The Old Numbers Game

by P.D. Lesko

I READ THE hefty Department of Education Statistics Quarterly from cover to cover with the relish that some people save for their favorite travel magazines. So, I was delighted to discover that U.S. News and World Report's controversial college ranking list includes percentages of full-time faculty employed. I read that several of the top 10 universities claimed over 95 percent of their faculty were full-time. What bastions of responsible hiring, or so most parents and students reading those numbers might think.

The truth, of course, isn't as close to 100 percent full-time faculty employment as those colleges would like everyone to believe. I went to my bookshelf and cracked open my 2001 copy of Petersen's Guide to 4 Year Colleges. There, I found the percentages of faculty who were full-time, as well, at the various institutions. At Harvard, officials had reported to Petersen's that 73 percent of faculty were full-time. To the officials at U.S. News and World Report, Harvard had upped the percentage from 73 to 99. Of colleges in the top 10 of U.S. News and World Report's rankings, and Petersen's Guide, Harvard had the largest discrepancy, with a 26 percent difference reported between the two sources.

Actually, that didn't bother me as much as the guys who claimed in Petersen's Guide that 100 percent of their faculty were full-time: Duke University and Columbia. A quick trip to the Duke University Web page (www.duke.edu) and a click through to the Mathematics department faculty list showed plain and simple that someone at Duke was telling a little white lie: there were 16 adjunct faculty listed on the Web page, as well as instructors, lecturers and visiting faculty (full-time, yes, but temporary faculty nonetheless). Over at Columbia, on that institution's Web page (www.columbia.edu), a click through to the Journalism School turned up a Spring 2001 faculty list with over 120 adjuncts included.

The fine folks at Stanford (number 5 on U.S. News & World Report's top 10 list) have a page on-line just for parents who are interested in statistics about that college's distinguished full-time faculty. On-line, 8 percent of faculty are listed as non tenure line. Stanford officials reported the same statistic to Petersen's. To U.S. News and World Report, Stanford reported that 21 percent of its faculty are non tenure line.

According to the Department of Education, on average 31 percent of faculty at 4-year research universities are part-time. That number, does not reflect the large increases in full-time temporary faculty hiring which has gone on over the past 3-5 years. College and university officials have responded to front-page articles in the national media about the exploitation of part-time faculty, but funding more full-time temporary slots. Benefits are included with many of these jobs, but they are dead-end appointments, which leave the faculty who accept them with little time to see to their own professional development.

Faculty hiring is complicated by many factors, including shrinking state funding for higher education and, in some cases, state laws which penalize colleges financially if tuition is raised above pre-determined levels in a given year. The Michigan Legislature doesn't tell General Motors how much a Cadillac may be sold for, but the representatives will withhold funding from the University of Michigan and Michigan State if the institutions raise tuition above 8 percent per year. As a result, the number of full-time temporary lecturers at the University of Michigan has doubled since 1987. A lecturer on the Ann Arbor campus earns, on average, one-third of what at tenured faculty member earns.

Of course, this faculty employment status numbers game could be simply the result of a clerical error, or some other innocent mistake. The fact remains, though, that in print (faculty directories) and on-line (Web page faculty listings), as well as in college catalogues like the Petersen's Guide, college officials routinely neglect to list part-time faculty. Whether this is an attempt to cover up overuse of adjuncts, or the result of the fact that it would take more time and money to list adjunct faculty in directories and on-line, one can only guess. However, such practices must stop.