College Admin Rake in Bonuses while Educators Struggle with Poverty Wages
Gov. DeSantis stacked state schools with friends and ideological allies. As they line their pockets with taxpayer money, those doing the actual work of education are getting stiffed.
At the University of Central Florida’s flagship campus on February 4th, the Student Success and Wellbeing Festival was being held outside of the Student Union. The event featured stands selling cookies and various merch, inviting students to join the many clubs on offer at Florida’s largest state school. Amidst the thick of student life pleasures was a group of both young and old faces holding signs with the usual protest chants you hear at student-led protests — except this wasn’t student-led. Professor Talat Rahman, a physics professor at UCF and the university’s chapter president of the United Faculty of Florida (UFF), a professor’s union for higher education, had organized the “Invest in Education, Not Administration” rally.
Students, faculty members and parents joined to march through the campus to the university president’s office in Millican Hall, in front of the Reflecting Pond. There she and the Secretary of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), Ken Pham, spoke to the crowd about the struggles full-time, salaried professors faced without a long overdue pay raise, as inflation continues to rise in central Florida.
“There are professors having a hard time, and they have to find some way to support themselves so that they can make ends meet,” Rahman said. “If you have a family of four on $50,000, that’s very hard.”
Rahman, along with her students and colleagues, are fed up with the challenges posed when universities value administration over their faculty. UCF President Alexander Cartwright’s salary rose to $1.2 million as professor’s salaries at the massive state university (one of the nation’s largest, with 70k students enrolled) received a 0% raise and only meager bonuses, according to a UFF press release. This discrepancy sparked the rally at UCF.
Pham led the protest across the campus straight to Millican Hall to deliver postcards from faculty and students demanding fair pay and wages for educators. The protesters stopped intermittently to let onlookers hear chants like, “Cartwright, Cartwright, you can’t hide/we can see your greedy side.” Although Pham isn’t part of the faculty, he stood side by side with the teaching staff.
“None of the faculty has received any amount of pay raise despite reaching preeminence, which is a very highly esteemed accomplishment in the realm of academia,” said Pham. “They’re just demanding fair pay for the amount of work that they do. Because at the end of the day, they are the heart and soul of the university. You would have no students at a university if you had no educators.”
The professors assisted the university in its successful push for preeminent status, which it achieved back in September. To reach preeminent status, a university must meet 12 of the 13 benchmarks provided by the state. Some of these benchmarks are a high student retention rate, average GPA of 4.0 for incoming freshmen students and the number of doctoral degrees awarded on an annual basis. Preeminence allows more research opportunities for universities, and opens up additional funding at the state level. And typically, professors at a university classified as preeminent earn more; it’s through their hard work that this status is granted, after all. It’s a significant achievement, and the lack of a raise for those putting in the actual work was part of the professors’ motivation to stage the rally.
When other Florida universities have reached preeminent status, raises were granted to their professors. Florida International University (FIU) gained their preeminent status in 2024, granting the university $25 million dollars in additional funding. FIU then gave both permanent raises and one-time bonuses to their faculty.
The last raise for faculty at UCF was negotiated for 3% and put into effect October 11, 2024. According to Rahman, “If we don’t get a raise this year, this would be the 3rd time in the last 5 years that we have had no raise.”
According to an article published in 2023 by FOX 35 news, the median salary to survive in the Orlando-Kissimee area as a single individual without children is $67,740. Of the professors, lecturers and instructors salaried by UCF as of fall 2025, 244 of the faculty earn less than the median salary range to live comfortably in the Orlando area. This doesn’t include non-salaried positions including adjunct professors or contracted employees, who make significantly less than their full-time hired colleagues.
Adjunct faculty staff as of 2022 made up 70% of the teaching staff at the university level nationwide, and 35% make less than $25,000 dollars a year according to In Depth reporter Anthony Hill of ABC. The program also described adjuncts as “gig workers,” since many need to work more than one job to survive. Hill described Yuki Jackson as one of these cases — for the few courses she taught at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, she received only $3,000 dollars a semester.
Even before the new year, UFF President and Associate Professor of History Robert Cassanello had major concerns surrounding professors’ pay and Governor DeSantis’s appointments in 2025.
“I think DeSantis is putting loyalists in presidential positions on the board of trustees, the board of governors. It’s more than just part of the conservative movement,” Cassanello said. “I think it’s loyalty to DeSantis as well.”
Within the last few years skepticism has arisen surrounding the Florida Governor’s appointments, notably New College President, Richard Corcoran, who has received substantial annual bonuses and raises. Corcoran and DeSantis have been under scrutiny due to substantial educational changes integrating conservative ideology into New College — erasing its legacy as an independent public institute that prides itself on its progressive teaching and grading methods.
“He’s reshaping public higher-ed in his image. It coincides a lot with what the Heritage Foundation and some of these organizations want done because he comes from those circles,” Cassanello said. “But I think with some of these appointments he is making, it is really about him helping his people who have been loyal to him, and they’re cashing out. You look at the salaries of these presidents he’s getting into these positions. They’re enormous compared to who they’re replacing, and the salaries of other people around the state.”
Just two weeks ago, President Corcoran received another $200,000 annual bonus, making this the third year in a row according to NPR and PBS affiliate WLRN. Among some of these appointments and raises made in 2025, Chancellor of the Department of Education Ray Rodrigues (appointed November of 2022), received a pay bump, making his base salary $600,000 with the opportunity for a 20% bonus. Rodrigues, who was a former Florida state Senator and a member of the state house, is now the highest paid government employee in the state of Florida.
“Chancellor Ray Rodrigues was making a little bit over $300,000, and then his salary went up twice as much. So, he’s making like $600,000,” Cassanello said. “Tell me what kind of job you get your salary boosted to double in a week. It’s absurd — if people looked at this, they would be disgusted. And that’s not to mention Corcoran at New College, who’s making a ton … and he’s sinking that college. On any, any, any metric, that college is not doing well financially – graduation rates, things like that, how much you’re spending per student – all this stuff, and Richard Corcoran’s cashing in on all this. So he’s ruining a public institution and he’s cashing in. It’s all a grift.”
Students at New College have experienced a falling retention rate, which is measured based on the number of students who start their semester in the fall and return the following year in the fall. In 2019, the full-time retention rate was 86%, but fell to 65% in 2023: an overall 20% decrease. In an article for Inside Higher Education reported by Josh Moody, Moody wrote that “While one estimate last year put the annual cost per student at about $10,000 per member institution, New College is an outlier, with a head count under 900 and a $118.5 million budget, which adds up to roughly $134,000 per student.”
The objective overspending and hemorrhaging of students at New College has formed an institutional crisis for the governor’s passion project, leaving questions and uncertainty once he leaves office in January 2027.
The UCF-UFF chapters’ press release stated UCF is “the most efficient university in the nation with the least amount spent per degree.” They also claim that they have “the fewest operational staff and faculty, and the highest student-to-faculty ratio (28:1). This ‘efficiency’ has resulted in chronic overwork and low morale.”
“Shared governance is lacking at UCF,” said Rahman. “We should be brought to the table for the discussions on where the university wants to go in the future, because the future lies in our hands as well … we are the ones who are going to be training students. So having equal partnership, sitting down at the table when we draw these plans and when we decide on how we move forward – shared governance works best.”
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