By Jon Marcus for The Hechinger Report.
Broadcast version by Eric Tegethoff for Washington News Service reporting for The Hechinger Report-Public News Service Collaboration

Raad Jassim really likes his job.

As an adjunct faculty member at a Canadian university, Jassim has four teaching assistants to help him grade assignments and answer questions. He makes the equivalent of about $7,000 per course, per term. He has a multiyear contract and can typically pick the subjects that he teaches. He has an office, access to professional training and government-provided health insurance.

All of these things, he said, help him focus on the reason that he’s there: his students.

And few of these benefits, or that kind of pay, are available to his counterparts south of the border, in the United States.

The comparatively poor working situation of American adjuncts “is a sad story,” said Jassim, who teaches corporate finance, real estate investment and managerial and engineering economics at McGill University. “It breaks my heart.”

Now there’s new scrutiny of how adjuncts’ pay and benefits affect not only them but also their students, who often go into debt to cover rising tuition.

Some 44 percent of American university and college faculty are part-time, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

U.S. adjuncts worry about their ability to engage with students and how well their students are learning, according to a new study that compares Canadian adjuncts with what it calls the “woefully under-supported and poorly compensated” American adjuncts.

“The people we’re relying on to teach our youth are dedicated and feel meaning in their jobs but are being relied upon without making a living wage,” said Candace Sue, executive director of Chegg’s Center for Digital Learning, a spin-off of the textbook and study help company that produces resources about technology and education and commissioned the study.

“It’s not fair to them — we know that. But it’s also not fair to the students who are relying on them to be focused on the classroom and to keep them going.”

The research is among the latest to document the woes of what has grown into an army of 792,000 U.S. university part-time and contingent faculty who work part time or on fixed contracts.

American adjuncts earn a median of $3,700 per course, an amount that has declined significantly when adjusted for inflation, the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP, says. The figure comes from 900 universities and colleges that provide employment data for about 370,000 full-time and 90,000 part-time faculty.

More than one in four adjuncts earn below the federal poverty level for a family of four, another new report, from the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, finds. More than three-quarters are guaranteed employment for only one term or semester at a time. That information is based on a survey distributed to adjuncts who are AFT members and, through social media, to adjuncts who are not members of the union; 1,043 responded. The AFT represents 85,000 adjuncts who have unionized.

“If you’re cobbling together jobs at different universities to make ends meet, you don’t have the time to do the work you want to with your students,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.

Fifty-seven percent of adjunct faculty, and almost all of the adjuncts at community colleges, get no medical benefits, the AAUP says. About one in five rely on Medicare or Medicaid, according to the AFT.

“You’re almost like a starving artist,” said Antwan Daniels, an adjunct in Kansas City and father of four who teaches chemistry at three different universities — one in person and two online — while also working on a doctorate in higher education administration.

Though much of the conversation around these salaries and benefits has centered on the toll it takes on adjunct faculty members themselves, researchers have turned to documenting how it is affecting students.

“Like with everything, if a contingent faculty [member] doesn’t have security themselves, it’s really hard to do that million and one things to help their students,” said Josh Kim, a sociologist at Dartmouth and a senior fellow at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University, who began his own career as an adjunct.

More than a third of adjuncts in the Center for Digital Learning study, which was conducted by Hanover Research, said low pay and lack of benefits or job security affected their ability to engage with students and the learning students take with them from class.

Adjunct faculty are more likely than faculty in general to say they don’t have enough time to prepare their courses and don’t receive enough administrative support, according to a breakdown of a September faculty survey provided to The Hechinger Report by the educational publishing and technology company Cengage.

“Unless the school has a well-rounded support system for the adjunct faculty, you’re serving the students at probably 60 percent of your capacity,” Daniels said. “You’re having a rushed conversation. You’re trying to distill it down to, ‘What do you need at this moment?’ ” Students, he said, “are not served in the way they should be.”

Fewer than half of adjuncts say they’ve received the training they need to help students in crisis, the AFT survey found.

