Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Senate Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today I introduced the Adjunct Faculty Loan Fairness Act, a bill that would make adjunct professors eligible to participate in the Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program.

Contingent faculty members are like full-time instructors. They have advanced degrees. They teach classes and spend many hours outside the classroom preparing for class. They hold office hours, grade papers and give feedback to students. They provide advice and write letters of recommendation. Students rely on them. Since most adjuncts have advanced degrees and, as almost 75 percent of graduate degree recipients have an average of $61,000 in student loans, they are also among the 40 million Americans with student debt.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is meant to encourage graduates to go into public service by offering student loan forgiveness for eligible federal loans after ten years of full-time work in government or the non-profit sector. Public service fields like nursing, military service, and public health qualify. And many education jobs qualify, including full-time work at public universities and part-time work at community colleges in high-needs subject areas or areas of shortage. But other faculty members who work part-time are not eligible for loan forgiveness because the law requires an annual average of 30 hours per week to qualify for the program. For adjunct faculty working at several schools on a contingent basis, this requirement can be difficult or impossible to meet, even when they are putting in more than 30 hours of work each week.

The number of faculty hours given for each class is calculated differently at different schools. Some give one hour per hour in the classroom while others actually take into consideration the time required outside the classroom. So, even as these faculty members are working hard and as their options for tenured, full-time positions become slimmer, more of them are overworked and undervalued for their work in public service.

The Adjunct Faculty Loan Fairness Act of 2014 would solve this by amending the Higher Education Act to expand the definition of a ``public service job'' to include a part-time faculty member who teaches at least one course at an eligible institution of higher education. They would still have to meet all the other requirements to qualify for the program, including making 120 on-time payments while employed at a qualifying institution, and they could not be employed full-time elsewhere at the same time.

This bill would benefit someone like David Weiss, an adjunct professor from St. Paul, Minnesota, who graduated with $48,000 in student debt and, after 12 years of on-time payments, has $35,000 left. Like most adjuncts, David has dealt with uncertain job security. In good years, he is able to teach 5 to 7 courses a year, but recently he has only been offered two to three courses. He supplements his income from teaching with other part-time work. This bill would ensure that David and many thousands like him, could obtain credit towards PSLF for payments made while teaching whether or not he was teaching one course or 7.

Unfortunately, for all their contributions to the college programs and the students they work with, adjunct faculty don't have the same employment benefits or job security as their colleagues. The number of classes they teach every semester varies. To make ends meet, these professors often end up teaching classes at more than one school in the same semester, getting paid about $3,000 per class and making an average annual income that hovers around minimum wage. This also means that, in some parts of the country, they spend as much time commuting as they do teaching.

Nationally, 2/3 of all higher education faculty work on a contingent basis, with low pay and little or no benefits or job security. In the past, these were a minority of professors who were hired to teach an occasional class because they could bring experience to the classroom in a specific field or industry. Over time, as university budgets have tightened and it has gotten more expensive to hire full-time, tenure track professors, higher education institutions have increasingly hired adjuncts.

From 1991 to 2011, the number of part-time faculty in the U.S. increased two and a half times from 291,000 to over 760,000. At the same time, the percentage of professors holding tenure-track positions has been steadily decreasing--from 45 percent of all instructors in 1975 to only 24 percent in 2011. The number of full-time instructors, tenured and non-tenured, now makes up only about 50 percent of professors on U.S. campuses. The other 50 percent of the 1.5 million faculty employees at public and non-profit colleges and universities in the U.S. work on a part-time, contingent basis.

Illinois colleges rely heavily on adjuncts. In 2012, 53 percent of all faculty at public and not-for-profit colleges and universities in the State, more than 30,400 faculty employees, worked on a part-time basis. This is a 52.6 percent increase in part-time faculty in Illinois compared to a 13 percent increase in full-time faculty since 2002.

Not surprisingly, in Illinois, 69 percent of all part-time faculty work in Chicago, where the cost of living is 16 percent higher than the U.S. average. Based on an average payment of $3,000 per class an adjunct professor must teach between seventeen and thirty classes a year to pay for rent and utilities in Chicago.

They would have to teach up to 7 classes to afford groceries for a family of four and two to four classes per year just to cover student loan payments. Because they are part-time, they are not eligible for vacation time, paid sick days, or group health-care. So they would have to teach an additional two to three classes to afford family coverage from the lowest priced health insurance offered on Get Covered Illinois, the official health marketplace.

Even though these professors are working in a relatively low-paying field, teaching our students, their part-time status also means they aren't eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.

This bill does not completely fix this growing reliance on part-time professors who are underpaid and undervalued. But it would ensure that members of the contingent faculty workforce are no longer excluded from the loan forgiveness program for public servants. I hope my colleagues will join me in the effort to provide this benefit to faculty members who provide our students with a quality education.

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