<p>My daughter is a high school senior and Ive been doing a lot of reading about the current state of the university educational system.</p>
<p>One question I have concerns the part time professors. Ive read that a number of colleges and universities use underpaid and over worked adjuncts/part time teachers. So I assume that it is not a good thing for college students, especially freshman, to have those kinds of teachers.</p>
<p>My question is whether there is a way to determine how many courses, especially those at the freshman level, are taught by part-time/adjunct teachers as opposed to full time teachers. Thanks to CC, Ive been introduced to the common data sets. But they only tell me the number of part time teachers; they dont seem to tell me the subjects and grades that are being taught by them.</p>
<p>One possible indication can come from looking at the actual course listings that students use for course registration. If a whole set of classes in a subject say “staff”, then it is more likely to be taught by part-time instructors or grad students. </p>
<p>At my son’s college, for most departments in course listings, they do list the grad students teaching courses under their last name, so you would need to compare those names to a list of faculty members to find out that they are grad students.</p>
<p>Overall, there is a big difference between a college that uses part-time instructors who are running from college to college to try to scrape together a living vs. an instructor who is working a full-time job and teaches one course in the evenings. The later often brings valuable real world experience into the classroom, and those instructors are often teaching because they enjoy it. There also are some part-time instructors who are retired from professional careers, who may also be more practically minded than a full-time professor.</p>
<p>There also are some specialized fields where part-time instructors make sense, such as an instructor in Chinese, where there is not enough demand to hire a full-time professor.</p>
<p>You also may wish to look up job listings for the college. If you see that they are still advertising for tenure track positions, that is a good thing. If you find that a college is ONLY advertising for part-time instructors, that is not so good.</p>
<p>Charlie: I agree with you about how valuable part time instructors can be in a professional as opposed to academic subject. My son went to SVA and took advertising and computer graphics. His part time instructors were actively working in the field. He found them to be extremely good and very much state of the art. I found the same thing at law school.</p>
<p>Just what I was thinking. I teach four classes at two colleges. I work extremely hard, and you’d be hardpressed to hear any student from my classes assert that I under-taught them. The smaller school I work at lists actual names on the class schedule, and my classes filled first for next semester because my students from this class are fighting to get into my comp 2 class. at the other school I teach at, sections weren’t assigned in time, and students were really upset they didn’t get into my class again. I’m not saying that to brag; I"m sure that’s true for many fine adjuncts who also teach freshman comp–the class few “real” professors want to teach.</p>
<p>I have a relative who is a part-time professor and researcher at a prestigious university. She is proud of the award she was given at graduation several years ago for teaching and mentorship (voted by the students).</p>
<p>My son would say that one of the adjuncts he had ranked as one of the top 3 or 4 faculty he had during his college career. On the other hand there was at least one FT tenured faculty that probably shouldn’t have even been taking tickets at a movie theater (definitely the exception, though). </p>
<p>At the college where he took some summer courses, the one adjunct was just a waste of time - cancelled 3 of twelve classes, 4-5 of the remaining class meetings were taken up with project presentations, and always let the class leave after 1 1/2 hours each class night (it was a 4 hour class). But that is also lack of administration oversight as well.</p>
<p>So what is a high school senior to do.
