[Update (4/17/2013, 9:54 p.m.): Education Sector and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni have retracted the report described in this Chronicle article.]
The rising cost of college can’t be blamed just on dwindling state appropriations or inflation, according to a report released on Wednesday by Education Sector and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. A decline in the teaching loads of tenured and tenure-track faculty members also plays a role, it says, driving up tuition costs by an average of $2,598 for students at four-year colleges over a seven-year period it studied.
The report, called “Selling Students Short: Declining Teaching Loads at Colleges and Universities,” says the decline in teaching loads “has had a dramatic influence on the spiraling costs of higher education.”
The report’s author, Andrew Gillen, who is Education Sector’s research director, says that examining why teaching loads have become lighter despite greater instructional needs could provide relief for students and families who are struggling to keep pace with tuition increases.
The average number of classes taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member decreased by 25 percent—from 3.6 to 2.7 courses per term—from the 1987-88 to the 2003-4 academic year, according to the report. If teaching loads had not become lighter, the report states, more than half of the tuition increases during that time could have been avoided.
“Colleges can—and must—take steps on their own to stem the ever-increasing rate of tuition increases,” Mr. Gillen said in a news release. “Increasing teaching loads, even marginally, can have a tremendous impact on cost.”
The report acknowledges that it’s difficult to put a dollar figure on how reduced teaching loads affect tuition because colleges have a number of ways of responding when a professor’s teaching load is lowered. Those include dropping the course offering, expanding other sections of the course, hiring an adjunct to teach it, or hiring another full-time faculty member to teach it.
The report’s authors limited their analysis to data for the last of those options, hiring another full-time professor, because of the negligible cost of the other options. The increasing reliance on adjuncts to teach classes “does not affect the cost estimates presented in this paper,” the report says, “because we are only focusing on classes taught by full-time faculty.”
Colleges could produce additional revenue, the report says, by increasing the teaching loads of professors who are not producing much research, allowing more students to be taught without increasing the number of faculty members.
Lawrence B. Martin, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has studied the budgetary costs of low teaching loads, estimates in the report that the revenue gain could be as much as $1-billion to $2-billion.
Institutional Priorities
Mr. Gillen notes in the report that “the decline in teaching loads is often attributed to universities prioritizing research over teaching.”
The Modern Language Association, the report states, found a sharp increase from 1968 to 2007 in the percentage of English and foreign-language departments that ranked “scholarship” as more important than teaching when making tenure decisions. The figure more than doubled, the report says, from 35.4 percent to 75.7 percent.
“Over time, as teaching becomes less of a priority, so does the perceived need for professors to teach a full roster of classes,” Mr. Gillen wrote.
While a lighter teaching load has been seen to affect students’ cost, it is unclear if it also affects the quality of the classroom experience.
“An optimistic view is that a decline in teaching loads would allow professors to devote more time to the remaining classes and students, which would presumably increase the quality of teaching,” Mr. Gillen wrote. “On the other hand, if the professors use the additional time for research and not teaching, then they would accumulate less teaching experience, which would presumably decrease teaching quality.”
Increasing the teaching responsibilities of faculty members may not be the best decision in all cases, Mr. Gillen wrote. An increased workload could mean a decrease in research output, which could have a high cost for society in the form of delayed scientific advances or new discoveries.
“As this paper has demonstrated, however, the costs of the decline in teaching loads are an inescapable reality, and they are very high costs,” he wrote. “In an era of rapidly-increasing college costs, the question of institutional priorities and the best interests of America’s college students demands urgent attention.”
Data for the report were collected from the Department of Education’s Data Analysis System and its Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy, according to its mission statement.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is an organization that works with national alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders to support liberal-arts education and to ensure affordable higher education.