Student Loan Blog : faculty

State Colleges Cut Staff, Programs as Budgets Slashed

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University who seven years ago promised to make ASU “The New American University” and to grow the school’s enrollment to 100,000 students by 2020, could see his plans go unfulfilled because of state budget cuts, reports The New York Times (“State Colleges Also Face Cuts in Ambitions,” March 17, 2009).

Since last June, ASU has lost $88 million in state funding, which amounts to 18 percent of the university’s base budget.

“The New American University has died; welcome to the Neutered American University,” the Arizona school’s student newspaper editorialized last month after ASU announced it would be eliminating more than 500 jobs, closing 48 programs and requiring remaining employees to take 10 to 15 days of unpaid leave this spring.

While ASU students said they believe school president Michael Crow is doing his best to protect them from further funding cuts, they also said the state’s budget cuts will negatively affect the quality of their education.

ASU Not Alone, Colleges Struggling Nationwide

Public colleges across the country are experiencing layoffs, salary freezes, and even enrollment reductions as they grapple with shrinking state funding in the current recession.

The University of Florida recently eliminated 430 faculty and staff positions, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, recently laid off around 100 employees, and the University of Vermont has eliminated 16 positions, left 22 faculty positions vacant, and frozen the salaries of certain staff, The New York Times reports.

And California’s higher education system, which serves 3.3 million students — nearly 20 percent of college student nationwide — is among the nation’s college systems hardest hit by this recession. Both the University of California system and the California State University system have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding and have been forced to shrink their enrollment numbers.

“What’s happening, everywhere, is what’s happening to Michael Crow,” said Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Costs, Productivity and Accountability, an organization that studies college spending. “The trend line is states disinvesting in higher education.”

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Medical Institute Awards $600 Million to 56 Biomedical Scientists

Student Loan Girl — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:25:00 GMT

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest sources of private funds for biomedical research, named 56 of the nation’s most gifted biomedical scientists as HHMI “investigators” this week (“HHMI Selects 56 of the Nation’s Top Scientists,” May 27, 2008).

HHMI investigators, who maintain faculty positions at universities and other research institutions, are scientists who embody the HHMI commitment to discovery, research, innovation, and to “extend[ing] the boundaries of science.” Previous appointees include 124 members of the National Academy of Sciences and 12 Nobel Prize winners.

HHMI honored 42 men and 14 women from 31 different institutions, with seven organizations gaining HHMI investigators for the first time: the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, Boston University, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cornell University, Purdue University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

HHMI selected its new investigators from among 1,070 applicants — researchers who had four to 10 years’ experience as faculty members at institutions across the country — in a nationwide competition that began in 2007.

In their first term of appointment, this year’s honorees will collectively receive more than $600 million to cover salaries, benefits, research funds, and other expenses. And because the HHMI philosophy is to support individuals as opposed to a specific course of research — to appoint investigators rather than award research grants — these investigators will be given the flexibility and financing to explore evolving ideas, to change the direction of their research if necessary, and to complete the course of their investigation, even if it takes many years.

“These 56 scientists will bring new and innovative ways of thinking about biology to the HHMI community,” said Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI. “They are poised to advance scientific knowledge dramatically in the coming years, and we are committed to providing them with the freedom and flexibility to do so.”

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Study: College Courses Taught by Part-Time Faculty Lead to High Freshman Dropout Rates

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:39:00 GMT

College freshmen are more likely to drop out of school before their sophomore year when they take introductory-level courses taught by part-time, rather than full-time instructors, a recent study suggests.

Increasingly, part-time and adjunct instructors are being assigned to teach first-year classes, also referred to as “gatekeeper courses.” Less than one percent of the students enrolled in these courses are continuing on to earn their associate’s degree, writes David Glenn of The Chronicle of Higher Education (“ ‘Gatekeeper’ Courses Should Not Be Assigned to Part-Time Instructors, Research Suggests,” March 27, 2008).

With the number of part-time and adjunct professors teaching introductory classes having more than doubled in the past 35 years, the study poses significant implications for the impact of first-year instruction on degree-earning rates, say the study’s authors, Audrey J. Jaeger, an assistant professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, and M. Kevin Eagan, Jr., a graduate student at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The Dropout Effect

Jaeger and Eagan’s paper, which will appear in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning journal later this year, was discussed at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in March.

As part of their study, Jaeger and Eagan analyzed transcripts of 30,000 students who were enrolled in introductory classes at four public four-year universities in a southeastern state between 2002 and 2005.

