Trends in Faculty and Administration

Timothy Taylor comments on a recent report.

When it comes to employment, colleges and universities have tried to hold down faculty costs in dealing with the expanding numbers of students by the use of time-contract faculty and part-timers. The nonprofessional staff are dealing with the increased number of students by using improved information technology and other capital investments, without a need for a higher total number of staff. But the number of professional staff is rising, both in absolute terms and relative to the number of students…

I’ll only add that institutions are defined by their people. As the full-time and tenured faculty become a smaller share of the employees of the institution and the professional administrators become a larger share, the nature and character of the institution inevitably changes. In this case, colleges and universities have become less about faculty, teaching, and research, and more about the provision of professional services to students and faculty. As far as I know, this shift was not planned or chosen, and the costs and benefits of such a shift were not analyzed in advance. It just happened.

My comments:

1. Perhaps this parallels shifts in other sectors of the economy. That is, we have fewer front-line production workers and more people working on building organizational capital.

2. The value of the organizational capital provided by non-teaching staff in education seems particularly nebulous because the measure of value in education is particularly nebulous.

3. In other sectors, the number of production workers per unit of output probably is falling faster than in higher education.

4. In other sectors, information technology has had more profound effects on the process of providing goods and services. People suspect that bigger changes are in store in education, once people figure out the best ways to apply information technology. I offered my guesses here. Some of these possibilities could lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of professors per student and also in the number of professors per organizational-capital builder in education.

3 thoughts on “Trends in Faculty and Administration

  1. That is what is known as “institutionalization” as inferred by Mancur Olson and further delineated in its maturation by Gordon Tullock.

    It is the “story” of the “evolution” of the community schoolhouse, created, maintained and guarded by the community members into the “Educational System” shaped and directed by Guildmasters of the institution to match their determinations.

  2. I would classify tenure-track faculty as people who build organizational capital — in the form of research expertise, labs (both the equipment and the people), and relationships with grant-issuing organizations — rather than front-line production workers. I think shifting them from teaching to research is a recognition of opportunity costs and a desire to improve economies of scale, even with a probable loss of marginal quality. (That is, most students will probably learn as much from a good adjunct as from a good tenure-track professor, but the best students will probably learn a little less.)

    I agree that proficient use of IT in education is trailing other sectors, but there is reason to hope that better IT adoption will *increase* the ratio of research-focused/tenure-track faculty to others, relative to today’s ratios: As the lessons from MOOCs and other innovations percolate through, I expect that courses will be created and managed by teams consisting of one subject-matter specialist (a tenure-track researcher) and one, or at most a few, IT/teaching specialist(s) who help organize the subject matter and teaching materials in a way that works for the class structure. For small class sizes, this presumably means that more core material will be reused over time, but that it will also grow into something like the “adaptive textbook” you mention in your column for The American.

  3. To me it seems that state subsidized schools should not market and yet they do. Also I do not think that it serves the taxpayers when state subsidized schools try to raise their status by limiting entry in order to become a top tier state school. I think that tax payer would be better served if students entry criteria were more equal across the system.

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