Once Again...

...the community colleges are left out of the analysis. When half of the college population is in one sector, to continually ignore it in research is criminal.

And just looking at the proportion of part-time/adjunct only tells part of the story. It is the proportion of students/student credit hours being taught by adjuncts in combination with the requirements for adjuncts to teach that help tell the true story.

Woodsie, at 8:30 am EDT on June 27, 2007

I couldn’t agree more with Woodsie. (When are people going to get the important role that community colleges play in higher education?) Adjunct instructors play a vital role in delivering high quality teaching to students. Using adjuncts, colleges in urban communities are able to tap into local talented and experienced professionals at a price they would not otherwise be able to afford, and students get the benefit of learning from those individuals.

freecollege, at 9:25 am EDT on June 27, 2007

Wait, Brad...

... are you implying then that full-time faculty are skilled at instruction??? I’m hard-pressed to think of one discipline where PhD candidates are actually required to learn about effective teaching practices as part of their program.

SB, at 11:20 am EDT on June 27, 2007

Garbage

Woodsie is right on target with this. And the exclusion of TAs compounds the ills. The title of the report should not be “What Determines Employment of Part-Time Faculty in Higher Education Institutions?” but “What Determines Employment of SOME Part-Time Faculty in SOME Education Institutions?” With all its flaws, it’s not worth the paper you would use to print it and certainly of very limited use.

VM, at 2:40 pm EDT on June 27, 2007

species of adjuncts

Of course the general statistics of the article do not consider the varieties of non-tenure track professors. We have long had adjuncts in professional schools (especially journalism and the performing arts) who are very accomplished practitioners in their fields (e.g., Andres Segovia was once a part-timer in the Music School; so too for active directors in Cinema, etc.). My son is an assistant professor in molecular biology at a major Ivy, where he teaches one course a year; non-tenure-track, full-time instructors teach most undergraduate biology courses there. My university is on the make by “hiring at the top"; consequently (although with other causes as well) most undergraduate English courses are now taught by part-timers (i.e. PhD’s without full time jobs). Most of them teach well, but few are long term, and students ask why at such large tuition they do not get the reputed faculty of the advertising and rankings.I have friends who are long-time adjuncts here and I do not want them let go, but one obviously knows that their presence here is purely financial and not academic: they can be got on the cheap.

David, professor emeritus of English, at 3:35 pm EDT on June 27, 2007

It seems to me that the omission of teaching assistants skews the whole study. The doctoral institutions that come in with the lowest percentages of adjunct instructors are the places that obviously would have the largest percentages of graduate students teaching as part of their financial aid packages. Add in the teaching assistants, and it’s quite possible you’ll find undergraduates less likely to have tenured professors for classes at doctoral institutions than at other institutions.

I concur that ignoring the matter of credit hours skews the picture a great deal, too. The tenured professor may teach a full load of classes, but if her/his classes include a couple of junior/senior level classes with enrollments of ten or less, s/he may assess the performance of fewer students than the adjunct teaching 25 or 30 students in a couple of sections of required freshman classes. As long-term success in college (measured by graduation rates, if you like, or by the number of credits taught by each type of instructor), the non-tenured are likely to have far more influence than the tenured, as they teach the majority of the freshman and sophomore classes that must be gotten through first. The 1/4 to 1/3 of students that drop out of many schools within the first year may never have actually had a college class with a tenured professor.

[Back when I taught a lecture hall astronomy class with an enrollment over 500 {as an adjunct}, my one class amounted to more credit-hours than the rest of the department combined.]

Thane Doss, Tokyo

Thane Doss, at 4:25 am EDT on June 28, 2007

Adjuncts

I agree with others concerning flaws in this study. When I was adjunct I taught 8 classes for 3 schools (2 were community colleges). The large university I worked considered 4/4 (4 classes in Fall and 4 in Spring) as Part-Time, but pay was so pitiful I had to teach at other places too. In English at large university, the English Dept. had 60 adjunct (not counting TAs). The rich got richer and the adjuncts got poorer. Administrators say it’s a matter of supply and demand.

Debra Snyder, at 7:25 am EDT on July 4, 2007