Study: Community college educator pay falls behind cost of living
Photo I Courtesy of Liz West / Wikimedia Commons
Senate Democrats visited Middlesex Community College in Lowell on Monday, May 6 to outline their plans to make community college free for all.
Faculty working multiple jobs to make ends meet. "Grossly" underpaid and overworked employees. Young professionals departing to join private institutions with higher pay. And an "obstacle-laden" bargaining system.
Massachusetts public higher education leaders are painting a grim picture of the ability of their institutions and campuses to hire and retain faculty and staff, asking how the so-called "education state" can provide quality, affordable education to students under unsupportive educator conditions.
The conversation unfolded on Tuesday, as public and private sector leaders tapped to make up the Commission on Higher Education, Quality and Affordability (CHEQA) raised concerns framed by frustration with the state's collective bargaining process and validation from newly presented wage data.
"One of the issues that play[s] into the kinds of concerns we have when we talk about recruitment and retention is the length of time that negotiations take, and then from between negotiations and actually getting something all the way through," Massachusetts Teachers Association President Max Page said Tuesday.
"It's always months and months, sometimes years — that's just a system that does not have to necessarily be that way," Page continued. "It's an obstacle-laden system that works eventually, but has its issues."
Community college leaders, like Massachusetts Association of Community Colleges President Nate Mackinnon and Massachusetts Community College Council President Claudine Barnes, spoke to their issues with reopener clauses, a process they said causes the state to shy away from renegotiating contracts mid-term, meaning higher education institutions can't address salary discrepancies as they arise.
Administration & Finance Assistant Secretary Mark Fine and Office of Employee Relations Deputy Director John Langan said the state includes ratified collective bargaining agreements within the most timely legislative vehicles possible. They referred to recent Healey administration parameter adjustments for higher education employees, as well as increases for state employees within recent three-year agreements, as supportive steps.
A preliminary study presented Tuesday by external consultants showcased data suggesting community college and state university leadership see recruitment as a more prevalent challenge than retention, and found compensation-related factors most notable when discussing those challenges.
The survey found that take-home pay for professors, instructors and lecturers at public four-year institutions in Massachusetts is insufficiently able to cover the state's cost of living, unlike wages in many competitor states.
At two-year institutions, findings suggested take-home pay for professors, associate professors and assistant professors lags behind most competitor states, among which Massachusetts experiences the largest gap of cost of living coverage.
Even "bright spots" in Massachusetts's offerings to employees, like paid parental leave and child care benefits, don't seem to make up for a lack of cost of living adjustments in salaries, according to the study.
Consultants recommended more research to straighten out some methodological issues. Several commission members, like Massachusetts Bay Community College President David Podell, said regardless, the preliminary data "certainly validates" what they've been seeing for years.
"Seeing it in numbers, imperfect though they may be… it's an indication of the real problem," Podell said. "The fact that we have great benefits in Massachusetts, I so much appreciate, however, that doesn't pay the rent and that doesn't pay for food. It's nice, but it's certainly not sufficient to attract and retain. It doesn't compensate for the compensation issue." The challenges are exacerbated at community colleges, which have seen a significant uptick in enrollment following Massachusetts's free community college rollout, Podell said.
Different research, commissioned by the MTA, presented more data about faculty and staff wages across higher education entities.
"The Commonwealth's institutions of higher education continue to be hampered by low wages for staff and faculty. And this is true in each of the three segments: our community colleges, state universities and in UMass," said Annetta Argyres, labor extension director in the Labor Resource Center at UMass Boston.
"It's true whether you look at our wages in comparison to national averages when adjusted for cost of living… whether you look at our wages in comparison to private higher education institutions in Massachusetts, where we all suffer from the same cost of living; or when you look at our wages in comparison to the living wage in the locales of our many campuses," Argyres said.
Community college leaders emphasized that the pay reflected in the studies creates a "dearth" of full-time faculty; a forced reliance on adjuncts, who don't provide things like curriculum development; and a reality that some staff have multiple jobs to make ends meet.
"It, to me, is a huge disservice to the state, to the students, to the faculty, to the staff. I grew up in Massachusetts. I've always been proud of Massachusetts being the 'education state' and having such pride in our public education system," Barnes said. "Therefore, we should not have a system where a full-time faculty member needs three jobs to keep their primary job."
"Not only are we grossly underpaid, we're also overworked," she continued, adding that over 50% of MCCC faculty teach during the day and have to teach at night to reach sustainable compensation levels.
The experience public higher education institutions are able to provide for students is called into question should faculty be required to "moonlight" to compensate for low pay, Mackinnon said.
A timeline for the commission's recommendations is unclear, but a few commissioners suggested they'll look into a foundational concern about how compensation processes are structured.
"As we're thinking about what the recommendations would be, we have to think about something beyond the normal cycle of negotiations, because those are across the board, and they don't address some huge gaps," Page said, adding that existing compensatory parameters won't help the system address wage inequalities and inefficiencies.
Board of Higher Education Chair & CHEQA Co-Chair Chris Gabrieli said the commission "should try" to complete recommendations by the end of April. Gabrieli said he doubts CHEQA will have any related items to recommend for the House fiscal 2026 budget by the time it likely rolls out in mid-April.
Final CHEQA recommendations will cover all issues the commission has discussed since November 2024: student success, financial aid and staff recruitment and retention.
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