Honestly-- that is where I'd encourage parents and prospective students alike to look hardest when choosing colleges. Look past the lazy river and climbing wall-- to what percentage of undergraduate courses are taught by adjunct faculty.
In a previous thread I mentioned research finding that adjuncts teach as well as professors:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted....college_acceptance_rates.html#Post199871 . If job security were the key to good teaching, the quality of teaching in our public schools would be uniformly high, but it is not.
I would want to know how much adjuncts are being paid. If they can make a decent living teaching 2-3 courses per semester, they may do a better job than if they need to teach 6.
Be very careful with parallels between secondary and primary teaching and post-secondary. Remember, theoretically
anyone teaching in post-secondary has, at a minimum, a terminal degree in the discipline in which they are teaching. They are also people who (again, theoretically) could be making a far better living outside of academia/teaching.
Neither of those things is necessarily true in secondary settings, where often instructors lack even a regular undergraduate major in the discipline they are teaching. Take a look at the difference in the requirements to become a
teacher of high school physics, for example, with being a regular physics major.
Also-- I also said nothing about the quality of the teaching from adjuncts. Some of them
are quite good. But it tells me a lot about what an institution actually values when it decides to rely on
temp workers rather than hiring those people on as members of a professional corps who are more or less permanently associated with the institution.
It also matters in that-- if a student is at an institution where adjuncts rotate in and out through the first 3 years of most major coursework-- and that student would like to apply for a prestigious internship during the summer-- how will they even FIND a professor to write a recommendation, hmm?
Maybe the
local public assistance office, I suppose. Many adjuncts do seem to wind up
there on a regular basis. I'm sure that while they fill out forms for food stamps or housing assistance, they won't mind writing up a nice letter of recommendation.
More about what modern adjunct teaching meansOpinions vary as to whether adjunct...ction, too. {pdf in link-- 2013 study} A quick infographic about what "adjunct" means in functional and typical terms.R. Schuman writes for Slate on the subjectHere’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.
I’m not subpar on purpose—I, like most adjuncts, just don’t have the resources to treat students well. Like, you know, my own office, where I can meet with students when they’re free, instead of the tiny weekly window of time when I get the desk and computer (which runs Windows XP) to myself. I am on campus five hours a week, because when I’m not in the classroom, I have nowhere else to go. If my students need further explanation, they can talk to me in class, or they can wait for whatever terse, harried lines I email them back (if I do; with all the jobs I juggle, sometimes I forget). I teach the same freshman survey over and over again, so I rarely have a student more than once, and thus never build a mentoring relationship with anyone. I am, by virtue of the parameters of my position, not giving students anything remotely near their money’s worth. And hundreds of thousands of adjuncts in the United States are just like me. Most of those adjuncts would be giving their students a much better education, were they only provided the support that a college gives its full-time faculty. But they aren’t, and the effect on student learning is—surprise—deleterious.
