ACTA's Must-Reads
« Alumni as ATMs | Main | What the AAC&U survey really says »
Whither teaching?
The American Federation of Teachers has just released a report that offers some mighty interesting data for anyone wishing to understand the challenges in American higher education. American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce 1997-2007 shows some noteworthy trends in just the last ten years. Between 1997 and 2007, the percentage of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty fell from about a third of the instructional staff in 1997 to just over a quarter in 2007. Non-instructional staff and administrative personnel grew considerably during that same time period--a major contributor to college costs, and a trend to be discouraged as we do in our state report cards.
What we increasingly have is a pyramid-shaped workforce where highly-compensated tenured professors have smaller and smaller teaching loads while outsourcing much of the undergraduate teaching to graduate students and part-time instructors (many of whom teach at several different institutions or hold jobs in other sectors). Ultimately, it's the students who are shortchanged, shouldering the cost of heavier administrative budgets and a tenured professoriate that too often makes itself scarce when it comes to teaching and mentoring undergraduates. As ACTA points out in Asking Questions, Getting Answers, trustees should ask whether "education remains a top priority" at their institutions--and if hiring, promotion, and budgeting reflect that priority.
Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on May 12, 2009 at May 12, 2009 04:34 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.goactablog.org/blog/mt-tb.cgi/616