What the gap costs, and why the state cannot yet measure it
By Scott Douglas, Southern California Regional Representative
What the number is, in plain language
California’s community colleges pay part-time faculty less per unit of instruction than full-time faculty for the identical teaching. Pricing that gap starts from one number: the per-FTEF cost of instruction within a district, applied uniformly regardless of employment classification. This is not a flat statewide rate and does not disturb salary schedules — each district keeps its own schedule, its own steps, and its own credential and experience columns. What changes is that a part-time instructor is placed on that same schedule rather than a separate, lower one, and paid in proportion to the load carried. Teaching a fraction of a full load is not a tier; being paid off a different schedule for it is.
Using audited FY 2023–24 data from a 13-district sample, the weighted-mean gap is $33,717 per FTEF. Applied to the state’s 12,520.8 part-time FTEF, that is a floor of $422 million a year — roughly 4.5% of current state appropriations to the system.
$422 million is a floor, not an estimate, and the paper is explicit that it cannot say how much higher the true, unknown gap actually runs. Some narrower effects in the underlying data push the computed estimate up, but the major distortions — overload, summer, and part-time pay counted in dollars with no matching FTEF — all push it down, and outweigh them. The data needed to correct for this — a full decomposition of that pay — is not available in any public report. The computed figure understates the real gap by a margin nobody can currently quantify.
The deeper finding: the state cannot check its own math
The dollar figure is not this paper’s most important conclusion. Its most important conclusion is that no one — including the state — can currently compute this number with precision, because the systems that would need to agree on it don’t.
Every district already produces the underlying data every pay period: who was paid, how much, for what assignment, under what classification. That data goes four different places, and each one strips out what the others need. The CCFS-311 tracks budget compliance. The 50% Law Report tracks the instructional-expenditure ratio. The Faculty Obligation Number tracks the full-time hiring requirement. CalSTRS tracks retirement contributions. None of them was built to measure compensation, because none of them was built for that purpose in the first place.
The architecture is an accident of exactly the kind of history the companion paper documents. Rather than fix the underlying pay structure, the Legislature addressed it in pieces — a parity fund, an office-hours supplement, a health insurance program — each partial remedy for the same unrepaired problem. Each one also arrived with its own reporting requirement, so the state could confirm that program’s money was spent as intended. Over fifty years those requirements accumulated into the architecture the state now has. The result: it can verify every patch, and cannot say whether the thing being patched is getting better or worse. The state built the instruments to monitor the remedies and never built one to measure the injury.
This is not a data problem the state failed to solve. It is a reporting architecture nobody designed to answer this question, doing exactly what it was built to do. The paper’s remedy is a reporting extract that preserves, per individual and per pay period, the handful of fields districts already maintain in payroll — classification, assignment type, FTEF, compensation, and CalSTRS crediting treatment — keyed to a system-wide faculty identifier the state has for students but has never created for faculty. The paper does not pretend this is trivial: 73 districts run different payroll and classification systems, and standardizing across them is real work. But the information already exists. It is fragmented, not missing — and the same granularity would improve FON compliance, 50% Law accuracy, and workforce planning whether or not equalization is ever funded.
What it does — and does not — establish
$422 million is a floor, not a forecast, and it will not become more precise on its own. Only the reporting fix closes that gap — by connecting data districts already generate, rather than by collecting anything new.
What this paper does establish is that the answer should be a computation, not a research project. Districts already pay people; the cost of placing part-time faculty on the same salary schedule as their full-time colleagues is knowable from records districts already keep. That nobody has computed it is itself a finding about the state’s own informational infrastructure — one worth fixing on its own terms, and a precondition for knowing whether any parity funding is actually closing the gap.
This is a synthesis of the full paper, Pro Rata Cost Analysis, which sets out the complete methodology, data, and appendix. For a copy, contact Scott Douglas at sdouglas@cpfa.org.