town of Selinsgrove as “relatively progressive and welcoming,” though he knows its rural surroundings can make for a less-than-inviting environment for some of his colleagues from marginalized backgrounds.

Now an associate professor, Duperon makes about $70,000 a year. His raises have generally ranged from 2.5 to 3.5 percent each year. Factor in the rising cost of insurance, he says, and “in terms of real dollars and purchasing power, I make less money now than I did when I started.” (Because he didn’t yet have his Ph.D., his starting salary was $51,000.)

Duperon wishes he were paid more, which he says is a common lament among many of his co-workers. He recalls a former colleague’s saying: “Warm fuzzies don’t put food on the table.”

He understands that. But at a small liberal-arts college like Susquehanna, he says, “I do get paid in warm fuzzies.” Teaching classes he’s interested in, exploring ideas with students, watching them change over four years, and then reuniting with them when they return for homecoming as alumni, he says, is “not nothing.”

“On paper, it looks like I’m not doing that great. It does not make a whole lot of financial sense why I continue to stay in this position when I’m essentially taking a pay cut every year for the benefit of having this job,” he says. But the intangibles, and the flexibility, make it worthwhile.

“My family and I,” he says, “we have found a way to make a really good life.”

— M.Z.

Bureaucracy at CUNY, of which Queens College is a part, means that it can take months for Swedell to get reimbursed. In the meantime, she’s racking up interest on her own credit card.

“I’m basically living paycheck to paycheck, and it just goes to the credit card,” Swedell, 56, says. “I’m not really doing a great job of budgeting, even at this point in my life. Sometimes there are things you just have to pay for and you just do it, and then you figure out how to cover it later.”

Swedell is a full professor. She has been at Queens for 23 years and made $132,987 last academic year, which amounts to $86,355 in purchasing power in Queens County. Every two weeks, on payday, she pays off what she can of her debt. “That,” she says, “is the reality of the situation.”

She isn’t asking for sympathy. She likes her job — her colleagues, her students, her research — and has never pursued one elsewhere. But to be a CUNY faculty member in New York City, Swedell says, “means that you aren’t going to be able to survive on your salary alone.” She’s found that the only colleagues who live comfortably are those who have a partner who makes significantly more money than they do. That’s the reality of making ends meet in the nation’s 12th-most-expensive county with a college in it.

Swedell is divorced and paying for her daughter’s education at the University of Vermont. The rest of her family lives on the West Coast or in her native Alaska. Swedell visits at least twice a year, making cross-country airfares a fixture of her regular expenses, but spends most of her time in the two-bedroom co-op apartment she bought in 2012, in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens.

“Old, but still functional” is how Swedell describes her 1930s building. “Even though things are falling apart and the plumbing is awful,” she says, “it has character.” Some maintenance is included in her co-op fee, which combined with her mortgage comes to about $2,500 each month.

Most of Swedell’s hobbies — walks in the park, spending time with friends and family — are low-cost, though she does enjoy the occasional Broadway show. Once or twice a month, she’ll meet colleagues at one of a handful of restaurants in Queens for dinner and drinks.

Her 2021 Subaru Crosstrek is the first vehicle she’s owned in a while; her last car, a lease, was stolen. She used the insurance money on a down payment for the Crosstrek.

The car cuts her commute down to about 15 minutes without traffic. Were she to take public transit, that time would balloon to about an hour by foot and bus (and, sometimes, subway). She only pays for a garage parking spot during the winter months, to avoid needing to shovel the Crosstrek out of snow at day’s end; otherwise, if she leaves campus early enough, she can usually find a street space within a block or two of her building.

Her go-to dinner is a grilled cheese sandwich with Dijon mustard and pickles. She saves time and money by ordering most of her groceries online from the regional supermarket chain Stop & Shop and having them delivered.

Her responsibilities keep her occupied most days, including weekends; she finds herself working steadily year round, though the one-month summer salary she earns as chair helps a bit.

