Tag: problems with adjuncts

Steve Street, a longtime adjunct, responded to the recent Jaeger and Eagan studies on part-timers and education.

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.

He then goes on to talk about another study, by Umbach, which said that because adjuncts don’t work outside of class, full-timers who are paying attention to that don’t work outside of class either.

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.”

Now, I am also a longtime adjunct. I’ve been an adjunct for seven years. A full-time adjunct for a year now. My students have my home phone number. I have office hours. I’m as available for them as I can be. I’ve answered a phone call and an email today (Saturday, after finals and grades) from two students who called and emailed today. I think I have been just as accessible as any full-timer.

I teach just as many demanding courses as the full-timers. I have just as many (or more) graded essays as the full-time composition teachers. I have a PhD. But I’m not in a tenure track position.

I’d be interested in some studies that show how adjuncts have saved the colleges’ behinds. 1/4 of CC1 is full-time faculty. If CC1 had to pay triple their faculty salaries, I wonder if they could survive. I doubt it.

Mark Bauerlein of Minding the Campus says, “[T]here is little evidence that full-time faculty are better teachers than part-timers are.”

But others disagree.

Benjamin (2002) has suggested ways that overreliance on part-time faculty may undermine successful student integration. Not only did he find part-time faculty to be relatively unavailable, but he also found that many used less challenging instructional methods. Plausibly, then, reliance on part-time faculty may hinder both social and academic integration and may also be understood as a factor that connects the integration model to the Bean and Metzner barrier or “student attrition” model.

New Directions for Higher Education published a dedicated volume documenting concerns that poor institutional assimilation by part-time faculty adversely affects student learning. The effects included reduced instructional quality, lack of curricular cohesion, and weak advising (Benjamin, 2003a, 2003b; Cross & Goldenberg, 2003; Elman, 2003; Schuster, 2003; Thompson, 2003; Townsend, 2003). While successfully raising questions about the instructional effectiveness of part-time faculty, the quantitative evidence in that volume did not address the central question of whether heavy reliance on part-time faculty significantly alters student outcomes. This issue was directly assessed in two quantitative studies examining student persistence and graduation. Harrington and Schibik (2001) studied one large midwestern university and found that, when freshmen took a higher percentage of their courses with part-time faculty, they were less likely to persist towards their degree. Ehrenberg and Zhang (2004) tested a large sample of institutions for which there were multiple observations dating back to 1986. They concluded that for each 10% increase in the percentage of faculty employed part-time at four-year institutions, graduation rates decrease by 2.65%. [bolding mine, ed.]

That is a major point, I think. If taking more part-time teacher decreases your likelihood of graduation, wouldn’t a student want to take full-timers?

I will say, though, that when I have on-campus hours as a part-timer, I still don’t see many students. And the ones I do see are from two categories, the hardest-working and the troublesome. The hardest-working students are coming to see me with early versions of their papers and asking how they can be improved. They are doing their best to do their best and I love to help them. The troublesome ones are those who probably won’t make it through class or their degree, or will only get it because they are such pains when thwarted that no one is willing to turn them down. These are the ones that it actually hurts to help. I worked with one of these for sixteen hours (minimum) to thirty-two hours (maximum) personally outside of class. When she made a B in the class, she ripped me up on Rate My Professor. She’s the kind of student that makes me not want to have office hours, even when I can.

and

Student evaluations of full- and part-time faculty differ little (Hellman, 1998). Yet differences have been found in grading patterns, with part-time faculty grades being significantly higher (McArthur, 1999).

I know that this latter has been an issue for me as a part-timer. I wonder if I am grading too hard, if grading easier would improve student retention. (I already have glowing evaluations.)

So, as an adjunct, am I helping or hurting my students?

I have a PhD, which is an issue discussed by Benjamin. I have office hours (sometimes). I am available. (I give students my home phone number.) I use multiple techniques for teaching.

I guess I think that, if there is a problem with adjuncts, it isn’t me. Of course, all of us probably think that.