<p>I ran across this article "10 Reasons to Skip the Expensive Colleges". There's a lot to critique in this brief article but it does purport to summarize a study by two respected academics at Columbia and Queens Colleges -- Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus.</p>
<p>According to the study, "70% of courses" at Yale are taught by adjuncts -- that is, non-tenure-track, paid-by-the-course professors. Can this possible by true??? They must be off by a mile, right?</p>
<p>My daughter took 9 courses as a freshman last year; 7 of the course instructors were tenured or tenure track faculty. Of the other 2, one is a brilliant recent doctorate, clearly on the way to a tenure track faculty appointment, while the other is a ‘senior lecturer’ who teaches a foreign language. </p>
<p>She thought all her course instructors were good, the most effective teacher was a tenured full professor and the least effective teacher was one of the famous professors on campus who is well known to the outside world. </p>
<p>Of course the above represents N=1. No idea what the official statistics are.</p>
<p>The only way that number even remotely makes sense is if they are counting discussion and lab sections taught by grad students in that 70%. I believe I only took one lecture course in my 4 years that was taught by someone other than a tenured/tenure-track professor (and that person was a long-time lecturer with job security) and every one of my seminars was taught by a tenured or tenure track faculty member. But almost all of those lecture courses had discussion sections, and if those are counted separately, I can see how they get to 70%. The irony, of course, is that getting rid of discussion sections would lower that 70% number drastically, even though it would mean a worse education as it would eliminate the chance to have smaller group discussions in the context of a lecture course.</p>
<p>The other sort of course routinely taught by non-tenure track faculty are language classes. But that doesn’t really seem like anything to complain about, if you ask me. It doesn’t take a PhD, much less doing cutting edge research, to be able to effectively teach a foreign language.</p>
<p>There may also be a lot of “classes” with one student–i.e., music lessons–and those may be taught by adjuncts. I think it highly likely that any student has more than a couple of classes actually taught by adjuncts.</p>
<p>It’s not “according to the study” that 70% of the courses at Yale are taught by adjuncts. It’s according to the Reader’s Digest article by Andrea Crouch that “the figure at Yale is 70%” for courses taught by “contingent teachers, including paid-by-the-course adjuncts”. </p>
<p>I think a few things are probably clear:</p>
<p>That statement is either wrong or terribly misleading. The author was probably looking at something that said something like that. But either that something was flat-out wrong, or Ms. Crouch flat-out misunderstood it. There is no way that 70% of the courses at Yale College are being taught by anything other than tenured or tenure-track faculty. </p>
<p>I have no idea what “contingent teachers” means. Could it include non-tenured assistant and associate professors? Possibly. In that case, maybe one is in the ballpark with 70%, but even then I doubt it.</p>
<p>When I was at Yale, most of the courses taught by adjuncts were College Seminars. Each residential college was allowed to sponsor 9-10 seminars per semester, with a maximum of 15 students each. These tended to be split between famous people coming in from New York to teach what they knew, star grad students teaching their theses, and sometimes faculty from other schools (Law, Med) trying out an idea. I took a bunch of these – a dance history class taught by a famous dance critic, my favorite grad student (later Chair of the German Literature Department at a first-rank university) teaching his thesis, a class on Tudor legal history taught by a law school professor, and a class on academic writing taught by a famous tenured professor at another Ivy who was well-known for writer’s block, having published virtually nothing in his career – perhaps the only person on record who was so smart and so respected that he didn’t perish despite not publishing. Among the other college seminars at the time were really popular ones with Paul Newman teaching acting and some mogul I don’t remember teaching investment theory. </p>
<p>A few non-seminar classes might also be taught by adjuncts. I believe John Hersey was an adjunct for Daily Themes, one of the signature courses at the college. And the introductory Financial Accounting course I took was co-taught by an Economics professor and the head of the Hartford Arthur Andersen office. </p>
<p>And all of that together, and all of the introductory language courses that were probably also taught by adjuncts, could not have amounted to 10% of the course offerings at Yale College. Not to mention that they were extremely valuable.</p>
<p>The entire article is silly. The number of inconsistencies is incredible. Who recommends skipping expensive colleges and then recommends liberal arts schools? Or recommends liberal arts schools and then mentions that Williams has a ton of professors on leave?</p>
<p>Not to mention the tons of other incorrect assumptions and generalizations that are made. What ever happened to critical thinking?</p>
<p>I meant to say in my post that it’s highly unlikely that a student would have more than a couple of adjuncts. There do seem to be a few departments that have more adjuncts than others, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, anyway, depending on who they are and why they are adjunct.</p>
<p>Tony Blair is an adjunct at Yale. Al Gore was an adjunct at Columbia. i THINk Toni Morrison is technically an adjunct at Princeton. David Dinkens, former mayor of NYC, was an adjunct at Columbia, teaching a course on NYC politics. The head of Coalition for the Homeless for Connecticut used to teach a seminar on homelessness at Yale. At all of the top schools, there are “post docs” who teach classes in the hope of getting a tenured position. </p>
<p>There are adjuncts and then there are adjuncts. </p>
<p>I’ve always found it sort of funny that a school like Princeton’s ranking will suffer because it has Toni Morrison teaching a course. She doesn’t have a Ph.D. Of course, we all know that it is FAR preferable to take a writing course taught by a Ph.D. rather than Toni Morrison or a politics course taught by someone with a Ph.D in poli sci rather than Tony Blair or David Dinkens.</p>