<p>I hope you will have time to read this interesting article and the accompanying report.:</p>
<p>As college costs continue to climb and climb and climb, I'd urge you all to ask the same question at every college you visit: "What percentage of your faculty are full time, tenure track faculty? What percentage are adjuncts? What percentage are grad students?"</p>
<p>College costs can work out to something like five hundred dollars per lecture hour. Are you getting what you pay for?</p>
<p>I would add that you might want to ask how many students are in the largest classes rather than only knowing the faculty to student ratio (which may very well include TAs and other staff).</p>
<p>you also might want to find out the % in a dept that have “emeritus” status and whether they actually still do any teaching…especially of undergrads</p>
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<p>Of course not. Private colleges have pricing power. They compete on quality of product (which manifests itself on quality of student body) - thus they have no incentive to cut costs. They let them run out of control and make it up on the revenue side.</p>
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<p>Those are good questions. Another important question:</p>
<p>“For the tenure track faculty that teach, how important is their teaching performance in the decision on whether to grant tenure?”</p>
<p>At most elite universities, the honest answer will be “not very important”.</p>
<p>In my opinion, what matters is not whether the person teaching my child is tenured, tenure-track, emeritus, adjunct, or a graduate student. What matters is the answer to the question:</p>
<p>“The people who will teach my kid- are they any good at teaching?”.</p>
<p>I would rather have a good-teaching graduate student than a bad-teaching tenured professor.</p>
<p>I’ve always found it curious that college instructors, weather they be PhD’s or grad student TA’s, need not have any teaching credentials or training. Odd.</p>
<p>Well, TAs are getting teaching training. Possibly at your expense. This way they will have at least that training before they get a faculty position. This has been one of the stronger arguments held by those who are prononents of liberal arts colleges for undergraduate studies. I am personally delighted that since I am paying a lot of money for my daughter’s education that she is being instructed only by tenure track, full-time, PhDs. And so far (fingers crossed) they can all teach also.</p>
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<p>Sorry, I’m not following the math here. Let’s assume a very light load of 3 lecture courses a week, each meeting three times for hour-long lectures. That’s nine hours a week. 30 weeks in the school year, 270 hours of lecture for the year. Counting all of a $55k COA and not just the tuition piece, and not accounting for things like libraries and maintenance and office hours and so forth, that’s more like $200 a lecture hour. I don’t see how one can get to $500 a lecture hour.</p>
<p>Regardless, your point is a good one. It’s also a nice number to pull out to encourage a student to actually go to class, given how much they’re paying for that hour of lecture.</p>
<p>I, frankly, think it’s less important to worry, too much, about the % of full time professors and more important know what kind of support those who do teach have from their respective departments–what are their teaching loads? what is their budget? are they allowed or encouraged to continue their research or just teach classes? I want my children studying with folks who are contributing to their field. If they are too burdened with heavy teaching loads, or do not receive proper funding/support from the administration, the students suffer.</p>
<p>Frankly, I want to know if they can speak English well enough, with a minimal enough accent to be understood. I also want to know whether the professors actually “want” to teach freshmen, and sophomores, or if they are told that they must teach them.</p>
<p>Actually, $200 per hour is an inflated figure since $55k covers room and board as well. A more realistic figure would be $150 per lecture hour. But even $200 an hour for a lecture is not expensive. It does not take into account the preparation needed for each hour of lecture or the resulting work (devising exams, grading papers and exams) and related responsibilities such as meeting students, attending departmental meetings, etc…).
