How Faculty Members View Students

Faculty satisfaction data made possible with support from

Faculty members juggle teaching, grading assignments, and conducting research. They write grants, run labs, and serve on the committees that keep their academic departments and institutions going.
One aspect of their jobs that stands out in both its rewards and its challenges is working with students. Here are key findings from a Chronicle survey of nearly 1,000 faculty members:

Most faculty members find teaching students to be satisfying work.

Out of four key tasks that contribute to a faculty member’s workload — teaching, mentoring students, doing service work, and conducting research — teaching stood out as being satisfying for the largest share.

A greater proportion of adjunct faculty members, who carry out the bulk of instruction at the nation’s colleges, were satisfied with teaching than were their tenure-track peers. At private colleges, faculty passion for teaching outpaces that of their public college peers.

They believe students have a high opinion of them.

Higher education has its share of skeptics who don’t think professors are worth the paychecks. But faculty members don’t believe those kinds of critics are in the classroom. Visual and performing-arts faculty members ranked the highest when it came to reporting how much students respected their jobs, with a mean score of 2.47 on a scale of 0 being respected to 10 not respected. Humanities professors aren’t quite as sure of their status with students. Their mean score was 3.46.

Faculty members see the big picture when it comes to teaching.

Every interaction with a student is an opportunity to shape the minds of the next generation. And nearly all faculty members — no matter the discipline, how much they earn, or where they work — believe that teaching has an impact on the lives of students.

Student engagement is a thing of the past.

Overall, faculty members agree that engaging students in class is trickier than ever before. Professors age 70 and up are the most satisfied with the engagement levels of the current generation, along with untenured professors and those in education. The least optimistic outlook on student engagement comes from faculty members in the sciences.

Teaching used to be more fulfilling.

Roughly 30 percent of faculty members in business, education, and engineering and math get more satisfaction out of teaching students today than in years past. That’s about equal to the share of untenured faculty members who feel the same.

Just over half of faculty members agree that teaching is harder work than it used to be.

Business professors feel the strain of working with students most prominently, with 68 percent of them agreeing that students are harder to teach. Among tenured professors, 65.4 percent find teaching more challenging, compared with 59.5 percent of untenured faculty members.

Source: Survey of 997 faculty members commissioned by The Chronicle of Higher Education, conducted by Maguire Associates, with support from TIAA.