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<p>For Ohio, I found out by looking in the report from the board of regents. I’m assuming that most states have a similar report.</p>
<p>You really can’t go by what a university says on their website. They will invariably say that x percent of their professors are full time, or that their student faculty ration is really great, or that x number of classes are taught by professors with PhDs. You really need to be looking at the percentage of undergraduate credit hours taught by not people with PhDs or people who are supposedly “full-time” (but not tenure-track) but by bona-fide tenured or tenure-track faculty members. </p>
<p>The statistics that schools give are often misleading: they’ll mention that they have a lot of faculty on staff, for instance, or a solid faculty to student ratio. But what they don’t tell you is that those professors might not teach undergraduates. </p>
<p>Or they might say that they’re employing a lot of people with PhDs to teach your kids. But those PhDs might not be full time. Or they might be full-time in the form of “lecturers”–and lectureships, while a step up from adjuncting, often require a great deal of teaching for little pay. And because the job isn’t secure, and because contracts are renewed based largely on student satisfaction (evaluations), lecturers often don’t have the freedom or incentive to really provide an in-depth and challenging education. </p>
<p>I know many lecturers who teach upper-level classes–the same upper-level classes that the school touts as being taught exclusively by “full-time faculty.” And technically they’re not lying, but there is a world of difference between a tenure-track professor and a contingent laborer in terms of pay, job security, and ability to do research. (Being able to do research invariably enriches a professor’s teaching.)</p>
<p>I don’t really want to enter into a discussion of whether or not people even <em>should</em> have tenure, or of supposedly “lazy professors” who have tenure and suck at teaching. My point is simply that schools are charging a lot of money these days while ruthlessly minimizing the money they spend on actual classroom instruction. It would be one thing if schools were turning to contingent labor and increasing class size in order to keep costs low for everybody. But that’s not what’s happening. Students are paying A LOT of money and taking on a lot of debt in order to be taught more than half the time by graduate students and adjucts. And that’s just not right.</p>