Fairness 101

America’s largest urban university system, which a brain-boggling 274,000 students attend, has agreed to dramatically hike the wages of the woefully underpaid men and women who are shouldering an ever-larger share of the teaching load.

Assuming the new contract between the City University and the Professional Staff Congress is okayed by members, which it should be, that’ll not only be welcome news for CUNY’s adjuncts, who now earn an embarrassing $3,222 per course. It’ll be good for CUNY’s predominantly low-income learners, who will benefit from a more stable, more attentive teaching corps that’s less likely to be rushing to second and third jobs to pay the rent.

Over the years, as academia has changed, CUNY schools have leaned ever more on part-time faculty. Adjuncts now handle more than 60% of the coursework at the system’s 11 four-year senior colleges, and about half of it at the seven two-year community colleges.

To raise their insultingly paltry earnings, the union demanded adjuncts get paid not only for time in the classroom but for office hours as well; that would hike base per-course pay to $5,500, a 71% increase over the life of the fiveyear deal. Regular faculty will see pay raise by about 10%, roughly in line with a 2%-per-year pattern.

It’s young men and women striving to get a foothold in upwardly mobile careers who will reap the biggest rewards of all this. Participants in CUNY’s ASAP program, which helps students who would otherwise struggle to complete their degree push through with aid of counseling, financial assistance and other personal attention, have nearly double the graduation rates of others.

It may sound trite but it’s true: Investing in a workforce that’s been systematically undervalued pays dividends.