Is the consensus that adjuncts/part time teachers is not something that should be considered in making a choice about colleges.</p>
<p>I was an adjunct and now I’m tenure track and here’s my perspective. It would be surprising if you didn’t, at some point, as an undergraduate, take at least a few courses taught by part-time or non-tenure track faculty. </p>
<p>I realize now, in retrospect, that all of my “science for dummies” type courses as an undergrad were actually taught by adjuncts at Wellesley (back about 25 years ago). We had a distribution requirements and let’s just say I’m no rocket scientist. I did not suffer AT ALL by taking Oceanography and Horticulture from advanced grad students at Harvard who had been hired to teach us nonsciencee types, rather than fulltime tenure track faculty. </p>
<p>HOWEVER, the problem arises when you end up taking, for example, most of the courses in your major from adjuncts – particularly if your institution doesn’t treat them well and as a result turnover is high. (That’s why you should be wary of a school that is ALWAYS advertising for adjuncts in your major.) You will find yourself eventually in a situation where you need recommendations for summer internships, grad school, etc. and you won’t be able to locate the professor whom you really liked and whose class you got an “A” in, because he moved on to another school that paid more. You might also find it difficult to really establish a strong relationship with a professor so that he’ll remember you when you need that letter – if your professor (a.) has no office (b.) has to rush off after every class because he has a class that starts elsewhere in 45 minutes (c.) teaches six sections a semester with 35 students in each, every semester including summers. </p>
<p>Also, universities with high adjunct turnover sometimes hire a professor two weeks (or less) before the semester starts – so you might end up with a situation where the professor is only a chapter ahead in the textbook than you, the student. It’s nice if you can take a final that’s been “roadtested” by a couple of previous classes, so that all the confusing questions with bad wording have already been identified and fixed/thrown out, etc. It’s also nice if your professor already knows how to teach. (Sometimes advanced grad students will adjunct as a way to acquire teaching skills – i.e. they know a lot about their subject, but are not yet familiar with lesson plans, organization and presentation skills, etc.)</p>
<p>Yes, you can also fault full-time tenure track faculty for occasionally giving a bad final, being unavailable for office hours or having poor presentation skills – but these are some patterns which I have seen which you might want to watch out for. (And yes, the best way to find patterns is to look at course catalogs and note how many courses are taught by either “Staff” or “TBD” (to be determined)).</p>
<p>Many universities use grad students to teach intro language and intro math classes. It would be a waste to a have a professor teach those classes. The use of grad students in those cases can help keep class sizes small and allow offering of classes during more times of the week. The biggest complaint I hear in that situation is that some grad students are hard to understand because English is not their first language.</p>
<p>I understand that US News ratings penalize colleges that have large numbers of classes taught by part-time instructors.</p>
<p>It’s not the presence of part time faculty (many of whom are highly qualified and excellent instructors), it’s the ratio of part timers to full timers. </p>
<p>Frankly, for an intro level class, an engaged and enthusiastic part time faculty member might offer a better experience than would a bored fulltimer who has been teaching the class the same way for 15 years because s/he is more interested in doing research or teaching upper division students.</p>
<p>For specific instructors, ratemyprofessor and other sites include ratings of both part time and full time faculty…but these have serious flaws that are not worth derailing this thread for.</p>
<p>That’s an odd example you used considering the skyrocketing demand for college Chinese courses within the last 2 decades. Almost all the Chinese language instructors I’ve had or knew were not only full-time…but also effectively tenured even if they weren’t “tenure track faculty”. </p>
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<p>As drill instructors/recitation, yes. Actually teaching the courses themselves without oversight from more experienced instructors…that doesn’t seem to be the common practice even at the larger universities.</p>
<p>In response to the above post, I just did a quick google search and found that Duke, U. of Washington and UVa are examples of universities that have grad students teach intro math classes. You are correct that for sciences, history, etc., the grad students mainly serve as teaching assistants and lab assistants and not the actual teacher of the course.</p>
<p>There are good and bad adjuncts and good and bad full time teachers, but at least at the community college where I work, the full timers have been vetted better so there is more quality control. Also, the adjuncts don’t have office hours, so that can be a disadvantage to students.</p>
Agreed … I think the same couple thoughts every time this topic comes up … </p>
<p>First, among the handful of best teachers I had in college were two adjuncts … and this makes sense these were folks who focused on teaching of specific knowledge areas. I am not saying all adjuncts are better but I do not understand why some people believe automatically that adjuncts teaching is a bad thing.</p>
<p>Second, frankly the teaching scenario I worry about most is a research universities and the few professors who only want to do research and half-ass their way through their teaching assignments … I learned to do Rubic’s cube in theback of a stats class with the worst prof I ever had. My experience at 3 research universities is that this happens but not often at all.</p>
<p>Bottom line … I find the adversion to adjuncts misplaced.</p>
I agree. There are advantages and disadvantages in using adjuncts - for the college, for the adjuncts, and for the students. But there are also advantages and disadvantages in regard to the regular tenured faculty. </p>
<p>Having been an adjunct for years, it doesn’t concern me if S has some during his experience (in fact he already has). OTOH, I did look at each school to which he applied to see what the overall ratio of Adjunct/Total faculty was, as I feel that an overuse of adjuncts such as is common in our local community colleges is exploitative and doesn’t give the departments any sense of cohesion. What does it mean to have gone to School X if the only thing students there have in common is the walls and floors? </p>
<p>Op, I suggest looking at the overall percentage of part time faculty and if the schools you are looking at are all similar then it becomes a non-issue. If there is a huge discrepancy with one school, then I would want to consider that further.</p>