A security staff at a college can earn around $25 an hour doing little more than opening doors if they are locked and looking up from reading the newspaper when someone gets into the building.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that being tenured or on tenure track makes one a good professor. In order to get tenure it’s necessary to publish, and if the professor is more concerned with publishing and speaking at conferences than he is with teaching, that’s not benefiting students. Some of the best teachers I had in college were the adjunct and part time professors who actually worked in their fields as a “regular” job and had current, practical knowledge in their areas. Some of the worst teachers I had were the tenured faculty who could not speak so that I could understand them. Their knowledge of the English language was fine, but the accents were such that they might as well have been speaking another language. I never had a TA, nor was I ever in a classroom with more than 50 students, so I can’t speak to that. </p>
<p>One thing I’m curious about - where do colleges spend their money? If part time and adjunct professors aren’t making much, and tenured faculty is shrinking, and there are lecture halls filled with hundreds of students to one professor and a TA or two, why are we seeing $50,000 COAs?</p>
<p>Our son has had professors that are excellent researchers and poor teachers and excellent teachers that do no research. He’s had some really awful grad students and went over their heads to get problems corrected. He’s had at least one adjunct from a more prestigious school.</p>
<p>Welcome to the real world. In the workplace, you get all kinds of people to work with and all kinds of managers. All kinds of customers and all kinds of suppliers. In the real world, there isn’t a tutoring center. There may or may not be office hours. You may have a manager that manages 40 other people where individual attention isn’t possible.</p>
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<p>That is the question I am most interested in. And it’s one that does not get answered often or honestly.</p>
<p>The percentage doesn’t really tell you much if your kid is majoring in Nanotechnology (virtually all professors will be full time, tenured or tenure track with heavy research commitments… it’s a relatively new, research intensive field) and the adjuncts are all teaching Spanish 1 and other entry level courses, mostly in foreign languages which need native speakers who don’t need to publish, manage grad students, or write grant proposals. I had an adjunct in grad school who was possibly the most gifted teacher I had ever had; available 24/7 (and this was before email or cellphones) and 100% committed to his students.</p>
<p>I think this is a dumb way to evaluate a college. I know kids who have had adjuncts teaching poli sci/public policy classes who were retired federal judges; adjuncts teaching medical ethics who were practicing neurologists or hospital clergy for their day jobs, or part-time professors of architecture who were practicing architects with large, prominent firms.</p>
<p>Why is this a bad thing?</p>
<p>I knew a tenured professor at Yale (supposedly reputed among the Ivies for its “undergrad focus”) who proudly displayed in his office the withering student evaluations he got for his teaching. He did not stay long at Yale…he moved on to Harvard (despite Yale trying hard to retain him on the faculty).</p>
<p>It’s a good question, but not sure that the answer makes much sense. There are plenty of wonderful adjuncts who can teach well, but chose to avoid the tenure tract of publish or perish. And, quite frankly, I’m not much swayed by having a grad student or two teach a class. Back in the dark ages, my Chem TA (who only taught the discussion section) was a post-doc and rising star (and great teacher and all-around good guy). In our spring course, he was a TA (in June); two months later, he was teaching at Princeton on the tenure track…</p>
<p>I had a friend who was an adjunct when his wife got tenure and he didn’t. He actually got better teaching reviews than she did (as she freely admitted), but she’d gotten better research results (and this was at a well known LAC where you might have thought the research was less important.)</p>
<p>I’m actually looking at schools that have a lot of adjunct professors. I don’t even mind grad students. First of all, I think everyone has a different view on this subject. I like learning from adjunct professors because - in many fields, perhaps not all - they’re very pragmatic. For example, George Washington has a high percentage of adjunct professors. It’s also in DC. There’s something special about learning from someone who’s out there doing something in his or her own field. On the other hand, full-time professors are also important because they have a lot of theoretical knowledge and (generally) a lot of experience in teaching. Graduate students offer their own views into the mix. I would be bothered by a lot of classes being taught by graduate students, but if it were one introductory course/lecture sections/lab sessions, I think that’s important for the undergraduate experience. Then again, I also don’t mind schools with classes that start big and end up small. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with adjunct professors and I’m even tolerant of grad students. Every student thrives in a different setting. In a highly theoreticaly LAC curriculum, I can see why you’d want a full team of full-time professors. But I think for a more varied classroom experience (not that the former example isn’t varied) and for students aiming for a more pragmatic program, adjuncts and graduate students can be part of a great package. It’s the same thing with k-12 teachers. I don’t care how “qualified” a teacher or a professor is. Qualification guarantees very little.</p>
<p>I know of one case of a senior scholar with loads of publications who was not hired at the tenure level because he taught too few students (they were all graduate students) even though he received stellar evaluations from those he did teach.</p>
<p>Top schools are putting increasing weight on teaching ability. More and more, Ph.D. students are encouraged to put together a teaching portfolio including their teaching philosophy, experience, courses they are prepared to teach, etc…</p>