More studies have come out linking part-time faculty members with student failure and/or with students’ disinclination to continue on from two-year to four-year colleges (The Chronicle, November 14).
As a longtime adjunct, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the rush to equate part-time instructors with inferior education. We’ve been knocking ourselves out for years with low pay and little respect, only to hear, when we finally do get some attention, that we were never very good anyway. The reaction to the new studies, and the ways in which the numbers have been interpreted, are at least as insightful into the troubled state of higher education today, and its misguided assumptions and priorities, as the numbers themselves.
First, the numbers. Audrey J. Jaeger and M. Kevin Eagan Jr. are the authors of two new studies on the effect of part-timers on education. They also conducted an often-cited study, released last April, on the dropout rates of community-college students. It found that students who had been taught by part-time instructors in large introductory “gatekeeper” courses were more likely to drop out before their sophomore year than were students taught by full-timers. (Jaeger is an associate professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, and Eagan is a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles.)
Now the two researchers have released two more studies. The first, on the transfer rates of some 25,000 students at California community colleges, “found that the likelihood of students continuing on to four-year institutions dropped by 2 percent for every increase of 10 percentage points in their credits earned with part-time faculty numbers,” The Chronicle reported. The second study found that “each increase of 10 percentage points in overall exposure to part-time faculty members was correlated with a reduction of 1 percentage point in such students’ likelihood of earning associate degrees.”
That same article in The Chronicle said the National Education Association estimated that part-time faculty members earned “just over a fourth as much, per course, as their full-time counterparts.”
So, to accept those numbers for the moment at face value, here’s my interpretation of the data: Full-time faculty members are paid almost 75 percent more but are only 20 percent more effective than part-timers. If a 2-percent drop in students’ going on to four-year institutions results from a 10-percent increase in the use of part-time instructors, then replacing all the full-time faculty members with adjuncts would result in only a 20-percent drop in students’ continuing on. And there would still be a huge pay differential to come out of the hides of part-time faculty members.
Maybe it’s the effectiveness of full-timers that we should be examining.
People whose livelihood depends on perpetuating the institution need to believe that having students continue on from two-year to four-year colleges is an absolute, unquestionable good. But can we assume, in good conscience, that more college is always better? Is more education really an indicator of educational success? “Lifelong learner” and “professional student” aren’t synonymous terms. Of course, no one in academe has suggested that more students of full-timers tend to hang around college towns for decades, forever polishing their dissertations, than do students of part-timers.
Here’s another assumption of these studies that needs examining: To what extent can we assume that students’ career decisions, let alone their performance or immediate satisfaction in a given course, depend on the instructor? Is student continuance the direct result of instructor effectiveness?
Even the best students and the proudest instructors, in the most overblown verbiage of a campus-awards ceremony, know that most of any given student’s achievement depends on the student — his or her effort and talent — and on a multiplicity of circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
Yet the focus of another new study dispenses with students entirely. Paul D. Umbach, an associate professor of adult and higher education at North Carolina State, set out to gauge the effect of part-time faculty members on their better-treated colleagues and, not surprisingly, found the effects of adjuncts to be poisonous there, too.
According to The Chronicle, Umbach “found that, compared with full-time faculty members, part-timers advised students less frequently, used active teaching techniques less often, spent less time preparing for class, and were less likely to participate in teaching workshops. The most striking finding, Mr. Umbach said, is that when part-timers accounted for a substantial share of the instructors on a campus, its full-timers devoted substantially fewer hours than full-timers elsewhere to preparing for class or advising students.”
In other words, full-timers who saw part-timers get away with a diminished campus presence proceeded to cut back their own time and effort on the campus. Umbach’s instinctive explanation, The Chronicle reported, was that the presence of so many part-timers made the full-timers feel too insecure about their jobs to do them well, and made the full-timers less committed to their institutions — much like the part-timers themselves.
Generally speaking, though, your first instinct when your job is threatened is to work harder, isn’t it?
Regardless, my point here is not: “You can’t trust these numbers.” I don’t dispute their accuracy. My point is: “You can’t trust these numbers alone to assess educational quality.” We should be as leery of diagnosing the ills of higher education with the tools of statistical analysis as we are of knowing public opinion by polls.
It is, after all, at the interfaces among student, instructor, and subject matter where education either happens or doesn’t. And even when it does happen, it may only be partial: How many times have you understood some concept or insight only years after leaving the classroom in which you first heard it?
Yet we continue to throw numbers at our problems the way the careless rich throw money at theirs. Education of any sort ought to instill, first and foremost, an ability to look closely at a given situation and assess it for oneself. But many products of American education seem to be able mostly to concede to authority, whether the authority is that of a refereed journal or of a set of numbers.
I have taught for a department whose common mission for more than a year was searching to fill multiple exciting new tenure-track lines, vetting the candidates, fretting about acceptances, feting some, and then alerting eight full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members (not including me), with whom the department had been perfectly satisfied, that their contracts would not be renewed. It was all done in pursuit of a collegewide ratio of 70-percent full-timers to 30-percent contingent faculty members. And then the next year, that same department had to hold basic-pedagogy workshops to explain to all the new hires the goals of courses that the fired adjunct faculty members had been teaching in an exemplary manner.
The pursuit of numbers can be absurd. Educational quality involves the books and readings, the assignments, the discussions sparked in the classroom, and the input of peers as well as, yes, instructors, including their preparedness, intelligence, concern, personality, and mannerisms. Sure, whether or not those instructors make a living wage must have an effect — one among many. But somehow it’s the use “of part-time instructors” alone that these “studies link ... to worse education,” as USA Today so baldly put in a December 3 headline.
The researchers behind those studies qualify their results more than those who report and act on them. Jaeger called for more qualitative studies; Umbach set his numbers in the context of how academic institutions treat part-time faculty members, to use his qualitative term, “like crap.”
When you’ve stepped in it, you reach for a stick, not a calculator. As “faculty experts” cited in The Chronicle’s November 14 article pointed out, “Colleges are not likely to stop relying on part-time faculty members anytime soon, [so] the solution is offering part-timers contracts that reward them for giving more time to their jobs outside the classroom.”
If we must deal in numbers, let’s consider the ones from U.S. News & World Report that say part-time faculty members earn $1,800 a course, on average, while full-time faculty members make $8,000 a course. If part-timers are only 20 percent less effective with 75 percent less money, just imagine what we could do with equal pay. Straight equity would be $6,400 a course. Those are nice, round numbers. Why not go after them?
