<p>As a tenured prof I see the disadvantages of adjuncts(hourly workers) teaching our undergrads. Office hours may be limited and many have full time positions which create time restraints further short changing their students. In addition they are not involved in university research which support our grad students and the occasional undergrad.</p>
<p>I am surprised that the likes of Penn, Yale and perhaps other top ranked universities use adjucnts to such a high degree. Our department uses seldom uses adjucncts even to cover tenured faculty on sabatical. We can often fill in these gaps with research or affiliated tenured faculty or the ocasional pos docs.</p>
<p>Garland, I like our DS’s first year Methods of Reasoning reading list a lot better. Not all dead white guys. ;-)</p>
<p>-Logic:The Theory of Inquiry(Dewey)
-Truth and other Enigmas(Dummett)
-Two Dogmas of Empericism(Quine)
-Travels in Hyperreality(Eco)
-Philosophy of Mind(Kim)
-Experience and Prediction(Reichenbach)
-The Life of the Mind(Arendt)
-Three Dialogues on Knowledge(Feyerbend)
-The Problem of Knowledge(Ager)
-Universals(Armstrong)
-Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality(Elio)</p>
<p>Fortunately a number of the readings were on library reserve.</p>
<p>I’m with Jonri. I do not believe that Yale and Penn use non-tenure track faculty to such a degree. Even the best-endowed schools use adjuncts to some degree if they hire practitioners, or employ lecturers who are great at teaching but do not wish to have full-time employment or submit to the publish or perish process to receive tenure (can the complaint be that they are bad teachers when the reverse is true?)</p>
<p>If sections led by TAs are counted as single classes, that is a fraudulent use of statistics.<br>
I have some knowledge of Penn and Yale. Just a couple of weeks ago, I actually talked to a Yale grad student who was a TA in a class of 20 undergrads. Not bad for either the grad student or the undergrads. Much better for the latter than being in a class of 55 (the cap at Dartmouth) with one prof and no TA. Think how much feedback they will (or won’t) get on their papers or exams if they have to get them back after one week. </p>
<p>Well, Originaloog, That’s just part of the Core. (and Woolf, Austen and Dubois might not want to be lumped with the dwg’s). They also take two classes in non-Western cultures, plus Frontiers of Science (NObel-level lectures by cutting edge scientists), Art HUmanities, Music Humanities, four semesters of language, two other sciences.</p>
<p>Anyway, my point was not to get into a multi-culti shootout, but to point out that you don’t choose this kind of curriculum for prestige, as was suggested by an earlier post. YOu do it because you like to learn.</p>
<p>I often preferred adjuncts in my business and law courses - they related the text material to real life experiences. Guess I was fortunate that they were good teachers also (have heard horrow stories about adjuncts that just talked about themselves and never actually covered any material). My computer science teacher offered me a job a month or so before I graduated so it all worked out great. I also liked taking courses at night (so I could sleep in).</p>
<p>I think the problem you identify is a legitimate one, not in terms of a given Ivy being a “fraud” but the whole question of TA’s and adjunct faculty. It is a real problem–not just at Ivies or state schools but other privates as well.</p>
<p>As Marite and others have mentioned, I do take the particular study you cited with a grain of salt. Studies like this were compiled by TA’s and such who had a strong interest in being identified as “employees” by the courts instead of as students with assistantships. Having been a TA in a doctoral program in an Ivy, I am not unsympathetic. Quite frankly, however, the statistics are flawed. In the case of Yale, the school administrators came up with a different way of counting beans and stated unequivocably that the split was 70% “real” faculty versus 30% TA’s/adjuncts. In one case (the TA’s) they used the number of contact hours with students. In the other case (the uni), they used the number of classes. Which set of stats was correct? Probably neither, since both had an axe to grind.</p>
