Why Is College So Expensive if Professors Are Paid So Little?

 These are educational professionals, and they need to be compensated like they are.

By Michelle Chen

 As the fall semester begins on the small-town campus of St Michael’s College in Vermont, Sharyn Layfield is entering the autumn of her educational career with the freshman writing seminar, The Examined Life. Lately, though, she’s been examining her own career with both mild pride and disappointment. With a degree in creative writing, she’s been working short-term teaching jobs since her 30s, often skirting poverty, never achieving the job security traditionally associated with academia. Now in her 60s, approaching retirement age modestly in a compact mobile home, she’s helping build one of Vermont’s few adjunct unions to help colleagues gain the respect on the job she has long been denied.

As an organizer with a newly formed SEIU local, she acknowledges she’s “too old to benefit from the improvements for many more years,” but she’s organizing because “others have lived as I have—hand-to-mouth—and I want that to change for them…. Our goal is to be respected, included, and paid for the work we do; it’s that simple.”