“We have a population of people that are being depended on to educate students that don’t have all the tools in their toolkit to do it in the way that we as a society expect them to be supported to do their jobs,” Sue said.

These new studies follow earlier findings by the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success showing that increased reliance on part-time and non-tenure track faculty resulted in higher dropout rates, lower grade-point averages and graduation rates and a reduced likelihood that community college students will continue on to four-year institutions for bachelor’s degrees, among other things.

“There are now two decades of research saying that having more exposure to part-time faculty who lack the most support leads to more dropouts, lower graduation rates, lower GPAs and difficulty finding a major,” said Adrianna Kezar, director of the Delphi Project and the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, where it’s housed.

Last-minute hiring and lack of job security are among the biggest problems, Kezar said. But “it’s overwhelming and cumulative, the number of bad working conditions, so you can’t totally distill out one or two. There are so many of these things that add up.”

What’s bringing new attention to this issue, she said, is that “institutions are being held accountable more” for their success rates, “so they’re more worried about these connections.”

Things appear brighter in Canada, the Center for Digital Learning study found in its comparison. Canadian adjuncts were almost three times less likely to be concerned about low salaries, and 87 percent of them get benefits.

“It does show that alternatives are available,” the report concluded.

While policies like that require financial investments by universities and colleges, Weingarten said it’s mostly a matter of these institutions’ priorities.

Instructional spending by universities, per student, goes down as the proportion of the faculty who are adjuncts goes up, a researcher from the Center for the Study of Academic Labor at Colorado State University found.

People think the cost of higher education is increasing “because there are more and more resources that are going into teaching and learning and it’s completely the opposite,” Weingarten said. “Where is the rising tuition going? Where’s the money going?”

Life as a Canadian adjunct isn’t perfect, said Jay Lister, who teaches education at McGill. But “I have guaranteed employment,” he said. “Even days when I’m just normal stressed, I worry about my students. I can’t fathom what I would do without the job security.”

At a coffee shop near the campus, wearing a union T-shirt, an Expos cap and a long beard tied with elastics, Lister said he also has enough to live on — though he said that might be different if he had kids.

Heather McPherson, a contingent lecturer at McGill, said her daughter — a doctoral candidate in anthropology at a university in California — has none of the relative job security she herself enjoys.

“She’s complained a lot,” McPherson said, outside the Faculty of Education Building on the slope of Mount Royal, which overlooks the city. “I don’t think her students suffer, but her stress level does.”

Adjuncts at McGill even get university email addresses for up to nine semesters after they teach a course, so students can reach out for recommendations or advice, said Jassim, who is president of the university’s Course Lecturers & Instructors Union.

Back in the United States, Kim likened the plight of adjuncts to those of autoworkers and Hollywood writers and actors, who have or are now striking for improved conditions.

“We have this system where the people who actually do the work are getting the least benefits and the least security. I think this is all related,” he said.

“What an enormous resource,” Kim said. “We have these motivated people. Just a little more security and a little more recognition and a little more pay would make such a difference.”


Jon Marcus wrote this article for The Hechinger Report.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.


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By Kyle Smedley for the Ball State Daily News .
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Ball State Daily News-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.

No matter the opponent, no matter the location, no matter the time, Keionte Newson kneels and bows his head at the 26-yard line before kickoff of every Ball State University football game. The senior Cardinal linebacker takes a moment to speak to his second cousin Dexter Jones, who died 10 years ago.

While praying, Newson calls on his family members who have died for guidance, looking to Jones and his deceased uncle, Jeremy Grant, specifically as father figures he has never truly had.

Keionte said he has a poor relationship with his true father, Derek, but that's only a piece of the 13-year puzzle he has had to piece together en route to becoming the first in his family to earn a college degree.

Since the age of nine, Keionte's life has been filled with adversity. His mother, Sharmane Grant, was laid off from her job as a caregiver, and Derek left the family for five years.

