The Maine Community College System and President David Daigler have proven that they aren’t willing to take the steps necessary to keep teachers at Maine’s community colleges. It’s long past time for Gov. Mills to step in and ensure that the students enrolling at the state’s community colleges aren’t just showing up to empty classrooms.
At Southern Maine Community College in South Portland on April 20, Jim Shilliday, whose wife is an adjunct professor in the Maine Community College System, holds a sign advocating for higher pay for adjunct professors in the system. The instructors’ contract is under negotiation. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
By providing free community college tuition for thousands of Mainers, Gov. Mills has made it clear that providing quality, affordable education to Maine residents is a priority for her administration.
There’s just one problem.
Seventy percent of the faculty in the Maine Community College System are adjunct professors and, with the system refusing to pay them a living wage, many of those educators are thinking about leaving. The system has already had to cancel classes at some of its campuses because of a lack of adjunct teaching staff. If adjunct professors continue to leave, the legacy of Mills’ community college policy and the future of Maine’s community colleges are in serious jeopardy.
According to figures from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, Maine Community Colleges pay their full-time faculty an average of $59,440 per year, which can be broken down to $1,981 per credit hour, not including benefits or payment that they receive for responsibilities other than teaching. Adjunct faculty, like me, make less than half that amount – across the Maine Community College System, adjunct faculty are paid $930 per credit hour with no benefits or assurance that we will be employed consistently from semester to semester.
Students who enroll at Maine’s community colleges pay the same rate for tuition whether the courses they take are taught by adjunct or full-time faculty. So why, then, are adjunct faculty paid less than half of what their full-time colleagues earn per credit hour?
The exploitation of adjunct faculty labor is not a small issue.
Data from the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System shows that, from 2017 to 2021, Maine’s community colleges employed an average of 1,164 faculty across their seven campuses: 332 full-time faculty and 832 part-time/adjunct faculty.
That means we’re not talking about a few adjunct faculty sprinkled across the state teaching one-time niche courses. We’re talking about an education system that survives by unfairly compensating a large percentage of its workforce. With Maine’s free tuition program increasing enrollment, Maine’s community colleges are taking things a step further by increasing class sizes, both jeopardizing the intimate education environment that community colleges provide and increasing wage inequality.
The climate of secondary education is changing; it has been for years, but the pandemic really kicked it into overdrive. In just the last three years, I’ve taught online college courses at three schools in Maine, Vermont and Oregon in addition to the classes I teach for the Maine Community College System, and I get paid much better everywhere else. I assure you that if the Maine Community College System doesn’t start offering more competitive wages to adjunct faculty and start valuing us the way they value full-time faculty, many of us are going to find remote teaching assignments at schools elsewhere in the country that are willing to give us the respect we deserve.
The job market for adjunct teaching is no longer local, it’s global. If the Maine Community College System wants to attract and retain quality educators, it needs to pay us what we’re worth or we’ll continue to go elsewhere.
Free tuition at Maine’s community colleges is great for our state’s workforce, but only if the community college has enough faculty to offer courses.
According to MCCS President Daigler, enrollment across the system is up 12% thanks to Mills’ free tuition program. Students are flocking to Maine community colleges all while teaching staff are running for the exits. With a substantial budget surplus, Janet Mills and the 131st Legislature have the ability to fix this problem. Investing in education without investing in the people responsible for providing that education is short-sighted and unsustainable.
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