Still Left Out: A Look at the Diversity of Part-Time Faculty Members Across California Public Institutions

In January 2024, the Campaign for College Opportunity published the report Still Left Out: How Exclusion In California’s Colleges & Universities Continues To Hurt Our Values, Students, and Democracy. The report documents the lack of representation and diversity among the senior leadership, faculty, and academic senates in the state’s public colleges and universities. It also addresses the lack of progress in remedying the situation since the Campaign’s original Left Out report in 2018.

In this piece, we focus on another sizable and rapidly growing segment of higher education faculty: part-time faculty members. The number of part-time faculty members has increased substantially across the nation over the past few decades. At many colleges and universities, they account for a majority of the faculty. The UC, CSU, and CCC systems all employ full-time and part-time faculty and instructional staff at very different rates. Unfortunately, across each of these three major higher education systems, part-time faculty members are no more representative of the diverse student bodies they serve than their full-time counterpartsI