<p>Do you consider percentage of adjunct teachers as a factor in helping to select your student's college list? I think we should raise this as an important consideration more so than we have in the past.</p>
<p>I do not think it is right for colleges to charge 50k plus and then treat the teachers as less than professional. Not that adjuncts are bad teachers, necessarily, just that the university and college system are using low paid instructors way too much. What do you think?</p>
<p>Some adjuncts are people who are working in the business and bring real world experience to the table. I don’t find those kinds of adjuncts problematic. But I would find it a problem if my college was populated by itinerant professors who teach at 3 or 4 schools each semester.</p>
<p>Sometimes the adjuncts are better than the FT professors.</p>
<p>The problem that arises is that the students can’t get a hold of these professors very easily–especially if we are talking about the ones who teach at 3 or 4 different colleges. Nothing like having a professor who stays on campus all the time, even if they are busy.</p>
<p>My oldest son’s absolute favorite professor is an adjunct. According to my son, this guy made a huge difference by presenting “real world” economics instead of just the theory. At graduation, I thanked the adjunct professor for his insights and inspiration and he responded, almost apologetically, that he keeps his day job (investment banking) because it pays the bills.</p>
<p>Not all adjuncts are created equal. A sitting judge who teaches a class on Law and Morality or the Editor in Chief of a well regarded daily newspaper who teaches a class on Politics in the Public Sphere may well be the high point of a kids college career. That’s different from an adjunct who teaches 6 different courses per week at 4 different colleges to cobble together a full time job. They all show up as adjunct faculty in the statistics- but I don’t know that I’d use those stats to screen.</p>
<p>A friend of mine is a psychiatrist at a highly regarded hospital and teaches a literature course as an adjunct focused on “Madness” (I forget the title- something to do with how playwrights and poets have depicted mental illness and insanity as a literary device). The only reason he can’t win his college’s annual teaching award is… he’s only an adjunct! But he’s nominated year after year.</p>
<p>My undergrad business degree work was done at a satellite campus and taught mostly by adjuncts. There were some truly horrible ones (like the business psych guy who thought watching “Welcome Back Cotter” during class time was educational). But my business law course taught by an experienced, practicing attorney; my introduction to marketing course, taught by a vice-president of marketing from a textbook publisher; my marketing research course, taught by a senior marketing manager from a supermarket chain; and my money and banking course, taught by a senior manager at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago were all beyond superb, and I remember them fondly nearly 40 years after the fact.</p>
<p>Adjuncts don’t bother me nearly as much as TAs bother me. One of the criteria is choosing my son’s university what that the school not use TAs. My experience with TAs at my state university was so negative that I didn’t want any of my kids to experience it. </p>
<p>Adjuncts are entirely different. some are great and some are awful - just like professors.</p>
<p>Well, it’s the same with TAs: some are great, some are bad. I am sorry you had a bad experience in your state school, but every great professor (or a big majority) was very likely a great TA (a requirement to get a PhD).</p>
<p>In my experience (though I know better than generalizing only for my case), TAs are sometimes better because they actually cared about getting good evaluations (in case they wanted to get a job teaching at a LAC or something like that). Many of the tenured profs were really awful teachers because their tenure had nothing to do with teaching and they had a guaranteed job, whether they sucked or not. I have heard it’s worst in the sciences, but as a said, good teachers can be adjuncts, TAs, or tenure-track/tenured faculty.</p>
<p>I would take # of adjuncts as an important consideration, because it might mean the college or university is in bad financial shape, but that would not be the deciding factor.</p>
<p>@OP - I think if you use the adjunct/TA criterion in your college search, your application list is going to be very short. It is the new normal. We all have to get used to it.</p>
<p>I’m inclined to agree with salander about TAs.</p>
<p>I had some wonderful TAs in the ‘80s. Many of them are professors of some significant stature now. Of course, there was a range, but I found that the range in their teaching was just about the same as the range of my professors’ teaching.</p>
<p>As a teacher who isn’t a professor, I think that the real problem is that colleges and universities too often turn a professor loose on students with a Ph.D. and no real training in pedagogy. I agree that the quality of teaching in colleges and universities is definitely something to be considered, but I don’t think the matter is as simple as blaming adjuncts or TAs or full-time faculty as a class.</p>
