Just curious - do most college rankings (e.g. USNWR) account for the percent of class taught by adjuncts? For a long time - I have found the increasing reliance on adjunct faculty problematic. I found this article on the topic kind of horrifying.
http://gawker.com/the-horrifying-reality-of-the-academic-job-market-1776914525
Ideally, adjunct faculty should be used to provide real-world professional expertise in relevant upper-level courses. What they generally are used for, however, is to staff lower-level service courses on the cheap. I think USNWR does take into account percentage of classes taught by adjunct faculty, and also percentage of faculty holding terminal degrees (i.e. PhDs instead of master’s) in their field. So, a college that uses a lot of part-time MAs to staff their first year writing courses, for example, would get dinged in the rankings.
The adjunct scandal is not news. It’s been going on for a long long time.
That article is nothing about college quality but about how horribly adjunct faculty are treated.
To my mind, the adjunct situation is a serious issue.
There are other issues.
. You can find out the adjunct percentage of each school by googling adjunct and name of school.
If a school has few adjuncts, look to see if they have a disproportionate amount of grad students as TAs. Who do you want to teach your child? A professor who has a stable research program and who is respected in her/his field–and can usher your child into the field properly? Or a “professor” who goes to three colleges each week and hardly has time to know his or her students, can’t do research, and can’t support her or his family?
Alternately, do you want a grad student or a professor teaching your child?
Look at what you’re spending: Are you getting what you think you are for the price?
What is really disgusting are the bloated salaries that the administrative bureaucrats make compared to the adjuncts.
Where graduate students TAs are used, a student in the class generally gets both a faculty member and a TA teaching the class. I.e. the student in the class gets two instructors instead of one – though in different class sections (a large lecture by the faculty member and a smaller discussion or lab by the TA).
Whether or not you think this format is good, bad, or neutral, it is not normally the case where a graduate student TA is the primary instructor of the course, with no faculty member instructor.
I always wonder why, when I read articles or threads like this, parents send their kids to universities as freshman instead of as juniors after transferring in from a community college. That is what I did. That is what my oldest son, 21, did. That is what my youngest son is going to do.
That way you avoid the gigantic lecture halls. You avoid the TA’s. You avoid the stressed out adjuncts who do a disproportionate amount of work for peanuts and no credit or respect.
You also save a fortune because darling daughter or son is living at home, post high school, for two more years raking up credits but avoiding dorm, travel and meal plan costs.
By the time he or she gets to a university he or she is mature enough to handle it, is in smaller classes and usually has a teacher who might actually learn his or her name. It makes so much sense.
With that saved money you can but the kid a car or give him or her an expenses paid gap year after grad school and before the real world work grind kicks in or just save in for a house. It is worth thinking about.
@ucbalumnus That is mainly true, but not always. You don’t have that issue (TAs teaching) at smaller schools. LACs generally have professors teaching the students directly (unless they are relying on adjuncts). I ask the question because some students may not realize that for their really hard calculus class they may get a TA, chosen because they got an A in the class, but who is a really lousy teacher, who may or may not speak English well. Even at Ivies, this is the case. They get two teachers, as you aptly pointed out, but one is distant talking to 600 students, and the other is unskilled and barely more advanced than the students they are teaching, potentially (and in my personal experience). At a small LAC or even at many community colleges, that class is small and has a professor teaching directly. It’s worth checking to see who really will be doing the teaching. For my family and my money, I’d prefer to have the professor teaching directly, which is why there are no Ivies on our list or large universities for undergrad.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/07/part-time-professors-teach-most-community-college-students-report-finds indicates that the use of adjuncts is extensive at community colleges, so someone wanting to avoid adjuncts may not find community college to be the optimal place to start.
@ucbalumnus Right you are again! This is why you need to look at each school individually. This is why you google the name of the school and the adjunct statistics. Some CCs rely on them heavily. Some CCs do not. The same goes for the courses within the schools, ideally all schools. Is my favorite course actually running when I’m planning to attend? Is it staffed with an adjunct?
You are absolutely correct. You must look carefully.
And may I add, thank you to OP for opening this thread.
The only way that top administrators will pay attention to this problem is if parents protest. I don’t mean picket signs and the like, but if queries come in–especially on accepted students day when they are rolling out the red carpets to get students to commit–from parents asking about adjuncts and declaring that they will or will not send their child to X school based on the number of adjuncts, things will change. Your child’s life will be better and so will the life of the adjunct who may be living out of her or his car.
My D at GWU was taught by adjuncts who had experience in the government in some of her international affairs classes. That was OK with her and she felt she learned from them.
My sister has a PhD and is a ‘lecturer’ at a top public university. I’m not sure how different that is from an adjunct; I’m not sure if it is a tenured position. She’s been there a long time as a part-time teacher, has provided statistical analysis for research, and is very involved with their online learning process. She was very proud of the fact that a few years ago she was awarded an honor voted upon the students at graduation for teaching and mentorship.
I know that many adjuncts are treated badly, but it not always a bad thing to be taught by less than a full professor.
