In fall 2019, 63.0 percent of faculty members were on contingent appointments; 20.0 percent were full-time contingent faculty members and 42.9 percent were part-time contingent faculty members. Only 26.5 percent of faculty members were tenured and 10.5 percent were on tenure track.
If you are a student, the chances that all of your courses in a semester are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty are close to zero. But you won’t lack for administrators:
From fiscal year 2011–12 to fiscal year 2018–19, the numbers of staff classified as “management” increased 12 percent per FTE student, real average salaries increased 7 percent, and salary outlays per FTE student increased 19 percent, including an extraordinary 24 percent increase in real salary expenditures per FTE student in public colleges and universities.
I think it’s worth noting that there are two sorts of “contingent” professors, and one is (in my opinion) significantly better than tenure-track professors for some classes.
The currently typical contingent professor is someone who wants to be a tenure-track professor, but hasn’t yet gotten a tenure-track job.
But two of my very best professors (25 years ago) were contingent, but not of that type. One was a retired computer graphics researcher; the other was a working accountant. Both of them had no interest whatsoever in being tenured professors; they taught a few classes because they wanted to share something they loved, and did or had done professionally for decades.
Anecdotally I have heard similar stories.
to paraphrase, from a friend:
“One of the best courses in criminology / sociology I took at Wayne State was from an adjunct professor who was a career prosecutor. He was an adjunct professor; his real job was working for the District Attorney’s Office in one of the ‘collar counties’ in metropolitan Detroit.”
I’m not understanding the economics of this story.
What’s the constraint which is keeping universities from increasing faculty, which would presumably provide value for students, but is not keeping them from increasing administrator positions?
Is it useful to think in terms of monopoly/monopsony here? Obviously there is competition among universities, but they have some characteristics of a cartel. The universities’ services are in high demand, and they are capturing high profits (or seem to be), but the number of tenured faculty positions does not seem to be increasing much. Is this because the universities themselves are somewhat monopsonistic, in that there’s only so many jobs for people who want to be professors? Is it because the existing tenured faculty are preventing the universities from creating more tenure positions, because it would diminish their own compensation (either in money or prestige, which I kind of suspect is the true coin of the realm in academia).
Are administrators’ wages too subject to public scrutiny, so that rather than use the increased profits to increase their monetary compensation they make their jobs cushier by hiring more people, but not the people who actually provide more value to students? Is it just too hard to create more faculty positions, somewhat independently of how much money it costs?
I have a guess. This is just a guess. (I am an associate dean.) The amount of administrative tasks that cannot be done by faulty has exploded in the last generation or two.
Would that be because those tasks are too specialized for faculty to effectively do them, or because of some rules about what people can do what jobs (are there unions? I have no idea)?
Mostly, faculty don’t want to do them. They want to teach or research.
My sense is that teaching is not the actual margin of competition for most colleges. Teaching quality is very hard to measure, and most students can’t quite tell the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher, let alone whether or not that correlates between being tenure track or adjunct. Most students can’t tell, incidentally, because they have had so few good teachers, usually zero, and so little interest in most of the subjects they are obligated to take for their degree, that you might as well be asking them to differentiate between various types of table wine.
The actual margin of competition in colleges seems to be amenities and activities. These can be things like on campus housing meaning there are lots of students around outside of class to hang out with, sports teams to cheer for, big pools and luxurious apartments, or “strong commitments to diversity and social justice”, etc. All these things require administrators and managers, people to go around making sure boxes are checked, posters are put up, events organized, all that sort of thing.
Tie into that the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow as high level managers expand their empire by hiring more people. More people under you means more prestige and a higher paycheck.
Teaching staff don’t have as much of an ability to expand as the administration because the hierarchy is much more flat. You might hire TAs and RAs, but neither are full time long term staff. You can run a lab, and a lot of professors do this, filled with post-docs, grad students, and lesser faculty, but of course that is a lab, not teaching. Teaching focused faculty usually only hire a few TAs, and don’t count as managers in that sense.
Now, between departments there is some competition and push for bloat, as the business school jostles with the liberal arts school for resources, etc. The administration, however, determines who gets that money, and where those full time positions get allotted, however. In fact, the administration determines where ALL the money and full time positions get allotted to, so it is little surprise that so many get allotted to… the administration.
“But you won’t lack for administrators:”
Administrators aren’t generally tenured — right? Unless they are already tenured faculty, I imagine.
It isn’t clear to me that teaching well requires tenure. The best researchers demand tenure, but most employees (even the very best ones) in most industries get along fine without it. If we want more teaching focused universities, we need to incentivize teaching. However, creating more tenure slots does not seem like a good way to do that. If we want better teachers we need outside written and validated tests and tie compensation to learning gains.
Milton Friedman described all this, but for socialized medicine. Inputs, i.e., administrators, go up, useful work goes down.
https://youtu.be/VPADFNKDhGM?t=282
Like labor unions that became protections for the older and connected while using younger workers without the benefits of tenure. Happened as well with the Mafia, where becoming a “made man” became rarer in the late 20th century. Universities/colleges now produce a surplus of “degree-hunters”, those getting credentials to get the job on campus rather than real interest in scholarship and research. Their shift from the Scottish university form with its emphasis on actual teaching to the Medieval structure of a society of letters for the protection of scholars is showing with the shift to benefiting the tenured while exploiting the strivers who occupy their estates.
“The medieval university differed in many respects with our idea of a modern university. It was primarily a guild of teachers and scholars, formed for common protection and mutual aid. It was a republic of letters, whose members were exempt from all services private and public, all personal taxes and contributions, and from all civil procedure in courts of law. The teaching function was secondary, and often entirely overlooked. The Scottish university from the beginning, however, emphasized the teaching function, and created an atmosphere academic rather than civil or political.”
–‘Scottish university’ John Grier Hibben, Scribner’s magazine, 1901
It is 100% a grifting operation.
There’s a song called Chaise Longue by Wet Leg and what’s encouraging and heartwarming about this song is that students have cottoned on to the scam. They’re not unaware of the racket.
Tuition paying students are like a dog with hundreds of ticks.
According to NCES in 2017 “At the postsecondary level, the United States spent $34,500 per FTE student, which was 102 percent higher than the average of OECD countries ($17,100).”
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
And of course this is not enough for the greedy swine.
Yet for this torrential spending all the USA really gets is bragging rights as Diploma Mill to The World. Second rate students who can’t get into good schools in the UK or their home country flock to the USA to practice English and get a degree with minimal effort. That and CCP targeting of US universities for tech espionage and influence peddling. In the universities as in the non-profits and US intelligence agencies, a little CCP money goes a long way and their efforts have been remarkably effective. Expect no reform without Xi’s approval.
As a grad student studying advanced math, why do I want or need a tenured professor? I want a good textbook and a good coach. I often don’t listen to the lectures, I prefer reading written content at my own pace, rather than listening to spoken content. I like seeing other human peers, that are usually complete strangers to me. I see a strong analogy to my CrossFit classes. I work a desk job, I exercise strictly for fitness, I will never compete in sports, but at CrossFit, I like seeing human peers, even complete strangers, doing what I’m doing, it just creates a happy fun energy. I like a good coach, but I don’t need the worlds best coach.
+1
Coaching & mentoring should be replacing teaching – with more standardized exams available to earn a “credential”. Like a degree.
This principle of demonstrated learning almost certainly needs more accreditation accommodation, which is almost certainly bright line forbidden.
We need to immediately convene a task force of associate deans and assistant vice chancellors to determine why so much of the faculty is adjunct.
Agree about the difference between adjuncts who want to be tenure track and working professionals teaching classes in their field of expertise.