The researchers found that when the colleges assigned part-time faculty, lecturers, and postdoctoral fellows to teach these introductory-level courses, students were significantly less likely to return to school their sophomore year.

There was no such dropout effect, on the other hand, in gatekeeper courses taught by graduate assistants or full-time, non-tenure-track instructors.

Personalized Attention Often Absent With Part-Time Faculty

Jaeger, the paper’s lead author, says that the chief reason for such high dropout rates among freshmen taught by part-time instructors may be attributed to the fact that adjuncts tend to have limited office hours, restricting their ability to communicate face-to-face with their students.

As a result, Jaeger speculates, students often become frustrated or disengaged with the course material.

This theory would seem to be reinforced by data pulled from the National Survey of Student Engagement.

In a review of this data, Paul Umbach, a professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, found that part-time and other contingent faculty tended to spend less time interacting with students and fewer hours preparing for class than their full-time counterparts.

Increasing Teacher Support Is Key

Jaeger and Eagan emphasize that their analysis is not intended as a criticism of part-time faculty. In fact, they urge university officials to better support their part-time professors, and propose specific courses of action administrators could take:

Assign part-time professors to smaller courses less vulnerable to dropouts
Allocate larger office spaces where part-time faculty can better interact with their students
Provide resources that facilitate interaction and support outside the classroom

A less sympathetic member of the AERA conference panel offers an alternate, if extreme view of what should be done instead: Stop hiring part-time faculty.

Asked Leonard L. Baird, executive editor of The Journal of Higher Education, “Could administrators be shown a cost-benefit analysis that might demonstrate that the money they save by hiring these people is outweighed, or even overwhelmed, by the revenue they lose when students drop out?”

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Congress Joins States and Colleges in Efforts to Reduce Soaring Textbook Costs

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:09:00 GMT

With the average college student now shelling out between $900 and $1,000 each year for textbooks and supplies, according to the College Board’s latest Trends in College Pricing report, schools, states, and now Congress are getting involved in the crusade to control the spiraling costs of college textbooks.

Propelled by studies that show the prices of textbooks are rising faster than the rate of inflation, the House of Representatives included provisions in the recently approved College Opportunity and Affordability Act that are specifically targeted at making textbook costs more manageable, reports Elia Powers of Inside Higher Ed (“Different Tacks on Textbook Choice,” Feb. 19, 2008).

The House bill (H.R. 4137), which passed the House on February 7 and renews the Higher Education Act, would have colleges provide advance information in their course schedules about required books to give students time to plan for expenses and comparison-shop for the most cost-effective options.

Also approved by the House was an amendment (H.AMDT.951) proposed by Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio that would create a pilot competitive grant program to assist a select number of colleges in setting up textbook rental programs.

States Enacting Their Own Textbook Legislation

H.R. 4137 would also require textbook publishers to provide more information about pricing and changes from previous editions, which follows bills already passed by some state legislatures, writes Powers.

Last April, for example, Washington state House Bill 2300 was signed into law, requiring textbook publishers to disclose retail prices and a history of revisions from edition to edition when presenting any materials to faculty.

In June, Oregon passed its similar Senate Bill 365 into law. In addition to charging publishers with providing retail prices and a list of all previous versions of a text to potential adopters, the Oregon measure requires publishers of textbook “bundles” (textbooks packaged with an accompanying CD-ROM or study guide, for instance) to make each component of the bundle available to students separately and to disclose the retail price of each piece.

In California, Assembly Bill 1548, known as the College Textbook Transparency Act, likewise calls for publishers to provide a list of revisions made to new editions, as well as for college bookstores to release the wholesale prices of textbooks. The California bill was signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in October and goes into effect in 2010.

Changes at the College Level

In response to the increasingly vocal concerns of students, families, and legislators, not all schools are waiting on Congress or state officials to adopt changes to textbook pricing and marketing practices. Some schools, writes Powers, have already instituted book rental, buyback, or other programs in a move to extend textbook affordability.

At Rio Salado College in Arizona, for example, a partnership with Pearson Custom Publishing allows professors to “build” custom textbooks, drawing material from multiple sources. Administrators believe this program could save students up to 50 percent on reading materials.

The University of Virginia, in addition to expanding its textbook rental and guaranteed buyback programs, is increasing its selection of e-books, which can save students as much as 30 percent over print versions of new editions. And a growing number of U.Va. professors are choosing to purchase older editions of books in cases where the new material isn’t a necessity, a move the university says cuts an average of 75 percent off new book prices.

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