<p>The other thing I would argue is that the situation is a lot more complex than this study would seem to admit. For example, TA’s tend to be clustered in certain fields more than others. The largest percentage of TA’s in most universities teach classes like freshman comp, intro languages, and lab sciences. If you are a classics or philsophy major at an Ivy, you may never see a TA, except for a few required classes (which may or not exist depending on what Ivy you attend). </p>
<p>Also, be careful about the label “adjunct”. This can mean so many different things. It can mean a part-time person who is ill qualified or it can mean someone with national name/experience who teaches on the side because they love it. My husband, for instance, occasionally teaches at the law school. He is one of those rare birds – a practicing attorney in a specialized field who has pages and pages of serious publications. The kids who get to take his class are at an advantage – he knows the practical stuff, but he’s also at the cutting edge of research. It is not unusual for the Ivies to get a shot at some of the most disinguished practitioners in a field as adjuncts.</p>
<p>Frankly, I think it’s just as ridiculous to take a study like this at face value as it is to think the USNWR statistics are the holy grail. Both are shot through with flaws. Anecdotes may not “prove” anything, but in real life the best way to approach a college search on this or any other question is to talk to a range of students and faculty and ask them probing questions. You may not have “proof” or figures, but you can get a good feel for what is going on at any school.</p>
<p>Cami makes excellent points, which were on my mind as I considered the stats offered by the TAs. I am troubled, however, by the stats at Yale. Let us say that a class has a prof and several TAs (because there are several sections). A student ordinarily would have 2 lectures by the prof plus one section led by the TA. From the undergrad’s point of view, the proportions are 70% faculty and 30% TA. From our perspective as parents, these are the stats that count; and they jibe with those of the Yale administration, not of the TAs. If, however, a prof lectured only for one hour a week and had TAs lead 2 hour sections, I would want to know why.
Yale TAs have been going on strike regularly; but I have not read about undergraduates complaining that Yale profs are not doing enough teaching.</p>
<p>In spite of a sense of disbelief among some parents, if you want to validate the original observation, just speak to some undergrads or recent graduates of a particular school.</p>
<p>Some well known schools are famous (infamous) for using cheaper labor to teach lower level undergraduates. Some rarely do. </p>
<p>But perhaps the bigger issue is: So what? </p>
<p>All schools have multiple options for meeting requirements; course information is published, courses critiqued by students etc. None of this stuff should be a surprise to the students. And, I bet there is a percentage that does not care, even at the elites.</p>
<p>Maybe this is a tempest in a teapot - I sure don’t see any undergrads weighing in here with any comments.</p>
<p>Maybe the surprise here is the surprise that it happens so much, at least to us parents? Dunno.</p>
<p>Good points, newmassdad. Regarding the figures at Yale, I remember reading that the TA’s included all their office hours in compiling these stats. To me, that was a little strange.</p>
<p>My daughter has only had 2 terms at Dartmouth, but her classes with 50ish students had TAs to help with papers, hold extra sessions, etc. - all the sciences do, but so did her geography and math class.</p>
<p>Overall, I didn’t like the idea of TAs or adjuncts - that was one of the big negatives that I saw in Dartmouth vs her other schools, all of which were smaller LACs. But, honestly, any of these systems can work, and any of these systems can have poor teachers at each particular level. Some full profs will be lousy teachers, some will be good. Some TAs will be able to explain beginning concepts very well, having just gone through the exercise of learning them, others will just hit their strides as teachers when it is time for them to move on. Some adjuncts will bring a fresh perspective to the 1 or 2 classes they teach, others are just being abused.