Generally, this is the kind of adjunct use that most people find acceptable – experienced people from non-academic settings teaching a specialty elective or some such.
“Lecturer” may be defined differently at different schools. Sometimes, it may be a parallel track to “professor”, but with greater emphasis on teaching and less on research (though they may be into research on teaching methodology for their subject), and with tenure-like status that can be granted. But that may not be the case at every school.
Lecturer sounds like what I know as Teaching Faculty. They do concentrate of teaching, course design, etc as opposed to research. They generally have different levels like associate, senior, etc With a clear defined promotion path. Much harder to be tenured but not impossible and can get multiyear contracts. Like an LAC professor since they are focused on teaching they can actually be better in the classroom than the professors focused on research.
Yes, people do your homework. Visit the campus and look around. The CC I teach at uses adjuncts, of course, and mostly for the night classes although night class enrollment is down. Enrollment is shifting to either day classes or online. It is easy to get a FT professor who ONLY teachers at a CC so by all means do your homework people. You won’t find any lectures by TV or auditorium classes either so please check things out as much as possible.
I should add, I think the stats posted about adjuncts are not accurate. I’ve taught at three CC’s and the vast majority of classes are taught by FT faculty. So, if you look at sections taught, it is not close. The FT faculty teach the majority of classes but if you go by pure head count the PT faculty might be close to 50% of the total faculty. Just FYI.
Not always. Graduate students often sole teach classes by themselves; in fact, it’s expected that candidates for faculty jobs have some sole teaching experience in the social sciences and humanities, and usually they get it by adjuncting as graduate students at nearby colleges or by sole-teaching classes at their own university. Some of the Core classes (Contemporary Civilization and Literature Humanities) at Columbia, for example, are taught by advanced doctoral students who have finished their MPhil, which is usually ABD - it’s a special fellowship you can apply for. (When I was there, it paid around $22,000 for 9 months.) And English literature students are expected to teach at least one semester of University Writing while they are there.
LACs use adjuncts, too, just not as many of them. When I was a student at a small LAC I had at least three adjunct professors, all in classes in my major. They taught the lower-level classes - general psychology, research methods, etc. They also have visiting assistant professors (who are generally one-year sabbatical replacements) and lecturer positions as well. (Lecturers are usually full-time, but non-tenure-track - it’s usually not possible for lecturers to get tenure but they can get job security the same way many companies have people who have worked there for 10-15+ years.
USNWR weights the percentage of part-time faculty as 5% the faculty resources score, which is weighted at 20%, so it’s about 1% of the overall score according to their methodology… The proportion of the faculty with the highest degree in their fields is weighted at 3% (15% * 20%), but most adjuncts have terminal degrees, particularly in the humanities and social sciences - even at community colleges. The field is so tight these days that many, many humanities/social sciences PhDs are out of academic work and have to adjunct if they want to stay within academia. Especially in desirable urban areas even your community college adjunct teaching freshman composition is very likely to have a PhD in English literature.
Either way, USNWR thought that the alumni giving rate and the average SAT/ACT scores of incoming students were more important than the qualifications and time that faculty have to put into their students.
The adjunct problem was one of the many reasons I decided to leave academia for industry. I vowed to myself when I thought about trying academia out during my PhD that I would not relegate myself to stringing together several adjunct classes to attempt to make a living, because that’s not what adjuncting is for and I knew that I was worth more than that as an employee (plus it doesn’t really help your prospects of getting an academic job).
@Dustyfeathers, um, one of the best classes I ever had was a seminar led by a PhD student (he’s now on the faculty at SOAS) and a couple of the worst-taught classes I ever had were by faculty who barely spoke English.
Also, consider that many of the grad students teaching classes at elite RU’s go on to teach as Profs at LACs and elsewhere.
Point being that, while your point on adjuncts (outside of professional schools, where adjuncts with industry experience are often a plus) is well-taken, mindlessly bashing PhD student-led classes is far off the mark. Especially when you consider that the faculty at most top RUs get tenure and respect mostly due to research prowess while at least some of the PhDs actually want to go on to teach at a LAC (do those same people suddenly go from being bad teachers to good teachers once they get a PhD and get hired at a LAC?). Just because USNews elevates something doesn’t mean that it is a good metric.
“Where graduate students TAs are used, a student in the class generally gets both a faculty member and a TA teaching the class.”
As Juilliet said, this depends on the university. At Berkeley, PhD students can teach their own substantive undergrad classes. At Harvard, they can teach intro math and language as well as research tutorials, but they can’t design courses the way they can at Berkeley. This isn’t a make-or-break issue for me personally, but it’s definitely something applicants can ask about. All things being equal, a professor has gone through more years of training and a more rigorous screening process, but grad students are not inherently inferior.
Just another point as it may come down to specific departments at a school if not at a higher level but a lot times when there are tenure controversies with faculty it most likely that they aren’t very good teachers. They may have great research and publications and bring lots of grant money but are denied tenure and it’s usually because of poor reviews as instructors. Not every school cares about this but many do.