Part-time faculty outnumber full-time faculty at community colleges by roughly two to one, though the actual number of classes taught is closer to one to one. In California, the situation is even more pronounced. As many as 37,000 adjuncts teach across 115 colleges, and adjuncts make up 70% or more of all faculty at 35 districts, with only two districts where full-time faculty outnumber part-timers.
Nationally, community college students comprise 39 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, with nearly half of Hispanic college students, 53 percent of Native American undergrads, and 39 percent of Black undergrads attending public two-year institutions. The populations most reliant on community colleges as a pathway to economic mobility are, in other words, the very students most likely to be taught by instructors working under the most precarious conditions in American higher education.
"The adjunct model has long operated on a convenient fiction that part-time faculty are supplemental, a reserve corps of working professionals who bring real-world expertise to the classroom for extra income," said Dr. Kenneth Parker, a higher education consultant. "In practice, however, adjuncts frequently constitute the instructional core of their institutions, cobbling together livelihoods across multiple campuses while receiving no benefits, no job security, and — until now — no compensation for the hours they spend outside the classroom doing the actual work of teaching."
A state Superior Court judge in Los Angeles County ruled earlier this year that part-time professors in the Long Beach Community College District should be paid for work done outside the classroom — including preparing lectures, grading papers, and meeting with students. The ruling by Judge Stuart M. Rice found that failing to compensate adjuncts for that work constitutes a violation of minimum wage law. A proposed $18 million settlement has since been reached, affecting more than 1,400 adjunct faculty over a six-year period, with a preliminary hearing scheduled for July 2026 and payments potentially distributed as early as fall 2026.
Simultaneously, a Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled in a separate 2022 lawsuit that adjuncts working across California are employees of the community college system's board of governors — a decision that could lead to uniformity in pay across the 116-college system. The plaintiff in that case, John Martin, an adjunct at Shasta and Butte community college districts and chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association, argued that the board violated state wage-and-hour laws by not compensating adjuncts for time spent preparing for classes, writing curriculum, grading, and interacting with students outside class. Lawyers for the community college system sought dismissal, arguing that adjuncts work for local districts, not the state — a motion the court rejected.
Daniel M. Galpern, the attorney representing Martin, says the legal foundation underlying both cases is unambiguous.
"In our view, the law in California is quite clear," Galpern said. "Employers, including California Community Colleges, are required to compensate part-time professors for every hour of their instructional-related work, including for their considerable work undertaken outside of the classroom in preparing lectures, developing and grading exams, and communicating with students."
The significance of both rulings extends far beyond California. Legal experts say that schools across the nation are watching closely.
"For those who have lived the adjunct experience, the courts are only catching up to a reality that has been hiding in plain sight for decades," said Parker, who added an adjunct earning the median pay per credit hour and teaching 36 credit hours per year would earn approximately 125% of the federal poverty level for a family of four , a figure that underscores how the gig economy has colonized the professoriate.
The implications for students are no less troubling. Research has consistently linked heavy reliance on adjunct faculty to lower student completion rates, particularly for first-generation and low-income students who most need consistent faculty relationships and mentorship. When instructors are financially stressed, professionally isolated, and cycling across campuses with little institutional support, the consequences accumulate quietly in the form of missed office hours, thinner feedback, and advising relationships that never have the chance to develop.
"What California's courts have done is assign a dollar figure to exploitation that the academy has long normalized," Parker added. "The question now is whether community college systems will treat these rulings as a floor or continue to treat their part-time faculty as a ceiling."
