Elia Newsom is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and the sole breadwinner for his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
He works 10 to 20 hours a week at a second job on top of his full-time work at the university, and picks up summer teaching when itap available. He worries about securing a stable future for his daughter.
“Itap been a struggle for us,” Newsom said. “I think $52,000 a year is probably fine for somebody living by themselves, maybe,” Newsom said. “You can’t really live in Boulder comfortably but you could probably get by, but I have a family.”
For some CU Boulder employees like Newsom, the salary from the university isn’t enough to make ends meet. Staff at CU Boulder make up the largest group that utilizes the university’s mobile food pantries, and the Boulder Faculty Assembly has listed pay equity for faculty as a top priority this year.
Newsom is also involved in the United Campus Workers Union, which advocates for a 20% cost of living adjustment and contracted raises of 5% to 6% annually for faculty, staff and graduate students at CU Boulder. The union organized a last year for higher wages. CU Boulder does not recognize the union, and state law does not grant higher education workers collective bargaining rights.
“The University of Colorado Boulder works diligently to balance the affordability of a CU Boulder education with the needs of our employees,” CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Mueksch wrote in an email. “Our campus recognizes the impact that ensuring attainable access to CU Boulder –– which we accomplish via tuition guarantee, modest tuition increases from the Board of Regents and CU Promise –– has on our ability to maintain wages that keep with inflationary costs, particularly in a community like Boulder where the cost of living has increased faster than the state and national average.”
‘Everyone should be able to live in dignity’
Newsom teaches in the writing and rhetoric program at CU Boulder and holds a doctorate degree. He said itap not uncommon for faculty like him to work second jobs.
He knows one professor who works for Uber as a second job and has picked up their students before. Another colleague of his has resorted to selling plasma to pay bills. Those faculty members declined to speak on the record about their experiences, citing concerns about their job security.
The university does not collect data on the number of its employees with second jobs, since Mueksch said CU Boulder does not require its employees to report any additional jobs they may have unless that job is a conflict of interest.
Alastair Norcross is a CU Boulder professor and chair of the CU Faculty Council. As a faculty leader, he helps advocate for better pay for his colleagues.
“I think itap very easy for people in general to think that college professors are all well paid and have easy jobs,” Norcross said. “And it comes as a shock to many people to hear about someone with a doctorate degree who’s an expert in their field and is teaching students who is also having to resort to selling plasma to make ends meet. I mean, this shouldn’t happen.”
According to a cost of from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the living wage for a single-person household in Boulder County is $26.36 an hour, or nearly $55,000 annually. That number nearly doubles if the adult has a child to support.
Sarah Huntley, Boulder’s director of communication and engagement, said the city considers $22 an hour a living wage for its employees, or nearly $46,000 a year. She said each employer in Boulder makes its own decisions about whatap considered a living wage and how to pay its employees based on its financial situation, including the university.
“CU Boulder aims to remain a competitive employer in the state and across higher education,” Mueksch wrote. “The university has a comprehensive compensation strategy that outlines several compensation goals, including a goal to establish a short-term and multi-year compensation strategy that advances the campus goal of recruiting, advancing, and retaining employees.”
At CU Boulder, minimum wage is $16 for students and $18 for staff. The current minimum wage in Boulder is $14.42, which to $15.57 on Jan. 1 and by 8% annually through 2027.
The university has different ranks of faculty that teach students: lecturers, teaching professors and tenured or tenure-track faculty.
Lecturers are typically paid the least, Norcross said. Lecturers are hired on a course-by-course basis, paid per course and usually hired one semester at a time.
In the College of Arts and Sciences, for lecturers starts at $4,970, which is increasing to $5,170 in the spring. If a lecturer teaches four courses a semester at the current rate, which is considered a full teaching load, they would earn less than $40,000 annually.
Pay for lecturers in hard sciences starts at a higher rate — for example, compensation starts at $8,500 per course in the and Applied Science.
