Donna Bain Butler, an adjunct professor in world languages and literatures at Delaware State University, was surprised to learn this semester that she would be receiving a pay cut after the university decided to pay adjunct faculty members based on the number of students enrolled in their classes. In her case, that number was one.
After taxes, Butler now earns $101 every other week to teach a three-credit-hour class with one graduate student, she said, down from $373 every other week. The pay is so little, she said, that “nobody in their right mind would stay.”
Prorated pay is a longstanding, rare, and under-the-radar model colleges deploy to cut costs.
Administrators say paying professors using a per-student scale allows them to still offer classes that don’t meet enrollment goals, but labor advocates argue the practice takes advantage of instructors and devalues higher education.
Across the nation, many small private institutions, regional colleges, and community colleges are facing enrollment challenges and budget cuts. Meanwhile, higher education has increasingly grown to rely on contingent faculty, who have struggled to organize for labor rights and deal with a variety of workplace issues, including low pay and short-term contracts.
Butler considers herself lucky to have other work that she relies on for income. She gave notice at Delaware State in March and will leave the university after the spring semester ends.
But before then, she took the opportunity last month to speak to the university’s Board of Trustees during the public-comment period of a board meeting.
She called prorating pay an “exploitative labor practice that hits the lowest-paid teachers who have no control over student enrollment.”
“To raise adjunct pay with one hand, and take away by prorating with the other, is an underhanded way to save money,” Butler told the trustees, referring to a pay increase adjunct faculty members were told they would receive. “Prorating teacher pay is not only unethical; it is also counterproductive.” Delaware State did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Not an Ideal Situation’
According to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources’ most recent Faculty in Higher Education Survey, 58 percent of the colleges that responded to questions about adjunct faculty said they cancel classes when enrollment falls below a certain number, 19 percent lower pay to a predetermined amount for classes with low enrollment, and 6 percent pay based on the number of students.
To William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at City University of New York’s Hunter College, paying faculty members according to student enrollment is “not an ideal situation.” Doing so depersonalizes the faculty-student relationship, he said, and putting a dollar figure on each person’s head as if they are widgets “seems not consistent with the ideal of higher education.”
Some labor advocates worry that offering lower pay for classes with lower student enrollment takes advantage of contingent faculty members who have little power to begin with.
“If people are desperate enough, you can effectively lower their pay or make them do the same work for less pay,” said Joe Berry, a member of the interim steering committee for Higher Education Labor United, a national coalition representing staff, instructors, and students working in higher education. “Collectively, there is no way this is a good thing.”
Nicholas DiGiovanni, a partner at the Boston-based law firm Morgan, Brown and Joy, who frequently represents colleges in labor and employment issues, said he occasionally sees provisions in labor contracts to pay faculty members according to class enrollment. In some cases, the practice can mean that professors end up earning more than the standard pay for classes, for example if contracts specify extra pay beyond a certain number of students.
But generally, DiGiovanni said, college administrators try to avoid getting into negotiations with faculty members or unions about class size on a course-by-course basis. That’s because provisions in labor contracts that require a college to pay professors more or offer another section of a course above a certain class size can tie administrators’ hands, as they may be forced to hire more instructors to accommodate more students, for example. “Administrations like to have some flexibility to have class size in their discretion,” DiGiovanni said.
‘Last Summer Was a Disaster’
Georgia Gwinnett College has historically paid its full-time faculty members a percentage of their annual salaries to teach most summer classes.
But when the college’s enrollment plunged by nearly 15 percent during the Covid pandemic, prompting the state to slash the four-year public institution’s funding, administrators looked to the summer session, which was running an average deficit of more than $600,000 annually, as a place to cut costs, according to George Low, the college’s provost and senior vice president for academic and student affairs. The college wanted to continue the summer session to accommodate students who start college during the summer or use those courses to stay on track to graduate, so it decided to pay faculty members to teach summer classes based on a combination of their salaries and student credit hours.
Many professors disliked the new pay model from the start, according to Jill Penn, an associate professor of biology and biochemistry at the college, who also serves as co-president of United Campus Workers of Georgia, a union that represents employees at the state’s public colleges. “Last summer was a disaster,” she said.
Many faculty members decided not to teach at all over the summer because they didn’t know how much they could expect to make, Penn said. “It’s very unpredictable — you don’t know how many people are going to sign up.”
This year, the college has tweaked its summer-pay formula to incorporate some feedback from faculty members, including setting a floor ($1,755 per credit hour) and ceiling ($3,350 per credit hour) for classes with at least 12 students. Instructors for some classes, such as internship courses, independent/directed study courses, and student-research courses with fewer than 12 students, will be paid $110 per student credit hour. Low said it’s too soon to tell whether the summer session will break even, which is the administration’s goal.
Penn said professors opposed to paying instructors based on student enrollment argue, among other things, that it discourages teaching upper-level and in-person courses because lower-level courses and online courses have higher enrollment caps. Professors also said it encourages grade inflation, as instructors seek to draw more students to their classes. Last summer, Penn said, so many professors decided not to teach that department chairs had to scramble to find instructors. Low said that he has not heard that finding people to teach during the summer has been a problem.
It didn’t help that even before last year’s pay model was adopted, morale at the college was already low, because many people have left their positions and not been replaced, leaving more work for those who remain, according to Penn. Last November, faculty at the college approved a vote of no-confidence in President Jann L. Joseph and Low, citing chronic understaffing and misplaced priorities. The pay-per-student formula was just one item on a list of complaints, Penn said.
“You want to be able to teach everybody and you don’t want to have to be thinking about that side of things,” Penn said. “You want to be focused on being experts in the subject matter and communicating that to the next generation.”
