by Richard Lyons

AS DISCUSSED IN my last column, employing adjunct instructors provides our institutions many benefits beyond reducing overall instructional costs. These include enriching our curricula with real-world perspectives, offering highly specialized courses for increasingly demanding students, cultivating linkages to community resources, and providing staffing flexibility. As any critical resource does, however, adjunct faculty requires ongoing development for its value to appreciate. When sufficiently developed, your adjunct faculty can be leveraged powerfully to aid you in addressing the array of issues impacting institutional effectiveness.

In recent years, our paradigm of institutional effectiveness has evolved significantly. While success was once indicated primarily by achieving growth goals in enrollment, standards in additional areas have been increasingly mandated by state legislatures, boards of trustees, accrediting associations, and other largely external stakeholders. In this age of increased accountability, institutional effectiveness is not only a function of improved student recruitment, but also of their retention within each course section, their completion of their program or degree, and their success on professional licensing or certification examinations and other indicators of quality. Added to this is the impact of U.S. News and World Report's and other popular ranking systems' emphasis on such customer-service and satisfaction standards as academic reputation, percentages of classes with less than 20 students, and value received from coursework completed.

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