Lecturers are meant to be part-time and temporary, according to CU Regent policy, but many teach full class loads and have been employed at CU Boulder for years. Norcross said the university hires many lecturers because there are not enough permanent faculty to meet the demand for courses.
In his department, which is philosophy, lecturers outnumber permanent faculty. There are 28 lecturers and 24 professors, according to the .
“My main concern has been the appallingly low pay we give to lecturers,” Norcross said. “I don’t think we pay our teaching professors particularly well but we certainly pay them better than our lecturers and we give them more job security.”
Mueksch said CU Boulder has taken numerous steps in recent years to address compensation for employees on campus. This includes a 4% raise for staff and a 4% increase in the merit pool for faculty in 2024 and upcoming in 2025. Since 2022, CU Boulder has increased staff pay and the faculty merit pool by at least 3% to 4% annually.
Lecturers are not included in the faculty merit compensation pool increase; however, CU Boulder has increased the contracted lecturer rates by 3% to 4% four times since 2022.
Above lecturers are teaching professors, who are salaried and whose primary focus is teaching and does not require research. Newsom is a teaching professor.
As of July 1, teaching professors and clinical faculty who are promoted receive between a $4,000 base-building raise and a $6,500 base-building raise. This was in addition to the 4% merit pool increases that occurred in 2024 and will occur in 2025. Because of this, Newsom now makes $56,000 a year.
Newsom said the raises, which are determined by the CU Board of Regents, are not enough. He’s frustrated when administrators who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year inform him he’ll get a 4% raise.
“It kind of feels insulting after a while,” Newsom said, adding, “Everyone should be able to live in dignity and be able to not struggle.”
Mueksch said the majority of the university’s staff and teaching professors are paid out of the university’s education and general fund, with the primary source of funding coming directly from students.
“For FY25, student tuition and fees account for 81% of the budget, followed by direct state funding (11%) and indirect cost recovery (8%),” Mueksch wrote. “This means CU Boulder must carefully balance affordability for students with employee compensation.”
At the top of the faculty ranks are tenure and tenure-track professors who do a mix of teaching and research. They also have built-in pathways for promotion and permanent job security. Norcross is a tenured professor.
As of fall 2023, which is the latest available data, CU Boulder employed 1,239 tenured and tenure-track professors, 2,380 research faculty, 570 teaching professors, 790 lecturers and 3,003 graduate students.
‘We owe it to the students’
Emily Harrington became aware of how little lecturers are paid and how much they’re working when she was made chair of undergraduate studies in the English department. As chair, part of her job is to staff all the English classes and assign instructors to courses.
She said most undergraduate courses are not taught by tenure or tenure-line professors, who are the highest-paid faculty with the most job security. Once a student majors in a discipline, they have more access to tenure-line professors.
“I think itap fair to say that freshmen and sophomores at CU across the board, most of their courses are going to be taught by (lecturers), graduate students or teaching professors,” she said.
At the undergraduate level, 72% of student credit hours are taught by teaching professors, lecturers and graduate students, according to CU Boulder’s Office of Data Analytics.
Teaching professors teach 43% of the credit hours, nontenured and nonteaching professors like lecturers teach 18% of the credit hours and graduate students teach 11% of the credit hours. Tenure-track faculty teach 28% of undergraduate student credit hours.
At the graduate level, 67% of credit hours are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty. The university tracks credit hours rather than the number of classes.
Newsom said he could give more to his students if he wasn’t being crushed by the amount of work for so little pay. The hour-and-a-half commute by bus from Broomfield, the second job, trying to take care of his family — it all takes a toll.
“You start to get burnt out after a while and you can’t give as much as you like to,” Newsom said, adding, “I feel like we’re all just trying to make it work but I know I could be giving them so much more if I had the kind of financial freedom to not work another job or have to teach in the summer.”
Mueksch said any employee who needs support can contact their department chair, supervisor or Human Resources unit if they feel comfortable doing so. She said employees have access to various resources including on-campus food pantries and online wellness programs.
“CU Boulder is committed to supporting all of its employees to ensure they have the resources needed to fulfill their job duties,” Mueksch wrote.