For Swedell, work, or most of it, is fun. That’s what she tries to explain to nonacademic family and friends, who never quite seem to get it: “We choose it because we enjoy it. You would not be in academia if you didn’t enjoy it, because you certainly aren’t doing it for the money.”

— M.Z.

He enjoys the work but not the pay. Clifford makes a little over $51,000 annually, a sum he says makes it hard to get by in Pima County, where the cost of living is just above average. His biweekly paychecks are for a little more than $1,300 each; one full paycheck, and then some, goes to the monthly mortgage payment of $1,650. That cost rose by about $500 in 2022, when Clifford divorced and refinanced his mortgage.

The previous mortgage payment — around $1,100 a month — was “absolutely manageable” for a two-income household, he says. But as a single person, Clifford found he needed a second source of income to make ends meet. The solution: Renting out the guest room in his house on Airbnb. The room was added to the 1960s bungalow decades later, and has its own entrance, bathroom, and closet.

Clifford rents the room for anywhere between $75 and $100 per night, depending on the going rate in the area. It’s a nice supplement, but not always reliable. This year, he was able to pull in $1,600, but the year before it was about half that.

The extra income balances Clifford’s other expenses: gas, electricity, water, food, and supplies for his two pugs, Judo and Isa. He has $20,000 in credit-card debt and more than $100,000 in student debt, having returned to college long enough after being discharged from the Army that his GI Bill benefits expired before he’d finished his undergraduate degree. He pays the minimum $100 a month on his student loans. “Especially with the amount of interest that you accrue,” he says, “I don’t ever think that I’ll pay them off before I die, so I don’t stress over them anymore.”

Many of Clifford’s colleagues, he says, share his financial woes. “We have to piecemeal our summers together,” he says, since as lecturers, their contracts don’t include the summer months. Some, like Clifford, opt to have their nine-month salary paid over 12 months.

“People pass down these strategies,” he says, “of how to survive as an instructor year round.” One example is teaching summer classes. As assistant director of the English 109 Honors program, Clifford gets first dibs on any summer sections of that course. In the past, he also worked for a graduate writing tutor program.

For several years, Clifford has served on a committee advocating for raises for lecturers in his department. To Clifford, the low pay comes as a particular “kick in the guts” when he looks up what various administrators at Arizona earn. “While they’re up there making six, seven figures, we in the lower echelons are barely making it,” he says. “We’re struggling to get by.”

Still, Clifford says his life is “much better than a lot of people’s lives that I know.” While he’s able to afford his home, put gas in his car, and feed his dogs, there’s something lacking. “I feel undervalued, and that starts with pay,” he says. “I think if you’re going to work in a profession, you should not only love it, you should be decently compensated for it, equitably compensated.”

— M.Z.

There, at least, she had an advantage: Before going back to school for her Ph.D., Hay was a pharmacist, practicing with a bachelor’s degree. As long as she completed a certain number of continuing-education credits, she could get relicensed. So she did, working every other weekend at a Target pharmacy about an hour away from her home. The $10,000 or $15,000 in extra income the pharmacy brought in made the commute worthwhile. In 2015, Hay transitioned to covering shifts as an on-call pharmacist at a psychiatric hospital, work she continues today. She says it was the pharmacy income, not her academic salary, that gave her “some measure of financial security.”

The pandemic helped, too. In addition to the three-and-a-half-year pause on student-loan repayment, Hay, 61, saved money by not traveling or eating out. In 2021, the $67,000 she had remaining in student loans was forgiven through the Biden administration’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. And in 2022, she was promoted from associate to full professor at what is now called the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley, which came with a $10,000 raise.

After taxes and deductions, Hay brings home $3,555.60 each month. Of that, $695 goes to rent for her two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. “I openly acknowledge I’m cheap, because it’s not super fancy, but that’s fine,” she says. She lives close to campus, so filling up her Toyota Prius doesn’t cost much, maybe $25 a month, though she finds the nearly $200 she pays in car insurance “kind of horrific” because she’s never been in an accident. Add in $300 to $450 a month for food and another $35 for the water bill. Between $90 and $110 goes to the electric, which Hay says is “a good example of where I can be stubborn and cheap: I will keep my thermostat set to 80 degrees in the apartment, which seems really warm, but when it’s 110 outside, it’s still cooler.”

