Universities Weblog

It's the old bait and switch. Top colleges attract students partly by promising classes with big-name professors. Once enrolled, though, students often find that instructors are graduate students or adjunct faculty who teach at several schools. Either way, students are duped.

As the Christian Science Monitor points out, the use of part-time faculty has become widespread. The good news is that most of these instructors focus primarily on teaching, not research, so classes can be more engaging. The bad news is that part-time faculty hop from one gig to the next, so they typically aren't available to address student concerns.

Does educational quality suffer? Most experts say yes, but I bet most students can't tell the difference. The real losers are the adjunct faculty, who teach part-time because full-time, tenure-track jobs have become scarce. They work for low wages and have little job security. They're academic gypsies hoping to land something permanent. And colleges, looking to save money, want to keep it that way, regardless of how students feel.

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