<p>One possible indication can come from looking at the actual course listings that students use for course registration. If a whole set of classes in a subject say “staff”, then it is more likely to be taught by part-time instructors or grad students. </p>
<p>At my son’s college, for most departments in course listings, they do list the grad students teaching courses under their last name, so you would need to compare those names to a list of faculty members to find out that they are grad students.</p>
<p>Overall, there is a big difference between a college that uses part-time instructors who are running from college to college to try to scrape together a living vs. an instructor who is working a full-time job and teaches one course in the evenings. The later often brings valuable real world experience into the classroom, and those instructors are often teaching because they enjoy it. There also are some part-time instructors who are retired from professional careers, who may also be more practically minded than a full-time professor.</p>
<p>There also are some specialized fields where part-time instructors make sense, such as an instructor in Chinese, where there is not enough demand to hire a full-time professor.</p>
<p>You also may wish to look up job listings for the college. If you see that they are still advertising for tenure track positions, that is a good thing. If you find that a college is ONLY advertising for part-time instructors, that is not so good.</p>