She avoids the cost of a gym membership by walking laps around the third floor of the university’s Arts and Humanities Building, where her office is located. She sends $800 from her paycheck straight to savings. Hay devotes much of the rest of her discretionary income to travel and entertainment, which she says is necessary living in the Valley. It’s one of the tradeoffs she’s found living in Hidalgo County, where the cost of living is among the lowest in the nation.

“Everybody will talk about how much cheaper it is to live here,” Hay says, “but aside from housing, I’ve never been completely convinced about that.” For one thing, “both professionally and personally, you pretty much have to fly to attend stuff,” she says. The $800 that the university provides professors for work-related travel doesn’t cover all of her conference expenses. As for entertainment, Hay says, in the Valley “there’s not as much passive culture. You have to make a conscious effort to pursue it.” For example, there is no local art museum, so to take in an exhibit, Hay has to plan a pit stop when she travels to a conference in a bigger city.

The combination of the raise when she was promoted to full professor, the forgiveness of her student loans, and her pandemic savings has granted Hay a level of financial freedom she hadn’t previously felt for the 20 years she’s worked in higher education. It gave her the confidence to splurge on one major entertainment expense: a ticket to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Vancouver in December. She had a flight credit, and she’d been swept up in the Swift hype last year. “This is very possibly a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing,” Hay says. “I was just like, ‘I’m doing it.’”

— M.Z.

Within two years of starting the job, Godfrey, now 42 and a professor of history at Central Oregon, had saved enough money for a down payment on a $130,000 starter house in Redmond, about 20 minutes outside of Bend. He described the former rental, which was the cheapest house in the neighborhood, as very basic, small, and old.

Godfrey’s decision to buy a house paid off: A few years later, the housing market in the Bend region started escalating, and in 2020, when people began working from home during the Covid pandemic, it exploded.

As newcomers with hefty salaries flooded the area, the median sale price of a home rose by more than 50 percent, according to the real-estate site Redfin. A similar dynamic has affected college towns like Bozeman, Mont., and Boise, Idaho.

“They paid huge amounts for those houses, like much more than we ever dreamed anyone would pay,” Godfrey says of Bend. He has bought and moved into two other homes since his first one; the starter home that he bought in 2014 sold last year for $370,000.

For faculty members who work at Central Oregon, their financial position is largely driven by two factors: when they arrived in the area and whether they were able to buy a house. Godfrey thinks of it as a generational divide. Those who arrived in the 1990s and early 2000s are living relatively large, making mortgage payments from another era in the real-estate market. They were able to build a life, both at Central Oregon and in the community.

But faculty members who arrived at Central Oregon more recently, especially in the last five to seven years, struggle to find affordable housing. They rent because they can’t afford to buy a home, and because rent is so expensive, they can’t save enough money for a down payment. As a result, many newer employees — even those with tenure — are less invested in the community and often end up leaving within a few years.

Years ago, Central Oregon was considered one of the best employers in town. Nowadays, it’s tough for anyone working there — or for any of the other local employers — to afford to live in Bend.

Faculty members at the institution belong to a union, the Central Oregon Community College Faculty Forum, which has negotiated pay increases over the years, but they haven’t kept up with the housing market. Today, the starting salary for professors at Central Oregon is close to $60,000. “In the grand scheme of community colleges, that’s pretty much average,” he says. But for what it costs to live in Central Oregon, “that doesn’t work.” A $60,000 salary at Central Oregon has the purchasing power of about $50,000 in Deschutes County, according to The Chronicle’s analysis.

As a former department chair, Godfrey has seen how the hot housing market can affect hiring. “You hope that there’s someone in the pool that meets your qualifications and lives locally, and if there’s not, increasingly they’ve let some positions just go empty for a while,” he says. You hope that someone eventually works out, he says, but it could take weeks, or even months.

