Legislature must improve pay for part-time CC faculty

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According to the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges 1999 Accountability Report, graduates from two-year job-preparatory programs earn approximately $11 per hour, or $22,000 annually. Assuming this is satisfactory for community college graduates, we would expect that the goal set for their professors, most of whom hold a masters degree or more, would be commensurably higher. Yet, assuming they had taught a full-time load, the teachers in more than 42 percent of the courses these graduates took were paid at a rate between $16,300 to 18,300 a year. Most, however, earned substantially less, unable to secure more courses.

To improve education in our community colleges it is important that the present legislative session not backslide on its commitment to improve part-time faculty pay and conditions. Since 1996, the State Board has acknowledged responsibility to redress the sorry set of affairs now prevailing.

One might argue this was acceptable if the state's more than 9,000 part-timers were comprised of individuals who sought part-time teaching as an inconsequential supplement to professional earnings. That, however, is not the case, according to a survey involving more than 20 percent of all part-timers at 14 two-year colleges. Last year's Washington Federation of Teachers (WFT) survey results are clear. Almost 70 percent said they wanted to work more than they are presently able to.

Ultimately, public concern must center on whether reliance upon part-timers improves education in this state. Can the WFT survey finding that those who wanted to teach full-time succeeded, on average, in garnering 3.3 different classes at a variety of different campuses, be good for education? In fact, there are a host of reasons to suspect that the heavy reliance upon part-timers adversely affects the system. Not least do we suspect that time spent traveling to and from campuses reduces the visibility and participation of part-timers at their institutions.

The State Board notes that research on part-time faculty fails to show that they have lower student evaluations, lower class retention or lower achievement in subsequent classes when compared to full-time faculty. While many part-time faculty are among the most effective in their colleges, the state's argument gives us little reason to be sanguine. The incentives in the present system are against rigorous courses. With too few full-time faculty members to conduct effective peer reviews of teaching, serious evaluation of part-timers falls by the wayside and student evaluations constitute the principle information on performance that administrators review.

Studies by the UW's Gerald Gilmore and Anthony Greenwald demonstrate that student ratings are generally lower in more-demanding classes. Yet, for faculty hoping to find tenure-track positions, student evaluation remains the key currency to this transaction. Thus, that part-time faculty receive evaluations at least as good as their full-time counterparts, and that they do not lose students in any greater numbers, fails to prove that heavy reliance upon part-timers is benign. Instead, one national survey documents that part-timers are less likely to require essay exams and term papers as well as a host of other time-intensive teaching methods.

What we need to evaluate is not individual performance, but the part-time system overall. Here indeed, the overall quality of community colleges looks troubling. Only one-eighth of the 87,500 students enrolled with the intent to transfer from a two-year to a four-year school succeeds in their goal. As a producer of bachelor degrees, Washington is among the worst in the country. In 1990, five new branch campuses were created across the state in an effort to remove any bottlenecks that may have existed. These campuses have struggled to make enrollment targets as the annual number of transfers from community colleges has increased by only 1,500 over the past decade.

Likewise, while employers express relative satisfaction over the job-specific skills, math and writing abilities of community and technical college graduates, about 40 percent of employers express dissatisfaction regarding important elements of employee performance, including adaptability to change, teamwork, overall work quality, work habits and computer skills.

None of this is meant to disparage the community and technical colleges that have served more than half the adult population in this state. These schools receive significantly less money per student than either their four-year colleges or the K-12 system. Yet, with these funds, community colleges are on the front line of our most intractable social problems, including poverty (40 percent of students have family incomes below $20,000) and race (a disproportionate number, 25 percent, are students of color). Given these challenges, we must ask whether it makes sense to deliver services with a faculty whose low pay, according to the State Board, encourages such rapid turnover that nearly two-thirds of part-timers have less than five years of experience.

It would be hard to imagine that the quality of education is not seriously diminished when over 70 percent of instructors have no financial incentive to participate in program-building, in advising, or in training the next generation of instructors. We must not allow the multitude of competing concerns to dislodge the Legislature's stated commitment to raise part-timer pay and to convert more positions into full-time lines. If Washington follows through on these commitments, it will be emulated as a national leader.

Daniel Jacoby is an associate professor at the University of Washington, Bothell campus, and author of the "Laboring For Freedom, A new look at the history of American Labor." He writes widely on education, apprenticeship and labor.