From: B. Oliver Walter Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2008 7:42 AM To: A&S Heads Cc: Myron B. Allen Subject: Impact of part-time instruction Thought you would find this article from today’s Chronicle interesting—it says to me that we are wise to invest in extended term APs and GAs rather than temporary part-time instruction. Ollie Thursday, March 27, 2008 'Gatekeeper' Courses Should Not Be Assigned to Part-Time Instructors, Research Suggests By DAVID GLENN New York First-year college students are significantly more likely to drop out if their high-stakes "gatekeeper courses" are taught by part-time adjuncts, according to the findings of a study presented here on Wednesday during the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. The paper is the latest in a long parade of studies suggesting that part-time instructors can be detrimental to students' well-being. "As more and more part-timers are hired, we've reached a point where budgets are moving faster than the research can tell us what the impacts are," said Audrey J. Jaeger, the new paper's lead author, in an interview on Wednesday. "We should pause for a moment and take a look at what's going on." Ms. Jaeger, an assistant professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, has been examining the effects of part-time instruction for several years. Most previous studies of the topic have looked at a single institution or at aggregated national data. But in her new study, which she conducted with M. Kevin Eagan Jr., a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles, Ms. Jaeger examined four public four-year universities in a southeastern state to see if she could find common patterns. Working with transcripts of roughly 30,000 students who enrolled in the four universities between 2002 and 2005, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan looked closely at the role of first-year "gatekeeper" courses. Like other scholars, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan define a gatekeeper as any large introductory class (enrolling 90 or more students) that must be passed in order to move forward in a course sequence. Biology 101 and Chemistry 101 are the classic models, but the study also included, for example, English classes that count toward general-education requirements. They found an unhappy pattern: If students' gatekeeper courses were taught by part-time adjuncts, lecturers, or postdoctoral fellows (which occurred from 8 percent to 22 percent of the time, depending on the institution), the students were significantly less likely to return for their sophomore year. That pattern was consistent across all four universities. Accessibility Issue Interestingly, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan did not find that courses taught by graduate assistants or by full-time non-tenure-track instructors had any negative effect. Partly for that reason, Ms. Jaeger suspects that the most important factor is students' inability to talk to part-time adjuncts about their course work. "Adjuncts are often trying to patch together a living, running back and forth between three different campuses," Ms. Jaeger said. If they don't have office hours and can't often be found on campus, she continued, their students are likely to become frustrated or disengaged with the course material. That theory reinforces findings in a paper that appeared last year in The Review of Higher Education. Paul D. Umbach, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, mined data from the National Survey of Student Engagement to examine the roles of part-time and contingent faculty members. Such instructors, he found, generally report spending less time preparing for class and less time interacting with students than do their full-time colleagues. During Wednesday's panel, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan urged institutions to consider assigning part-time instructors to smaller, advanced courses, rather than to large, introductory courses populated with first-year students who might be vulnerable to dropping out. The two scholars both emphasized that they don't mean to criticize adjuncts. "We're not blaming part-time faculty," Ms. Jaeger said during the panel discussion. "We're actually putting the onus on institutions of higher education to support part-time faculty." Such support, she said, might include "more office space, more places to gather, more resources that would allow them to give support to students outside the classroom." She added that part-time faculty members' flexibility can be a crucial virtue, especially at community colleges. If there is new local demand for a particular specialized program, for example, "you can put that together almost overnight, because you can go ahead and hire four part-time people. That's part of what community colleges do to serve the needs of their communities." Another member of the conference panel made a more explicit plea for colleges to reverse the trend toward part-time hires. "Could administrators be shown a cost-benefit analysis that might demonstrate that the money they save by hiring these people is outweighed, or even overwhelmed, by the revenue they lose when students drop out?" asked Leonard L. Baird, a professor of higher education at Ohio State University who is executive editor of The Journal of Higher Education. On Thursday, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan will present results of a second study, this one concerning the effects of part-time instruction at 107 community colleges in a large state system. They examined transcripts of more than 175,000 students who enrolled in 2000 or 2001 and indicated that they planned to seek associate's degrees. Here, too, Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan found that heavy exposure to part-time faculty members had a negative effect. In one of their statistical models, "an increase of 10 percent in the first-year proportion spent with part-time faculty results in students' becoming 1 percent less likely to earn an associate's degree." Ms. Jaeger and Mr. Eagan's work has been financed by the Association for Institutional Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Education Statistics. Their paper on gatekeeper courses will appear later this year in the journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning. Ms. Jaeger says she sees a need for small-scale, qualitative research about how adjunct faculty members spend their time and how they interact with students. In any case, the topic isn't going to vanish. According to federal statistics, the share of part-time faculty members at American colleges and universities rose from 22.1 percent in 1970 to 47.6 percent in 2005.