I think a lot of adaptation goes on, on the part of the students - they quickly learn which classes to take and which to avoid - they are survivors.</p>
<p>I certainly would not count discussion sections and such as classes needing to be taught by regular faculty. If they counted those hours it is a somewhat misrepresented stat. Discussion is way for the PhD student to get used to dealing with students and provide some needed individual attention in a large class. It’s also why they get paid to be in school.</p>
<p>I’m a tenured prof at a big research place and I think these kinds of studies and criticisms are a good thing. Schools are always tempted to ignore undergrads and anything that holds their feet to the fire is a good thing. The best way to reward schools that do focus on undergrads and make faculty teach them is to punish or critique those that don’t.</p>
<p>I can tell you that one of the first rewards to big name outside faculty is the promise of light teaching loads with minimal undergrad teaching. In some cases, none. Many profs at the best known places teach no more than 2 semester courses a year – with one of them a small PhD seminar. Even those who officially teach 3 courses effectively teach 2 because the 3rd course is sometimes running the faculty seminar. When being offered a job at an Ivy many years ago, one senior member of the department told me, “If you teach TOO well, we’ll take that against you come tenure time.” He wasn’t quite kidding.</p>
<p>Now there are good reasons why the top schools do this and those policies are sometimes defensible. But I’d like to see these rules made public. And if some schools buck the trend by making their profs teach more, they and the profs should be rewarded with positive publicity.</p>
<p>So I welcome such scrutiny even if, inevitably, there will be spin games regarding what consitute classes vs contact or part-time vs full-time faculty.</p>
<p>As someone said, there are great profs, and mediocre ones; great TFs and not so great ones. It’s not an either/or situation.</p>
<p>I actually like the fact that my S’s classes have TFs. He has only one class that has more than 30 students, but he has had TFs in all but one class capped at 15. The smallest, with 11, had a TF.</p>
<p>A prof who can rely on having TFs may be more willing to assign essay questions rather than multiple choice questions. TFs go over lectures with students, lead discussions, grade papers (or problem sets) and provide comments on them, help students choose paper topics. A prof who has classes of 40 and no TF may not be able to provide the same kind of support. Indeed, S1 experienced just this kind of situation at his LAC.</p>
<p>OK, I double-checked the article. The wording indicates that about 40% of the actual classes–not labs or discussion are taught by TT faculty. They have another stat for discussions etc where, as we would expect, few TT teach them.</p>
<p>"The report covers all 1,228 undergraduate classes, 566 recitations, and 162 laboratory sessions taught in the School of Arts and Sciences during the fall 2005 term, as listed on the university registrar’s Web site. The job classification of the instructor listed for each course or lab session was determined from a university directory. </p>
<p>According to the findings, 39.7 percent of the classes were taught by temporary instructors, 40 percent by tenured or tenure-track faculty members, and 10 percent by graduate students. The rest were handled by adjunct faculty members or other nonprofessors, such as administrators or staff members. </p>
<p>Professors, the report says, teach even fewer undergraduate labs and recitations, covering just 10 percent of recitations and 33 percent of labs. Graduate instructors led at least 68 percent of recitations and 52 percent of labs. The report defines recitations as smaller weekly discussion sections that supplement large lecture courses"</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification. Just a couple of comments. In any given year, up to 1/3 of tenure-track faculty may be on leave. A school has two options: not offer the course or invite visiting profs to teach the courses that otherwise would not be offered. I remember that some years ago, some financially strapped universities (usually state universities) were delighted if their profs went on (unpaid) leave and taught elsewhere for a year (or two, or three). At such schools, the courses ordinarily taught by the prof on leave were obviously not being offered. But at the school where the prof was visiting, s/he would be counted as non-tenure track.</p>
<p>Another comment involves newly hired faculty. Some are hired as instructors or lecturers (i.e. non tenure-track) because they have not finished their dissertation before the start date. The presumption is that once the dissertation has been completed and defended, the instructor will become a tenure-track assistant prof. I don’t know how prevalent this situation is.</p>
<p>Finally, at many top schools, the math departments hire assistant profs for only 3 years with no prospect of tenure. I don’t know how they are counted in the studies done at Penn and Yale; they do constitute a fair proportion of the math departments.</p>
<p>All of these could have a fairly significant impact on the stats cited.</p>
<p>I do think the numbers of classes taught by nontenured faculty may be suspect. And prospective students should be savy enough to know that TA’s, adjuncts etc will be handling most lab, recitation and tutorial sessions.</p>
<p>However universities sell themselves to prospective undergrads based on the quality of their faculties. If a high percentage of the undergraduate classes are not taught by these faculties it is a case of false advertising IMHO. I have done some private consulting and I think a client would be totally justified in voiding our contract if my proposal was based on my cv & rate schedule but I decided to have a grad student doing 50% of the work. I would feel justifiably cheated if I joined Baltusrol Country Club and was informed that I could only play the Upper Course and not the reknowned Lower Course.</p>
<p>Do we really think prospectives students will ever hear something along the lines of, “Our faculty includes 5 Nobel Laurets but none have taught an undergrad course in 5 years and a x%age of your frosh and soph courses will not be taught by our reknowned faculty either.”</p>
<p>There does seem to be room for improvement. Just because a school is popular, does not mean changes are not in order. It was a 1994 student survey that occasioned many of the changes seen at Chicago in the past 10 years.</p>
<p>Poll: Harvard Students Mostly Unhappy</p>
<p>CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - A long-held stereotype that Harvard undergraduates feel neglected by their professors and don’t have as much fun as students at other colleges now has some data to back it up.</p>
<p>Student satisfaction at Harvard College ranks near the bottom of a group of 31 elite private schools, according to survey results outlined in a confidential memo obtained by The Boston Globe and reported in Tuesday’s editions.</p>
<p>… The 21-page memo, from staff researchers at Harvard to academic deans, documents student dissatisfaction with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, as well as the sense of community and social life on campus.</p>
<p>It would be interesting to see the results of this Survey for all the schools who took part, not just Harvard.</p>
<p>This thread is about students being taught by non-tenure track faculty.
