The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the new law designed to expand health insurance to more Americans, has put adjuncts and their workload in the spotlight. The Internal Revenue Service this month issued proposed rules for employers that acknowledge the special work circumstances of adjuncts—among them, the way adjuncts rack up work hours outside of the classroom—that need to be considered when evaluating whether their employers must provide them with health benefits. Under the new law, which takes effect in January 2014, employees who work at least a 30-hour work week must receive health benefits from their employers. Some colleges are concerned about how to tally up the hours adjuncts spend on the job to determine if they have reached that full-time status. Most adjuncts don’t receive health benefits, and the legislation appeared to pave the way for them to finally get access.

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by Audrey Williams June, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: January 7th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“It’s time to take back our departments and show some respect and dignity to our teaching colleagues,” Mr. Boldt told the audience at the presidential forum. The first step is to offer contracts to non-tenure-track faculty members, he said. “The other part of the equation is simple: Adjuncts should be paid a living wage for their work. If universities are going to employ adjuncts with a full-time course load, those adjuncts should be paid accordingly.” The Modern Language Association has pushed for around $6,800 as the going rate paid to teach a standard, three-credit course. That far exceeds what most non-tenure-track instructors receive, as the Adjunct Project has documented. “Thousands and thousands of our colleagues are being horribly mistreated,” Mr. Boldt said during his talk. That ought to worry the tenured too, he argued. Relying so much on non-tenured labor, colleges are “designing departments that are built on a foundation of sand and have no bargaining power.”

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by Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: January 5th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

For adjuncts, reliable information about potential workplaces has always been hard to come by. Many colleges don’t collect the data, and higher-education groups, such as the American Association of University Professors, haven’t been able to find a way to systematically track the pay that adjuncts earn. Over the past year, however, adjuncts across the nation have been turning to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourcing effort that started last February… a snapshot of what about 1,800 adjuncts at 1,050 colleges had reported about their institutions as of late last month shows pay disparities across types of colleges and disciplines and a dearth of health and retirement benefits available to adjuncts in general. Many adjuncts have also indicated that they are essentially shut out of participating in most forms of governance. The overall average pay reported by adjuncts is $2,987 per three-credit course. Adjuncts at 16 colleges reported earning less than $1,000… Seventy-nine percent of adjuncts reported that they didn’t get health insurance at their college. Only 14 percent of adjuncts said they had retirement benefits or the opportunity to buy into a group retirement plan. “I really think the only way that these issues are going to be tackled is by unionization,” says Mr. Feiden, who is active in the part-time-faculty union at Montgomery.

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by Audrey Williams June and Jonah Newman, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: January 4th, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

After the momentous Proposition 30 referendum in November last year in which a majority of Californians voted to put more money into public higher education, there have been further signs of a rebound in taxpayer support for America’s long-suffering universities. In one recent poll, Americans said they’d rather spend money on higher education than on defence. Now other public universities are asking for more money from their state legislatures, with a promise to freeze tuition fees in return. But experts caution that it is unlikely US universities will ever be in receipt of a free flow of money, and that efficiency and thrift will remain the rule.

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by Jon Marcus, Times Higher Education.

Posted: January 3rd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

By passing Proposition 30, the voters sent a clear and strong message to Sacramento that higher education should be a priority in our state’s budget. Soon the governor and state Legislature will have an opportunity to deliver on the mandate of Proposition 30. In the second week of January, Brown is expected to present a 2013-14 California fiscal budget. It is vital that higher education be a strong priority in the budget proposal and that long-term solutions toward fixing the constant underfunding of our education systems are brought to the table.

Posted: January 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Most of the Legislature is made up of men and women in their 40s and 50s, and a quick scan of their biographies reveals where most got their college educations — UCLA, UC Irvine, Fresno State, CSU Northridge, Long Beach State, San Jose State. In this regard, they resemble a generation of Californians who were blessed by forward-thinking investment in public higher education. Their lives would be different if they were coming of age today, and their futures more uncertain. Looking back, Williams acknowledges that today his path to a college degree “would have been impossible.” At the dawn of 2013, it’s time Californians resolved to reinvest in the opportunities that they themselves have already reaped.

Posted: January 2nd, 2013, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Across U.S. higher education, nonclassroom costs have ballooned, administrative payrolls being a prime example. The number of employees hired by colleges and universities to manage or administer people, programs and regulations increased 50% faster than the number of instructors between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. Department of Education says. It’s part of the reason that tuition, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs. The University of Minnesota illustrates the trend… Administrative employees make up an increasing share of the university’s higher-paid people. The school employs 353 people earning more than $200,000 a year. That is up 57% from the inflation-adjusted pay equivalent in 2001. Among this $200,000-plus group, 81 today have administrative titles, versus 39 in 2001. Administrators making over $300,000 in inflation-adjusted terms rose to 17 from seven.

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by Douglas Belkin and Scott Thurm, The Wall Street Journal.

Posted: December 28th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In November, Dr. Claire Pomeroy, dean of the UC Davis School of Medicine, announced she would be stepping down. Her boss, UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, made no link between Pomeroy’s departure and the investigation into the neurosurgeons, and praised Pomeroy for her “many contributions.” However, the federal watchdog agency came down hard on Pomeroy, stating that she and other top leaders had failed to hold medical staff accountable – and had thus placed all patients at increased risk… Now, more than a year later, medical center officials are adamant that Muizelaar and Schrot never engaged in unapproved research. Instead, the university contends, the surgeons were providing “innovative treatment” to try to save three terminally ill patients, all of whom consented to the procedures.

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by Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: December 23rd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Here’s the cruel part: The students from the bottom tier are often the ones who need face-to-face instruction most of all. “The idea that they can have better education and more access at lower cost through massive online courses is just preposterous,” says Patricia A. McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University. Seventy percent of her students are eligible for Pell Grants, and 50 percent come from the broken District of Columbia school system. Her task has been trying to figure out how to serve those students at a college with the university’s meager $11-million endowment. Getting them to and through college takes advisers, counselors, and learning-disability experts—a fact Ms. McGuire has tried to convey to foundations, policy makers, and the public. But the reinvention conversation has had a “tech guy” fixation on mere content delivery, she says. “It reveals a lack of understanding of what it takes to make the student actually learn the content and do something with it.”

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by Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: December 17th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Economic growth and our state’s standard of living depend on our ability to compete in the knowledge-based global economy that requires college-educated and trained workers. Several analyses now show that the state is on a trajectory that will leave it far short of workers needed for national and international competitiveness. For example, the San Francisco based Public Policy Institute of California has estimated that by 2020, 39 percent of California jobs will require a bachelor’s degree, but the proportion of working age population with bachelor’s degrees will fall far short at 33 percent. A recent national report from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce concluded that within six years, 61 percent of all jobs in California will require education and training beyond high school. Between 2008 and 2018, jobs requiring postsecondary education will grow by 1.8 million, far outpacing the increases in jobs for high school graduates. One likely consequence is that California will become less attractive to employers who require college-trained workers, leading to an exodus of middle class jobs, as California’s economy is overtaken by states and nations that are more successful in developing a twenty-first century workforce.

Posted: December 13th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.