<p>The new normal actually seems to be the use of other undergrads, rather than graduate students with many, many years of college and post-college experience as students under their belts, as TA’s. As a parent, I am not particularly happy about this trend.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a huge difference between an experienced adjunct with a professional day job, vs. an adjunct who is hobbling together small paychecks from many different colleges to survive. </p>
<p>I had some great TAs many years ago when I was in college. At my son’s college, TAs mainly teach discussion sessions, labs, intro calculus and intro writing classes. If they are teaching higher level classes, that can be a negative. </p>
<p>However, the biggest complaint I hear about TAs is that far too many of them are not fluent in English, particularly in economics, math., engineering and technical subjects. It is one thing for students to get used to an accent. It is much more serious when a TA cannot communicate complex material in their second (or third) language.</p>
<p>I’ve had adjunct professors, and I don’t really have a problem with them. Top LACs don’t always have the budget to have full time professors in every single niche, or they may want to test out offering a particular course or subject area to see how popular it is. In either of those cases, I would rather have an adjunct than no class at all. Also, I would rather have an adjunct than have overworked, frazzled professors trying to cover too many subject areas, or spending so much time teaching intro courses they don’t have time to teach many courses for advanced students, let alone design new courses to keep the catalogue from becoming stale. </p>
<p>A lot of people complain about adjunct professors, but honestly, in order to get rid of the practice of using adjuncts, they would have to raise tuition to cover the cost of hiring more professors, which would lead to further complaints. Or they would have to ask professorst to take on more courses, or they would have to cut back on courses and thus curtail your kid’s educational options. There’s no magic fix for this, but I think a school that’s well managed can find a balance between classes taught by full professors, and classes taught by adjuncts.</p>
<p>Smithie, they should make the economics work. It’s basically slave labor. I really feel sorry for the adjuncts who are getting paid something like $2000 for a course. I was offered a job (which would have been on top of my regular job for fun) and when I thought about how much time I’d have to put in, especially the first year, I’d probably have been earning a dollar an hour. I remember just grading math homework which I did one semester as an undergrad was surprisingly time consuming.</p>
<p>But I agree adjuncts can be great professors, especially those that are bringing in real life expertise from the field and don’t want to work full time.</p>
<p>In a GOOD research university the TAs can be excellent. In humanities in particular, many are grads from elite schools. Their teaching is closely supervised by their departments (with surprise drop-in visits from faculty) and their teaching evaluations are closely monitored. The ones who prove problematic do not receive future classes. </p>
<p>So eliminating a school from your list based on TAs isn’t a terribly effective criteria. More likely you should find out what kind of courses the TAs teach, and how they’re monitored. FWIW, the top 10 public university I attended and still follow, TAs primarily lead discussion sections, help grade, and teach subjects that frankly would be a waste of money/time to pay professors for. Example: you don’t want, say, an Italian literature professor teaching basic Italian grammar. TAs can do that quite well, leaving the professor to teach the field he/she got their PdD in.</p>
<p>I work at a public university, and one trend you’ll see more of is adjuncts. Due to budget cuts and lack of funding, schools are often replacing retiring faculty with adjuncts.</p>
<p>There are some excellent adjuncts out there, by the way. So while it may be something to consider, it doesnot necessarily mean the quality of the education is diminished in any way.</p>
<p>D is at a school in Boston and took a class from an adjunct - who’s day job was at Harvard.</p>
<p>I just started reading the book “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” by Professor X. Anyone else reading this?</p>
<p>Adjuncts are not the same as TAs.</p>
<p>I’ve been an adjunct and I’ve been a full time professor. Full time is definitely better for both the teacher and the student, but there are plenty of really top notch adjuncts out there.</p>
<p>This is one of those things that, because it is quantifiable, makes some people think it provides meaningful information about a school. The overall percentage is not as useful information as a department-by-department breakdown - my institution employs a fair number of adjuncts as accounting teachers and music instructors, but few philosophers - and in both cases, that seems like a sensible decision.</p>
<p>I am not concerned that Adjuncts might not be good teachers. I am concerned that Universities and Colleges should not be taking advantage of low cost labor forcing people to patch together teaching jobs at multiple universities and charging us over 50k per year for the priviledge of taking advantage of teachers.</p>