By Jane S. Gabin
Despite having a Ph.D. I was unable to find full-time teaching work, so, like many of you, I took my skills elsewhere. I worked for 10 years in the admissions office of UNC-Chapel Hill and then became a college counselor at selective secondary schools in New York. At a conference I attended, I became aware that the small, liberal arts college hosting us hired 46% of its faculty as contingent. In my naïveté (at the time) I was shocked.
The head of counseling at my school did not want to know about this. I looked at the Common Data Set of the most popular colleges our students applied to, and found that 38 had more contingents than full-time teachers. I wrote to all 38, asking for an explanation. Most ignored me. One sent a snippy letter saying their policies were “legal.” Another school asked me to “understand” their unique situation. When I approached the head of NACAC (The National Association of College Admission Counselors, of which I am member) about this problem of contingency abuse, I was told that NACAC had “other priorities.”
I learned many colleges disguised their real priorities, and secondary school counselors went along with them.
After I retired, I could say what I wanted, which was that US colleges, through a campaign of denial and “other priorities,” had manipulated America into a situation where:
- tuition has risen at twice the rate of inflation
- there are so many well-paid administrators
- student debt is the greatest it has ever been
My experience and membership in these organizations has given me familiarity with data not ordinarily mentioned in discussions of higher education. I used sources I am familiar with to determine how many faculty at a given institution have job security, a necessary condition for the exercise of academic freedom.
I used a school’s Common Data Set to answer my question. Colleges and universities are required to submit data to the government’s Post-Secondary Educational Data Set – known as IPEDS – which are checked by the Department of Education. But there have been problems. In some cases, fraudulent data were reported by schools, and they were punished slightly by being omitted from national rankings – for one year. In other cases, not all the data is revealed by a school. Also, the only categories provided to report faculty job status are “Part time” and “Full time,” which does not fully reflect the difference between contingent and tenure-line. And sometimes the CDS itself is difficult to locate.
Currently, my list of 700+ colleges & universities considers the most popular among today’s applicants, and includes the Ivies, small private schools, large private schools, state universities, religious schools, and secular schools. Of the 744 colleges, 231 had more part-time faculty than full-time faculty. Many additional schools came perilously close to this. But no one, it seems, wants to know about this.