Across California’s community college system, a handful of part-time instructors have discovered a lucrative loophole in online education — one that lets them teach dozens of courses simultaneously across multiple campuses, often earning six-figure salaries that rival or exceed those of top administrators.
A CalMatters investigation found at least 70 adjunct professors who drew paychecks from five or more community college districts, Cal State campuses or UC campuses in a single year, with some instructors teaching more than a dozen classes in one semester. For educators in the Inland Empire and across the state, the findings raise pointed questions about oversight, teaching quality and what students are really getting from the booming online education marketplace.
One instructor, sociology and ethnic studies professor Thien-Huong Ninh Villarreal, holds tenured, full-time positions and also picks up recurring part-time work at nine other institutions, including UC Berkeley and Sacramento State. This semester alone, she’s teaching roughly 30 classes to about 1,100 students. In 2024, that workload brought her nearly $800,000 in pay — more than the chancellor of California’s entire community college system. Ninh Villarreal did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The scale of such teaching loads has alarmed faculty advocates. Sarah Thompson, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, said it’s simply not possible to properly evaluate and support that many students without help. “Obviously no one has enough time in a week to teach 30 classes and do a good job, so that’s very problematic,” she said.
But Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor overseeing finance and strategic initiatives for the state’s community college system, pushed back on the idea that teaching many classes automatically means poor instruction. He said the real issue would be if an instructor’s workload prevented adequate student engagement, feedback or support — and in those cases, he said accountability falls on the local college district, not the statewide system.
CalMatters built its findings by analyzing payroll data from the nonprofit Transparent California and cross-referencing it with course catalogs and faculty rosters. No statewide rule currently limits how many classes an adjunct can teach across different community college districts — only within a single district, where the cap is generally three courses per semester.
Andrew Vanden Heuvel, an adjunct astronomy instructor, offered a window into how the math works. Teaching from an office above his garage near Lake Michigan, he said he instructs roughly 50 online astronomy classes and labs — sometimes reaching 1,000 students in a single semester — for colleges scattered from Santa Monica and San Jose to Visalia, plus campuses in Michigan, New Mexico, Washington and Florida.
Nearly all his lectures are pre-recorded, a format known as asynchronous instruction that lets students work through material on their own schedule. Quizzes are multiple choice and graded automatically; many written assignments, he said, are checked by an algorithm that merely verifies they were turned in, not how well they were done. “In its current form, I am not grading anything (by hand),” he said.
California pays far better than most other states for this kind of work, Vanden Heuvel said — roughly eight times what he earns in Florida for similar teaching. In 2024, his California teaching jobs alone brought in about $320,000. His total nationwide earnings that year reached $758,485.
Union leaders say they were stunned by the scope of these arrangements. “I don’t know how you can earn that much money, how you can have that many assignments. I mean that’s pretty wild,” said Jim Mahler, president of the community college council for the California Federation of Teachers. He suspects some instructors are doing little more than hitting “play” on recorded lectures.
The CalMatters review found several other professors who combined full-time tenured positions with heavy side loads of online teaching. Bobby Seals holds a full-time post at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose while teaching 14 additional courses across four other districts and San Jose State, reaching roughly 930 students this term. Faramarz Mortezaie chairs the computer science department at Mission College in Santa Clara while teaching 11 more classes elsewhere, including San Jose State. Nicholas Nardi, a full-time psychology professor at Santa Ana College, teaches 11 additional courses at six other schools. Timothy Durfield of Citrus College adds 10 more classes across four districts, and Walter Meyer of Santa Monica College teaches 10 extra online courses reaching students in Los Angeles and Kern counties. None of these instructors responded to requests for comment.
Because California’s 73 community college districts operate independently, no single entity tracks how many classes an instructor teaches system-wide. The Cal State and UC systems are more centralized and can better monitor faculty workloads, but if a professor is also picking up community college courses, that activity may go unnoticed entirely.
Researchers caution that it remains unclear whether online courses, done well, produce worse outcomes than in-person instruction. Working adults who make up much of the community college population often favor the flexibility online classes offer. But asynchronous courses in particular have been linked to less student-instructor interaction, which studies show can hurt student success.
Vanden Heuvel, who posts many of his lectures to a YouTube channel with nearly 5 million total views, insists his students are well served. He said he gives out his personal cell number and fields up to 30 student emails a day, responding to every one. State and federal rules require professors to maintain meaningful interaction with students, particularly in asynchronous courses — a requirement Ferguson said applies “regardless of how many colleges or districts employ the instructor.”
Still, Vanden Heuvel acknowledged the setup leaves plenty of room for students to lean on artificial intelligence, given how many assignments are graded only for completion. “It’s a defensible instructional practice to assess that way,” he said, comparing it to standardized tests like the LSAT or GRE. “I don’t love it.”
Not every adjunct teaching at multiple campuses is pulling in big money. Tina Leonard, who teaches American Sign Language at five different districts, earned just over $84,000 in 2024. Leonard, who is deaf, said full-time, tenure-track ASL positions are scarce and highly competitive, and that juggling several part-time jobs often leaves her owing extra taxes because each college withholds as though it were her only employer.
K. Frindell, president of the California Community College Independents faculty union federation, said the pattern reflects a system that has quietly created its own loophole — one that lets districts save money by relying on adjuncts while pushing those same instructors to patch together a living wage across multiple campuses. She said the state doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many adjuncts are working multiple jobs, since tallies don’t account for instructors teaching across different districts.
Lawmakers have repeatedly tried and failed to extend more stable pay, benefits or full-time opportunities to part-time faculty. A 2022 effort sent $200 million to districts to help reimburse adjuncts for health insurance costs, but participation has been limited — fewer than 7,000 adjuncts used the program in the 2024-25 academic year, and much of the money remains unspent. Many districts chose not to take part.
Noah Thomas, an art professor who commutes among five community college districts in Orange and Los Angeles counties teaching in-person studio classes, said he looked into the new health benefits but found them inadequate, covering only himself and only for the 10 months of his contract. He earned just over $100,000 in 2024 — a fraction of what some online-heavy instructors make — but said he has no interest in scaling up the way others have. “Financially I’d love to teach as many classes as I could. $800,000 sounds amazing. But I’m not a factory of education like that. I really love teaching students one-on-one and showing them how to actually cut out a piece of cardboard and use a band saw.”
For his part, Vanden Heuvel said he has wrestled with the ethics of his own teaching model, even as he defends its results. He said student evaluations consistently rate his courses as above average in quality, and he has self-published a 600-page book of student reflections on how the class changed the way they see the night sky. Still, he admits the scale of what he’s built invites scrutiny. “There’s always the sense of like, ‘Is what I’m doing OK or not OK? Am I pushing it a little too far or not?'”
Original source: CalMatters
