Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?

Abstract

We are grateful to the Northwestern University Registrar's office, office of admissions, and office of human resources for providing the data necessary to carry out this analysis, and to numerous colleagues for helpful suggestions. Caitlin Ahearn and Christine Mulhern provided exceptional research assistance. All opinions and errors are our own. We have not received research support for this project. ABSTRACTThis study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student's first term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern's average students and less-qualified students.

Contingent Faculty Perceptions of Organizational Support, Workplace Attitudes, and Teaching Evaluations at a Public Research University

“…These results not only refute the misconception that contingent faculty have too little time to provide students with feedback but also support that they provide students with teaching which is as good as that provided by TTTF, at least in medium-size and large-size classes. In line with such result, a study by Figlio et al (2013, September 1) in a private research university also found that students who were average or less-qualified learned relatively more in their introductory courses from contingent faculty across a wide variety of subject areas.…”

“…According to Eagan and Jaeger (2008), while students were negatively affected by part-time faculty, neither having graduate teaching assistants nor full-time, non-tenure track faculty as their instructors was negatively associated with persistence into the second year. Lastly, a study of freshmen at a private research university in the Midwest found that students, particularly those who are average or are less-qualified, learned relatively more in their introductory courses from non-tenure track faculty than from TTTF, across a variety of subject areas (Figlio, Schapiro, & Soter, 2013, September 1).…”

Attendance Spillovers between Public and For-Profit Colleges: Evidence from Statewide Changes in Appropriations for Higher Education

“…Finally, using the information available in the freshmen migration sample, we investigate the extent to which flagship institutions, which generally have 44 Research on the effect of the replacement of tenure-track faculty with adjuncts is mixed (Figlio, Schapiro, and Soter, 2015;Bettinger and Long, 2010;Carrell and West, 2010), though it is unlikely that students are dissuaded in their enrollment decisions by higher faculty-student ratios, or more faculty hours per student. admissions discretion, vary the composition of their student body in response to different funding environments.…”

Academic freedom and tenure: introduction

“…1). It is interesting to note that the number of tenured positions compared to the total number of professors in the USA has sharply decreased during the last 40 yr from 57% in 1975 to 30% in 2009, and is expected to reach a low threshold of 15 to 20% (Figlio et al 2013).…”