In the past, I suggested that the metric “percentage of adjuncts” should be included as part of any evaluation of a school. I even did some back-of-the-envelope math to look at the percentage of adjuncts at a few public colleges.
Today, Rebecca Shuman goes even further. She says that those numbers should be included in college rankings.
Here’s the cold, hard truth every prospective student, and every parent, should know: In the vast majority of subjects, when you have an adjunct professor instead of a full-timer,you are getting a substandard education. To say this, I am admitting that I myself provide subpar service to my students. But I do….
To be truly ahead of the game, the “percentage of faculty who are full-time” should be front and center on the rankings list, before even student-to-faculty ratio. Instead, it’s tucked away inside the paid version of U.S. News’ ranking website, so most “education consumers” will never see it—even though it should be the first thing you ask when you and your kid are touring a campus. Whether or not some sports nut who graduated in 1952 gives bank to the football team should matter much, much less than whether or not your professor has slept in a heated house, and thus prepared your lesson effectively.
Apt. 11d 
Interesting data here: http://www.mla.org/acad_work_data?id=196079. The numbers at a lot of institutions are fairly dramatic, in particular, there’s a definite trend towards a decreasing number of tenured faculty (i.e. not just an expansion, but a replacement).
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Percent of full-time faculty is already part of the US News Rankings formula (see last sentence of the following quote).
“Faculty resources (20 percent): Research shows that the more satisfied students are about their contact with professors, the more they will learn and the more likely they are to graduate. We use six factors from the 2012-2013 academic year to assess a school’s commitment to instruction.
Class size has two components: the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students (30 percent of the faculty resources score) and the proportion with 50 or more students (10 percent of the score).
Faculty salary (35 percent) is the average faculty pay, plus benefits, during the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 academic years, adjusted for regional differences in the cost of living using indexes from the consulting firm Runzheimer International. We also weigh the proportion of professors with the highest degree in their fields (15 percent), the student-faculty ratio (5 percent) and the proportion of faculty who are full time (5 percent).”
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2013/09/09/how-us-news-calculated-the-2014-best-colleges-rankings?page=5
It’s a very small part of the overall score however (5% of the Faculty Resources category, which is worth 20% of the overall score).
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As a parent, I find the category “undergraduate academic reputation” to be given too much weight in the rankings. I’m not clear on how high school counselors or university administrators are supposed to be able to monitor the academic experience at multiple institutions. I’d think you’d get many people opting to vote for the “safe” choices, and alumni loyalty votes. 22.5% is absurd.
“Alumni giving” should be dropped. I don’t think it’s an “indirect measure of academic satisfaction.” It probably measures “school spirit,” i.e. football, beer & social life, and the size of the development staff.
“Average class size” ratings would be an incentive to increase adjuncts, though, wouldn’t it? Hire adjuncts to teach more classes–what you might lose on % full-time faculty, you make up on “class size.” I like lectures, so a simple weighting of class size is too simple. A larger lecture with a dynamite professor, vs. a small class with someone hired on short notice to bring class sizes down? What a choice.
I think full-time vs. adjunct is a more important question than tenure track vs. non-tenure track. How important is research for undergraduates? It’s great if it improves your education, but it’s not great if undergraduate students are regarded as unimportant to the professors’ academic life. So putting research in the “financial resources” category is problematic (to me, as a parent.)
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“How important is research for undergraduates? ”
Absolutely vital for science majors. I don’t know for engineering majors, and I certainly don’t know for humanities. I’ve been going through my old biology textbooks and thinking about what’s new at the undergraduate level since I went to school. And the answer is an awful lot. I know that intimately in my own field, but I’ve realized I really need new sources for topics, say, in molecular biology and genetics, the progress in which I am not as familiar.
I also think that you can’t really know the cutting edge work without doing it in some form. Otherwise, you end up providing the same role as the science journalist in informing others.
Also, anyone planning on pursuing science as a career (even if they are going to industry and not academics) needs to have access to a lab, and should be doing undergraduate research of some sort.
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Sure…but “research” doesn’t necessarily mean “research with undergraduate participation,” does it? Hypothetically, a professor could be pursuing very important, expensive research funded by external grants, but not teach undergraduates all that often (or at all), and not have many undergraduates involved in the lab, right? So a lump sum of “resources devoted to research” doesn’t measure “resources devoted to undergraduate exposure to research.”
I’m thinking of all the small, liberal-arts colleges I’ve toured with my children, most of whom emphasize that all research is done with undergraduates in the labs, as there are no graduate students.
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Access to labs by undergraduates might be variable among different universities and fields. I can say that access was possible at all 3 research-intensive universities I associated with and even at NIH (though that required access through a special program, but one that is accessible to NIH-area students at Georgetown and other nearby schools), at least in biology.
At Gas Station without Pumps, they’ve been touring universities, and come to the conclusion that some schools (UCLA, in computer science, for example) don’t have access for undergraduates. I think access might depend on idiosyncratic characteristics of institutions and fields (for example, it could be that in CS, where there are masters students, the undergraduates are basically supplanted unless the school makes a significant investment in providing access to undergraduates).
I can’t speak to the kind of access that students have at strong, small-liberal arts colleges, in general, but in one specific comparison there are no where near the opportunities for undergraduate research at Amherst (or others of its ilk, which is schools with on the order of 200 faculty) that there are at the University of Washington, in broad areas of biology.
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