This sounds like an opportunity to differentiate themselves: Come to college ABC where you will be taught by full professors rather than adjuncts.
Or would students ignore that and be enticed by shiny new dorms and gyms instead?
Mostly, at 17-19yo, they ARE impressed with all of those shiny things.
This particular line of reasoning was TOTALLY lost on DD's friends, and mostly upon their parents as well. {shrug}
I'm also thinking, no disrespect intended to the authors of that study, that this is a pretty isolated and narrow examination of the problem presented by adjuncts, taken in full context.
Adjuncts do NOT add the same value to an institution in the context of: expert student advising via established network of local public/private sector ties, knowledge of a variety of graduate and professional school requirements/preferences/etc, service within the academic community over a long period of time (cross-disciplinary ties forged via committee work, research, etc), and finally-- a stable lab/office where faculty are AVAILABLE to students who walk in looking for answers or help.
I know all of that to be so. Period, full stop. It's also true that the impact of adjunct vs. non-adjunct is MOSTLY felt at the sophomore level and beyond-- and quite probably (IMO) in
retention rates. I notice that retention rates didn't make that study.
How do
I explain that study? Simple-- fixed term and adjunct faculty are often younger, more energetic, and more experimental than their older colleagues with tenure. They take more risks pedagogically-- and they WORK in a more labor-intensive fashion, at least at first. It's a more useful comparison to look at adjuncts in their first 3-5 years in the classroom with tenure-track (but obviously UNTENURED) faculty at a variety of institutions during that same time-frame in their careers. I'm guessing that the
classroom experiences are roughly equivalent there. What differs is the stuff OUTSIDE of class.
It's a problem that the unwary observers may not fully appreciate, but not having those fresh young faces on university committees and in labs and offices-- as residents, not nomads-- profoundly changes a university. It does. Faculty know it-- and have been fighting this sea change for over a decade, but
they are losing the war.