Keionte had to stop playing youth football so the family could use that money on essentials. Keionte, along with Grant and his siblings, then moved into Section 8 housing. Shortly thereafter, Grant fell into a years-long state of depression.

Keionte lashed out at himself and others, struggling to find an outlet for his pent-up anger.

Despite it all, in Keionte's five years at Ball State - with his family back in Covington, Tennessee - he has thrived more than ever during his 22 years on this Earth.

Now that his time as a Cardinal is over, Keionte said he is finally ready to share his story.

"Regardless if I'm put in the NFL or I get blessed with a great job or something, I just want to change how everybody sees our family," Keionte said.

Financial Insecurity

A conversation between Grant and one of Keionte's aunts still sticks with him more than a decade later. Grant, the household's main provider, had just been fired after working for nearly five years as a caregiver for those with mental illnesses, and she went to the family to discuss their next steps.

"I didn't know what to do," Grant said. "I was doing hair and cleaning doctor's offices ... It wasn't a lot of money, but it would be enough."

Keionte eavesdropped on the conversation and walked into the kitchen. Even as an elementary schooler, he knew money was tight, and he knew playing youth football wasn't free.

Despite his love for the game he had already been playing for five years, Keionte told his mom he would quit football to save the family money. A couple of years later, Keionte's family found a way to get him back involved with football in small, community leagues. He didn't start consistently playing until middle school began.

As soon as he was old enough, Keionte wanted to find work to help bring in money for the family. Grant wouldn't let him, telling Keionte it wasn't his job to provide for the family as a teenager, which drew out even more frustration from Keionte.

While he now realizes his past frustrations may not have been rational, Keionte felt his mother wasn't making the right decisions to put the family in a better financial situation. The arguments escalated enough that Grant asked Keionte to move out, after which he stayed with a friend for about a month before moving in with his newly present father. That didn't last long either, as Keionte cited a lack of effort from Derek as the reason for their still-standing issues.

Keionte moved back in with Grant after less than a year away, remembering how he cried for his mother no matter where he stayed.

"I tried to give her space for a long time, and that probably wasn't the best thing for me to do," Keionte said. "For a long time, I would see her in the morning, and she'd be on the couch, then I'd come back after practice and school, and she'd still be there ... I'd go home and sit in my room and shut myself off because I didn't know how to express my emotions properly. I was angry and mad all the time."

Grant confirmed that she was depressed for years after losing her job, but she didn't know how upset Keionte was when he retreated to his room for hours after school.

"He's always been kind of a loner," Grant said. "... I'm glad he didn't fall into the environment of Section 8 housing."

Grant continued to work odd jobs for years before finally finding consistent employment near the end of Keionte's time in high school. Prior to his senior year, Keionte presented Grant with the idea of transferring from Brighton High School to Blackman High School. He knew if he transferred to Blackman, his mother would have a better chance of finding employment.

She did and was hired as a computer technician in FedEx's supply logistics department, a role she still holds today.

"I never completely gave up," Grant said.

The Search for a Father Figure

For as long as Keionte can remember, he visited his father every weekend. However, Keionte remembered Derek "disappearing" for about five years after his ninth birthday.

He believes Derek spent the majority of that time in Texas, but Keionte said he never cared enough to ask his dad for confirmation. Once Keionte started eighth grade, he said Derek began to "creep" back into his life, attending the occasional middle school football game or messaging Keionte's mother to check on him.


"He would take me to a workout or a trainer, then give me some half-ass advice," Keionte said. "I was like, 'You don't even want to be telling me this right now, and I can feel it.'"

Keionte's relationship with Derek has been up and down since, only improving to the point where the two stayed in the same hotel room after Ball State played Western Illinois in 2021. Keionte remembered having razor bumps on his face and neck that day, and when Derek pointed them out, Keionte blamed his father for never teaching him how to properly shave.

Derek responded by telling Keionte he didn't need to be around to teach "trivial" lessons like that to his son, to which Keionte took major exception. A couple of years of little-to-no contact passed, during which time Keionte immersed himself in his faith for the first time.

