Full-TIme Faculty as a Minority

Full-Time Faculty as a Minority
“By” Baylis
I am very surprised that I have not seen the avalanche of typical articles that appear each year decrying the decline in the percentage of full-time faculty within the academy. This past week beginning June 3, a conference entitled, “Reinventing the American University, The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education,” was held without much fanfare in Washington, DC. When I looked at the proposed agenda (available at http://www.aei.org/event/100218#doc), I thought to myself this could be a great conference. Speakers were addressing the topic of the American University from many different directions. Some speakers and sessions proposed returning to the era of full-time, tenured faculty as the norm. Some speakers and sessions proposed other models as normative. I think the conference planners intentionally tried to present all sides of the story.
Every time I see a headline or an article about full-time faculty becoming a minority, as a statistician and administrator, I want to yell, “How are you counting faculty and what is the most important thing in education?” Aren’t we supposed to be concerned the most about student learning? Most of the arguments that I have seen about full-time faculty becoming a minority are based strictly on head counts of faculty. How many people are employed as full-time faculty and how many people are employed as part-time faculty? What would happen if, instead of looking at this from the faculty perspective, we looked at this from the students’ perspective? Who are the students actually seeing in the front of their classes? What do I mean?
All of my 40 years in higher education have been spent in private small to medium size institutions, where the average annual credit load for faculty was 24 credits. Courses were predominantly 3 credits. The data from one school in particular illustrates what I am trying to say. Because courses did not all have the same number of credits assigned to them, the average number of sections per semester taught by full-time faculty was 4.2 but still with an average credit load per semester of 12. We did employ adjunct faculty with the average number of sections taught by adjuncts at 1.2 sections per semester, and an average credit load of 2.8 credits per semester.
There are two ways to measure how much teaching faculty members are doing. These are the number of sections taught and the number of credit hours generated. Neither of these really gets at the question of how much students are learning. To get at the answer to this question, we will have to dig deeper into the assessment of student learning. This is something that the academy as a whole has been reluctant to do, whether because of cost or difficulty.
Returning to the question of who are students actually seeing in front of their classes, two different years at the same institution will illustrate what I am trying to say. The first year, we had 107 full-time faculty members and 125 adjuncts. That’s a 46% to 54% ratio. Thus the full-time faculty was in the minority according to headcount. However, at an average load of 4.2 sections per semester, the full-time faculty taught 75% of the sections, while the adjuncts taught 25% of the sections. The typical student on average would see a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 75% of the time. The next year, we were able to hire another 7 full-time faculty. We offered the same number of sections the second year. By maintaining the same average load of 4.2 sections per semester, we covered 80% of the sections by full-time faculty. Under these circumstances, we were able to eliminate 25 adjuncts and still cover everything we needed to cover. With 25 fewer adjuncts and 7 more full-time faculty members, the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was reversed to 53% to 47%. Under these conditions we had 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts. Thus, a typical student had a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 80% of the time. If we looked at this question from the perspective of credits generated, this particular year the full-time faculty generated 78% of the credits earned by students. The primary reason this percentage was so high was that we intentionally kept adjuncts out of the large entry-level course sections. Adjuncts did teach some entry-level courses, but these courses had smaller section size.
At the same school, when it adopted a slightly more generous course release policy for full-time faculty, the average number of sections covered by full-time faculty dropped to 3.8 per semester. Under these conditions, we found that we needed to hire 19 more full-time faculty members to maintain the suggested guideline that we adopted of having 80% of sections covered by full-time faculty. It also meant that, to maintain the same 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts, we found that we had to maintain the same adjunct count as we had the year before. These changes meant that the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was 60% to 40%. This change increased the faculty salary budget by $1,400,000 per year which the school was able to afford that one year only because admissions had a great year and brought in 100 more students than the budget was based on. But these 100 more students had a ramification in the number of students faculty had in each class. Keeping the same number of sections offered as the previous year, the average class size increased by 6, so the typical full-time faculty member was teaching almost 24 more students per semester than he or she had done before. Because of this increase the full-time faculty generated 85% of the credits generated that year.
I was asked what it would cost to have all full-time faculty members with the same average sectional load of 3.8 per semester. I calculated that this would require the hiring of an additional 32 full-time faculty members in order to eliminate all adjuncts. When I calculated the cost of this proposal, it turned out it would add more than an additional $1,600,000 per year to the budget, which was more than this school could afford since you cannot count on great admission years, year after year.
Having achieved one round of increased release time, the faculty pushed for another round of increased release time that would have made the average semester sectional load for a full-time faculty member, 3.2 sections per semester. If we held to the suggested guideline that 80% of sections taught were to be taught by full-time faculty, it would require an additional 24 full-time faculty and no additional adjuncts. This would have resulted in a 56% to 44% full-time faculty to part-time faculty ratio. The budget impact of this decision would have been an increase of $1,800,000 per year. Since that cost estimate was so great, the faculty did not push for an all full-time faculty with average semester load of 3.2 sections. This would have required an additional 38 full-time faculty with an increase of more than $2,000,000 per year to the salary budget.
When somebody decries the fact that full-time faculty members are in the minority, they almost always appear to be talking about absolute head counts and not the number of sections taught by full-time faculty versus the number of sections taught by adjuncts. There is a big difference. However, I will admit that teaching is not the only contractual contact that faculty members have with students. What happens to advising loads when the number of adjuncts grows above 50%? It depends upon how the advising system is configured. At the above school we had an advising office with specialists for all first-year students and for second-year undecided students. Students beyond their first year that declared a major, which represented 67% of the student body, were assigned a full-time faculty member in that area. Under the 46% to 54% full-time to adjunct ratio, we had an average advising load of 18 students per faculty member. The next year when the ratio switched to 53% to 47% of full-time to adjuncts, the average advising load dropped to 16 students per faculty member. The following year, when the ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty was 60% to 40%, the average advising load dropped to 14 students per faculty member. There is no straight linear function between the average advising load and the number of full-time faculty because the number of first-year and undecided second-year students changes each year. If the institution had adopted the all full-time faculty policy and maintain the advising center for all first-year students and undeclared second-year students, the average advising load per faculty member would have been approximately 10 students. However, since advisors were assigned by discipline, some faculty would have been assigned fewer than 5 advisees and some faculty would have been assigned more than 25 advisees. Individual faculty members would have seen very little reduction in the number of advisees assigned to them. Because of all the variables involved, such as the number of students, the number of majors, and the disciplines in which the students major and the disciplines in which adjuncts are used, the average advising load numbers will vary from institution to institution and from year to year at a given institution.
Some programs are helped by having adjuncts instead of all full-time faculty members. Music is a program with so many sub-disciplines and instruments in which students can study or concentrate that an institution can’t afford a full-time faculty member for each instrument. Even at a large institution, there may only be three or four oboists enrolled at one time. Teaching these three or four students will not be a full-time load. At a smaller institution, there may be only one or two oboists, enrolled at one time. Nursing is another area where adjuncts are very useful, and for smaller institutions, a necessity. Clinical instructors must be active nurses, so unless the institution has its own hospital, it must hire practicing nurses as adjuncts to cover the hospital clinical that nurses must complete.
In conclusion, when the cry goes up from full-time faculty about the decline in their numbers, let’s ask, “What is the real complaint?”