25 percent of part-time college faculty receive government aid

A new report from the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education has found that many adjunct professors across the country aren't being paid enough to live.

A quarter of part-time faculty members at U.S. universities and colleges receive some sort of government aid, including Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), or food stamps, the researchers found. A full 20 percent of part-time faculty members' families receive the EITC, according to the report.

NBC News reports that the families of about 100,000 part-time faculty members are enrolled in some form of public assistance programs. Some adjunct professors have other full-time jobs, Quartz reports, but many adjunct professors have doctorate degrees and don't hold other jobs. And the rate of adjunct professor positions is growing more quickly than the rate of full-time professor jobs, Quartz notes.

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Kendall Fells, the organizing director of Fight for $15, a campaign to help low-wage workers, told USA Today that the fight for living wages is about childcare workers and adjunct professors, not just fast-food workers. If Berkeley's study is any indication, change can't come soon enough.