He was told by members of his Bible study to let go of the grudge he held against Derek, and Keionte slowly started to build the bond with his father back. That was until April 2, Keionte's 22nd birthday, when the day came and went without a text from Derek.

Keionte messaged his father the next day to ask why he didn't reach out. Keionte said Derek responded that Keionte didn't wish him a happy birthday the year prior, prompting Keionte to scroll through their text messages and find a greeting he sent to Derek on his 50th birthday.

"All those years he missed, he missed happy birthdays, Happy New Year's, Merry Christmas and all that," Keionte said. "When he wasn't there, he wasn't there for real ... I was like, 'I've been trying, trying, trying to give you opportunities, and you just keep burning them.' I said, 'You can come to my games, but you won't be on my ticket list. I won't have tickets for you. I don't want to talk to you after games.'"

Keionte said he isn't interested in rekindling a relationship with his father until Derek shows Keionte that he cares about his personal life rather than just his athletic ventures.

The father figure that Keionte looked to in his adolescence was only 13 years older than him - his second cousin, Dexter Jones. The two spent nearly every moment together.

But in December 2014, Keionte came home from watching a local high school basketball game, and he said his life changed. Jones died from heart failure, found by family lying face down in his front yard.

"Two days before that, [the family] all went to play basketball, and he was running circles around everybody ... He was a ray of sunshine, and when he passed, it tore a hole in my family," Keionte said.

Grant was still unemployed at the time, and her depression only worsened after Jones' death. In the aftermath of losing his cousin, Keionte experienced suicidal thoughts for the first time.

His grades dropped, his focus was sporadic and he didn't enjoy spending time in his own home. When Keionte was home, he released his anger by punching holes in the walls or shouting at family members.

"Where I was growing up - if you were gonna be a man or call yourself a man - people expected men to hold on to their emotions," Keionte said. "I felt lost, and I found that football was the only safe haven I had."

Keionte's male role model after Jones' death became his middle school football coach, Larry Williams. He filled the gap in Grant's struggles to drive Keionte to and from football practice every day due to the 30-minute distance between their home and Brighton Middle School. Outside of football, Williams kept Keionte in check in the classroom both in academics and behavior.

Without Williams, Keionte said he doesn't know if he would have gotten to the point of earning a full-ride scholarship to play Division-I football, and it was during this time that Keionte discovered his love for the number nine.

This is the brotherhood they talk about'

Keionte first wore the number nine during his sophomore and junior seasons at Brighton High School, but he was not able to carry the number over to Blackman High School for his senior season. In his first two seasons with Ball State, Keionte wore the numbers 56 and 25.

He remembered feeling a sense of restoration when he earned the number nine ahead of his third year as a Cardinal, but Keionte felt like he did not live up to the standards of wearing a number that holds such high importance within him. In his two most recent seasons, Keionte said he has proven he deserves the number nine by earning True Cardinal 1 honors and serving as Ball State's team captain for the 2024 season.

"I can't be that guy that's frustrated and flustered and always worried about what's going on; I got to be that happy face and bright light that's in the locker room," Keionte said.

Perhaps no Cardinal took more from Keionte's leadership than redshirt junior wide receiver Qian Magwood, foraying that into a friendship that has lasted nearly a half-decade. Citing Keionte's outgoing personality as one of his most personable traits off the field, Magwood said his best friend was a "beacon of light" for the Cardinals.

"I know a lot of days where he's not having his best days, and he still comes in laughing, acting goofy and messing with somebody," Magwood said. " ... Some days, I come in and I just don't have it, but somehow, some way, with the guys in there, it's impossible to have a bad day."

Keionte and Magwood make a point to talk with each other for a brief moment before each game. Magwood said the meeting could be as simple as a dap up or a conversation revolving around prayer or words of encouragement.

Their vulnerability around each other comes with being roommates for years, staying up until dawn talking about their struggles and even being by each other's side when they receive traumatic news.