The college often has students who want to take a class and not enough professors to teach. Eventually, Godfrey worries, students who can go elsewhere to get into the classes they want will just leave.

Over the years, there’s been talk at the college of allowing remote teaching or subsidizing housing for new faculty, but nothing has materialized. “They can’t pay tech salaries to community-college professors,” Godfrey says. “You just can’t. But on the other hand, it affects the quality of our recruitment so significantly.”

Many professors take side jobs to make ends meet, working gigs in publishing or computer coding, for example. And some choose not to teach over the summer because they can earn more doing other work. Many staff members work as bartenders or make deliveries on DoorDash to pick up extra cash.

Murray is happy at Central Oregon — he loves teaching and likes the community there. But if he were on the job market now for the first time, he says he would never take the job there because he would most likely need roommates in order to pay the rent, and he’d probably have more student loans than he did because college is more expensive now.

“Who wants that?”

— A.L.

Vance’s mother also covers the water and propane-tank bills for the house, and provides after-school care for her 6-year-old grandson, who’s in first grade. The cost of living in Warren County, where they live, is just a bit below the national average. Day-care expenses for the Vances’ 4-year-old — $200 per week for a full-time preschool day care — account for the largest portion of the family’s monthly expenses. Other monthly costs include about $145 for internet, $25 to $30 for cellphones, about $100 for a gym membership, between $150 and $250 for electric, and $50 for life insurance. The Vances also pay $120 every other month to a pest-control company. Vance, who drives a plug-in hybrid minivan, only has to fill up on gas about once a month, though her husband, Robert, who commutes 30 to 45 minutes to work in west Des Moines, uses more. Food expenses can add up. Vance, her mother, and her older son all have celiac disease and are on gluten-free diets, making groceries more expensive.

She describes her family’s quality of life as “frugal and comfortable.”

When Vance, 36, was pregnant with her first child, she went to human resources at Simpson to inquire about adding him to her medical insurance. As it turned out, the family was eligible for Medicaid, thanks to income limits for the program that were raised during the Obama era (at the time, she was earning about $50,000 and her husband was an adjunct at Simpson, teaching two or three math and statistics courses each year). “I was really surprised, since I felt like we were doing reasonably comfortably,” Vance says, but she was glad to enroll.

She also learned that being on Medicaid provided automatic eligibility for WIC, which provides free supplemental nutrition to low-income families with young children. Through WIC, she’d gotten breastfeeding benefits after the birth of both sons, and, when they were older, they received solid-food packages. Now Vance has become an “evangelist” for both programs, encouraging colleagues who may not realize they’re eligible to sign up.

Vance’s base salary at Simpson is $61,690 now, though she’ll bring in about $3,600 extra this year through course overloads. She earned a raise of approximately $8,000 through a two-step campuswide process to remedy salary compression and inversion. Robert, meanwhile, makes approximately $60,000 working at a bank. The family’s goal is to pay most of their expenses with Vance’s take-home salary, and they’ve “mentally earmarked” her husband’s pay for child care. They also try to put away $1,000 into savings each month, and max out their individual Roth IRA and shared health-savings accounts each year.

All told, Vance says, the couple has a “workable amount of discretionary income,” including a $50 monthly “fun budget” for each of them. Vance devotes some of that to her fiber-arts hobby; she knits, spins, and sews. “It’s pretty low-cost in terms of money spent per hour of enjoying it,” she says.

Her salary, Vance says, is “low” but “definitely livable,” aided by the fact that the family has no student debt and has enjoyed generational-wealth transfer, from both her grandmother and Robert’s. “I think if I were the sole breadwinner,” she says, “it’d be tight.”

Still, sometimes she’ll see Simpson students graduate with a math or computer-science degree and get higher starting salaries than hers. “That hurts.” And she knows she’s “downwardly mobile, economically.” Even without adjusting for inflation, she and Robert make significantly less money than her parents did — her father as a software engineer and her mother mostly as a nurse — when she was a child.

“I wish there was more pay transparency in general,” Vance says. “I think it helps us all if we share how much we’re making, and how we’re making things work.”

— M.Z.