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| The Adjunct Office. |
Students learned more when their first instructor in a discipline was not on the tenure track, as compared with those whose introductory professor was tenured, according to a new paper from Northwestern University.
The paper, "Are Tenure-Track Professors Better Teachers?," was released on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it sheds new light on the hotly debated topic of whether the increased use of adjunct instructors is helping or hindering students' learning.
More in the Crampicle.
No kidding! Adjuncts HAVE to be better than tenure track, they're expendable!
ReplyDeleteThe helotization of higher education will continue until the supply of Ph. D.s is lower than the demand.
The researchers found "strong and consistent evidence that Northwestern faculty outside of the tenure system outperform tenure track/tenured professors in introductory undergraduate classrooms," wrote David N. Figlio, director of Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research; Morton O. Schapiro, the university's president; and Kevin B. Soter, an associate consultant at an organization called the Greatest Good, which uses economic methods and data analysis to help businesses.
ReplyDeleteAh-hahahahahaha! The president of the university insists adjuncts are better for students! Alert the media! Ah-hahahahahaha!
Ah, good old Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago, IL, where I learned what it is like to be taken advantage of economically. Talk about deep learning!
ReplyDeleteMore cutting edge reporting from the chronicle and real revolutionary scholarship from the social sciences. Is this funded by the Koch brothers?
ReplyDeleteIn related news, sometimes wolves will gnaw off their own paws to escape traps. And zombies like brains.
And Stella nails it. It's in the uni's best interest to say that its slave labor is better for students. Bonus points for its attempt to pit adjuncts against the tenured.
ReplyDeleteWell played, Satan. Well played.
Yeah, and it's really great for the student when they want to take another class from that adjunct but can't because the adjunct has been canned, or they want a recommendation a couple of years down the road and can't find the adjunct, or when they do get a recommendation and the snobs on a grad school committee dismiss it because it's from "just an adjunct." It's especially great for them to see that two advanced degrees and a career in higher education can pay you so little that you have to be on food stamps.
ReplyDeleteI also like that it's adjuncts vs tenured AND tenure-track combined: a tenured prof with at least 5 or 6 years experience totally should be lumped together with a just-out-of-grad-school newbie who knows she will be fired in a couple years if that book doesn't get written and if she doesn't stay "collegial."
ReplyDeleteI hope all administrators (particularly my dean, who forwarded it to us all this morning) read past the headline. Almost all the adjuncts in the study have been working at Northwestern for at least 6 quarters, they get paid between $4200 and $7334 per course, and the "less-qualified" students in the study have an average SAT of 1316.
More accurate headline: Better Students and a Better Pay Scale Allows Adjuncts to Do Their Job Better
Amen, Ana Thyrosis.
DeleteI still can't get my head around why a writer would feel the need to use the actual word 'compared' after a comparitive adjective. "Students learned more . . . as compared with those . . ." is now more better (heh) than simply "students learned more . . . THAN those . . ."?
ReplyDelete