Harvard students have many reasons for complaining, but being taught by adjuncts is not one of them.</p>
<p>My S is a freshman. Here are some numbers regarding contact hours:</p>
<p>Fall:
Class#1, 11 students, 1 prof (2hrs) 1 TF (1hr)
Class #2, 21 students, 1 prof (3 hrs) 1 CA (1hr)
Class #3, 29 students, 1 prof (3 hrs) 1 TF(1 hr), plus 1 lab assistant (3hrs, every other week).
Class #4, 26 students, 1 prof (2 hrs), 1TF (1hr).</p>
<p>Spring:
Class #1: 15 students 1 prof (3hrs), no TF
Class #2: 19 students, 1 prof (3hrs), 1 CA (1hr)
Class #3, 120 students, 1 prof (2 hrs) 1 TF (1 hr)
Class #4, 26 students, 1 prof (3hrs) 1 TF (1 hr) 1 lab assistant (3hrs every other week).</p>
<p>This is a faculty:student ratio that would be more in keeping with well-endowed LACs; the number of contact hours between students and faculty also seem to me quite adequate.</p>
<p>Some of my S’s profs are stars in their respective fields. Out of the 8 classes, six were/are taught by full professors; one by newly minted Ph.D., and one by a long-time lecturer with impeccable credentials.</p>
<p>Larger class sizes than my first year S’s at UChicago (all profs, and one dean), but still not bad. :)</p>
<p>The issue is also the contact with faculty and the quality of instruction, though I’m very glad your son is happy, apparently the majority at Harvard, and perhaps elsewhere, do not feel they are getting their money’s worth. From what I read of the survey, I believe over half of the student population had to respond before it was considered valid.</p>
<p>Since my S very much enjoyed his class with the newly minted Ph.D. and is getting great instruction from the lecturer, I have no complaint about their lack of tenure. S1 at a LAC had some classes that were larger than S2’s.</p>
<p>By the way, the largest class at Harvard–842–is being taught by a lecturer who makes no bones about not being interested in getting tenure because he so enjoys teaching. </p>
<p>Regarding the survey, I do not believe that it required responses from more than 50% of the students; I could be wrong. The students who responded were self-selected and therefore not necessarily representative of the larger student body. Nonetheless, the deans do take it seriously because it indicates student unhappiness with certain aspects of their experience. As one dean told me, ""It does not matter if only 10% of the students are unhappy. That they are unhappy is what we need to address.</p>
<p>The survey combined many different issues. On the subject of faculty/student contacts, as a parent who has to nag my S to go talk to his profs, I can see both sides of the culture of mutual avoidance, mutual being the operative word. </p>
<p>The issue, however, that students seemed to complain the most about was the lack of a campus-based social life (which is partly, though not solely, due to the fact that so many of them are involved in activities that take place off-campus). The lack of a student center seems to be at the heart of the students’ complaints. But hey, at least Harvard is not known as the place “where fun goes to die.” That honor goes to Chicago, I believe.</p>
<p>But this is far afield from the issue of adjuncts and TAs doing most of the teaching.</p>