Magwood remembers he and Keionte hanging out at another player's apartment during their freshman year when Keionte suddenly left the room to take a phone call. He came back and told the room that one of his friends in Tennessee had been shot dead.

"I remember him hanging the phone up and starting crying. He just fell into my arms," Magwood said. "This was the first moment where I was like, 'This is the brotherhood they talk about.'"

Magwood has had moments where he's the one crying in Keionte's arms. When his grandmother died last year, he remembered Keionte being one of the first people to call and make sure he felt supported in his loss.

Heart on His Sleeve

Keionte has tattoos on both arms - the ink encompassing the struggles he has endured since the age of nine. On his left arm are a dove, a clock with a broken hand, a shattered hourglass, the word "ambition," and the phrase "I came a long way, but I'm not as far as I'm going to be." Before he leaves Ball State, he plans to add the number nine to his sleeve.

"I started from Section 8 housing to a soon-to-be college graduate," Keionte said. "That's leaps and bounds, and people don't live to see that sometimes."


Kyle Smedley wrote this article for the Ball State Daily News.


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Nearly a dozen changes could be made to the Kentucky Community and Technical College system, under Senate Joint Resolution 179, passed by lawmakers earlier this year.

The system's Acting Executive Vice President and Provost Phil Neal said the Board of Regents' recommendations are aimed at improving the process to obtaining two-year college degrees, and expanding options for students.

He said one major change includes collaboration between schools and the state Department of Education, to make it easier to offer dual and transfer credits.

"For example, on the transfer front," said Neal, "one of our recommendations that would be a change is that our eight public universities and our 16 KCTCS colleges, would all have a common course-numbering system for freshmen and sophomore level courses - and that just helps students more seamlessly transfer."

A former chief of staff is suing the system in a whistleblower lawsuit, alleging she faced retaliation for reporting waste and mismanagement.

Last week a Franklin County Circuit Court judge denied a request by the system that the case be dismissed.

A recent audit found a need to improve internal policies and procedures, but found no evidence of fraud or criminal behavior.

Neal said the state's Community and Technical College System has among the most affordable tuition rates in the state, and serves more than 66,000 students.

"We lead the country, number one, in the number of credentials conferred per capita," said Neal. "So the production of people with credentials is right up there at the top. Half of our 16 colleges have been recognized as some of the top performing community colleges in the country."

Americans' views on the importance of a college degree is shifting.

According to a Pew study released earlier this year, only one in four U.S. adults say it's extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree, in order to get a well-paying job in today's economy.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.




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Recent changes to Florida's education laws have removed information on consent, contraceptives and prenatal development from many health lessons at school.

Parents are concerned the Florida Department of Education's policies may leave some districts without vital instruction.

Stephana Ferrell, director of research and insight for the Florida Freedom to Read Project in Orange County, is worried about what she sees as gaps in her children's education, including access to comprehensive health information.

"It's unfortunate that parents have been opted out of these educational experiences," Ferrell stated. "But it's now time for us all to get informed about what our kids are missing and make the extra effort to ensure that our young citizens are armed with this information."

Advocacy groups, including PEN America and EveryLibrary, cautioned overcompliance with state laws may lead to the removal of books on topics like anatomy, teen pregnancy and sexual assault. In a joint letter, they urged Florida school superintendents and school board attorneys to exercise restraint and preserve the resources for students.

Ferrell described a clash between two views: one believing ignorance protects innocence, and another believing being informed is the best way to understand and avoid risks. She sided with the latter, saying education safeguards the community.

"We really are trying to encourage that information to remain available," Ferrell emphasized. "There are lots of nonfiction, well-written and age-appropriate materials that can be made available in the library, and have been made available in libraries in the past."

Florida school districts have struggled for years to determine which books should remain in libraries under laws signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. The laws allow parents and others to challenge books deemed "inappropriate," though recent legislative changes limit the number of challenges. This fall, the Department of Education released a list of more than 700 books removed from, or discontinued in, schools statewide.


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