Norcross said itap a moral imperative for the university to pay its faculty better, especially lecturers.
“Many of our courses are taught by lecturers, and as a university, we have an obligation to our students, and if we don’t treat our lecturers well, we don’t give them decent working conditions, we can’t expect them to do an optimal job teaching,” Norcross said. “We owe it to the students as well as the lecturers to make sure that our faculty have good working conditions because you’re much more likely to do a good job teaching if you’re not constantly worrying about whether you can make ends meet.”
Students at CU Boulder don’t know how things might be different if their instructors had more time for them, Harrington said.
“Their commitment to the work I think can mask the detriment to students, in a way, because they’re giving their all and I think students don’t know necessarily what else might be available to them, for example, if the person who’s teaching them isn’t pushed to their limits,” she said.
Students may be on the cusp of dropping out or failing, for example, and the instructor simply doesn’t have the time to reach out. Harrington said the solution could be twofold: pay faculty better, and retention will improve.
“Actually paying people well that are teaching first-year students would be the best investment that you could make in retention because then they would have the time and availability to provide the mentorship that will help students want to stay in college and to feel like there’s somebody at the university who really cares about them,” she said.
Newsom believes there needs to be a change in the structure of higher education. He feels administration and research are valued more than teaching, and within teaching, there’s a large pay gap between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty.
Outside of the classroom, he said many janitors, kitchen workers and office administrators earn $40,000 and have worked at CU Boulder for years. Meanwhile, upper-level administrators are making between $200,000 and $400,000 or more annually.
“There needs to be a change. Itap not sustainable,” Newsom said. “We are going to be rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. We’re just staving off the inevitable until a change is made. We can’t keep paying administrators exorbitant salaries. We can’t keep charging students more and more and more to go to school and we can’t keep paying faculty so little, and not just faculty, but staff too.”
Norcross said the problem comes down to a lack of funding. Colorado is one of the lowest states in terms of higher education funding granted by the state, placing 48th in the nation in fiscal year 2023 by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
“To be fair, most of the people we talk to about this are receptive to the concerns but itap always going to come down to the bottom line, which is the question of funding and the question of whether we have the money to do the things we need to do,” Norcross said.
‘I just need CU Boulder to care about me’
Rent, a car payment and groceries: these are the expenses Shayna Khachadoorian had to choose between as an academic advisor and staff member at CU Boulder.
Her $50,000 salary wasn’t enough to live in Boulder County, so she found an apartment in Broomfield where she struggled to survive as a single woman.
“Paycheck to paycheck is not descriptive enough,” Khachadoorian said. “My colleagues, fellow academic advisors, had to feed me and give me groceries. Thatap the level of food insecurity we’re talking.”
As an academic advisor, Khachadoorian offers everything from mental health support to advice on a class schedule to the next steps after a student has failed every class at CU Boulder. She started visiting food pantries shortly after she started working at CU Boulder.
“I’m supposed to be the adult that they can lean on … and to know that at the end of the day, I have to go and get groceries from a food pantry or go to the Buffs Basic Needs Center and get groceries, that doesn’t make me feel like an adult they can rely on,” Khachadoorian said.
The Buffs Basic Needs Center at CU Boulder offers mobile food pantries about once a month, and on those days, Khachadoorian would use her lunch break to rush over and pick up groceries. The mobile food pantries are open to employees, students and the general public.
In the last academic year, the Mobile Food Pantry held 13 events at CU Boulder that distributed 102,261 pounds of food equating to 85,217 meals.
More than 53% of the people who used the food pantries were staff, with 1,666 visits. CU Boulder employs 4,303 university staff and 819 classified staff, according to the most recent data from the fall of 2023. Classified staff are employees that are part of the state’s personnel system.
Students accounted for 37.2% of the visits, with 350 undergraduate student visits and 813 graduate student visits. Faculty visits made up 3.4% of usage, or 106 visits, and community members made up 6.2%, or 195 visits. In its data, the university counts the number of visits, not the number of people.
