Reliance on part-time faculty a problem for education

With a worsening economy and states like Ohio cutting back on the funding they provide higher education, more and more colleges and universities are turning to part-time faculty to carry much of the teaching load. Even at Youngstown State University, which has the highest percentage of full professors teaching lower level courses in Ohio public universities, 411 part-timers taught at YSU last semester compared to 298 who are full-time faculty. This doesn't mean that more YSU courses are taught by adjunct faculty than regular faculty -- few part-timers carry a full teaching load -- but it underscores the difficulties Ohio institutions are facing, in particular, and raises, in general, concerns about the direction of higher education in the nation.
As recently as 10 years ago, the ratio of full-time to part-time faculty in four-year colleges and universities in the United States was about 2 to 1. By 1997, that ratio had changed to 1.3 to 1.
But now the number of part-time faculty is equal to or greater than the number of full-time faculty in many institutions, resulting necessarily in an increasing number of courses being taught not by regular college faculty, but by graduate assistants and part-time instructors.
Overall, in Ohio, 49 percent of the credit hours taken by first-year students are taught by full-time faculty, 13 percent by graduate teaching assistants and 38 percent by part-timers. At YSU, 47 percent of first-year credit hours are taught by graduate assistants and part-time faculty.
Value added: To be sure, the considerable professional competencies and technological expertise of some part-time faculty members -- those who have full-time professional careers elsewhere -- are invaluable to those institutions that cannot offer adequate work or salary to a full-time professor in certain fields.
And a number of adjunct faculty are content teaching one or two classes a semester because of the flexibility a part-time position provides.
However, increasingly, colleges and universities are forced to hire instructors who teach part-time because it's full-time work -- which they would prefer -- is unavailable. Some educated men and women are working at three different institutions to derive a full-time salary. As dedicated as such faculty might want to be to their students, it's obvious that their allegiances are divided. Further, of necessity they'll have little time to undertake the kind or research that helps them to develop new teaching methods and new knowledge.
The more part-timers are hired, the more that full-time faculty must handle non-instructional duties like advising, curriculum development and program coordination which necessarily diminishes the time they spend on academics.
One of the most important aspects of higher education is the opportunity for students to learn from the best minds in the nation. When those minds are otherwise occupied -- whether in administrative minutiae or in driving from one campus to another -- there is no benefit to the students.