“I think that CU Boulder should be embarrassed that so many of us rely on the food pantry and Buff Pantry and Community Food Share for access to food,” Khachadoorian said. “We are an incredible institution and I love CU Boulder. I genuinely love my job and I love my students, and why can’t I afford groceries? Why do I have to debate between rent in a very expensive area and the ability to have fresh produce?”
Lindsay Nelson is a 34-year-old staff member and the graduate program coordinator of the astrophysical and planetary sciences department. She lives among undergraduates in an apartment in Boulder with a roommate who is a postdoctoral researcher.
“The cost of living in Boulder is so prohibitive that despite the fact that I have a master’s degree and over 10 years of experience in my field, I’ll never be able to afford to own a home here and can barely afford to rent in the city where I work,” Nelson said.
Nelson makes $62,000 a year. Ideally, she’d be able to live on her own, have a parking lot without potholes and a washer and dryer inside her home. Nelson has a side job where she tutors five months out of the year to supplement her income.
At CU Boulder, Nelson said there needs to be more paths to promotion and the ability to be given more responsibilities for more pay. In the short term, flexible work-from-home options and free or reduced parking on campus would also help. CU Boulder employees pay about $60 a month to park on campus.
Mueksch said CU Boulder offers flexibility to work with supervisors on remote or hybrid work schedules and provides a generous benefit package to its employees, including any temporary faculty member with a 50% or greater appointment.
For staff, Nelson said there needs to be more affordable housing available through the university. There’s currently no housing available for faculty and staff at CU Boulder, as the university is focused on providing housing for graduate students and their families.
“CU Boulder continues to evaluate opportunities to increase attainable housing for our students, faculty and staff,” Mueksch wrote. “Earlier this year, CU Boulder acquired the former in Louisville for the purpose of building a mixed-use, transit-oriented development that includes housing for faculty, staff and possibly graduate students.”
She added that the 2021 annexation of CU Boulder South also presents an opportunity to build faculty and staff housing.
Boulder is also working on creating more affordable housing. The city has a goal to make 15% of all its homes . In 2024, there were 4,000 homes in this program.
Kristin Oliver is a graduate research assistant in the physics department. She feels she and other graduate students are getting paid for half the amount of work they do for CU Boulder.
“It makes me consider leaving grad school all the time because I feel exploited,” Oliver said. “And I’m 31, so I’m at the point in my life right where I don’t want to be living with five roommates and eating ramen noodles all the time. I’m trying to plan for my future here and itap really hard when I feel like the work that I do, which is honestly a lot of the sort of day-to-day functioning of our research group, gets undervalued.”
Oliver completes data analysis and writes research papers. During the school year, she gets paid about $3,000 a month before taxes for 20 hours of work a week. She suspects she’s among the highest-paid graduate students because her department is well-funded.
Oliver’s hourly wage is high, but she said she gets paid for working 20 hours a week despite being expected to work 40 hours. The unpaid 20 hours are intended to be used for work on her dissertation, which is considered class work for credit.
“People who don’t come from backgrounds where they have the ability to lean on their family for financial support, or people who might be supporting their family, it makes it really hard for those kinds of people to access higher education and graduate education,” Oliver said.
CU Boulder has also made adjustments to graduate students’ compensation.
“There’s been a consistent effort to increase financial support and decrease financial burdens on graduate students at CU Boulder, including increased stipends for graduate students on appointment, increased benefits including dental coverage, paid parental leave and the elimination of fees,” Mueksch wrote.
Now, Khachadoorian lives in Littleton with her partner who she met during her first year at CU Boulder. She makes $2,000 more a year since she was hired and doesn’t need to visit food pantries anymore. Her financial insecurity is significantly reduced thanks to her two-income household.
At the end of the day, Khachadoorian does her job because she loves her students.
“It is so worthwhile to work with them and know that at the end of the day, one person at CU Boulder cares about them, and if I’m able to do that, I’ve done my job well,” Khachadoorian said. “I just need CU Boulder to care about me. I need that in return.”
