Chapter V: Teacher Personnel Research in Higher Education

Abstract

SINCE 1958, the majority of articles on college teaching personnel have been discursive in nature. There is still a marked lack of systematic research on problems related to teacher personnel in colleges and universities. Need and Preparation of TeachersThe need for college teachers was spelled out clearly in an article in Higher Education (1961). The authors predicted a college student population in 1970 of approximately 6,000,000, of whom 4,500,000 will probably attend full time. They predicted that this enrollment would require an increase of college teachers from 232,000 during the 1959-60 academic year to 322,000 ten years later unless some new ways of teaching are discovered and accepted.The common criterion for adequate preparation for college teaching was possession of a doctorate degree. The National Education Association, Research Division (1959) reported that only one in four new college teachers had an earned doctorate, that two in ten did not have a master's degree, that in general fewer and fewer new teachers had a doctorate, and that more and more teachers had less than a master's degree. Maul (1959) supported this point of view with evidence that the proportion of new teachers holding a doctorate had dropped from 31.4 percent during the 1953-54 academic year to 23.8 percent during the 1958-59 academic year. He predicted that colleges and universities would continue to have fewer and fewer new teachers holding top academic degrees. Stoikov (1959) disagreed with the contention that the quality of college teachers was on the downgrade because fewer new teachers possessed a doctorate. Using as a criterion the percentage of full-time teaching staff holding a doctorate rather than the percentage of only new teachers, he presented evidence that the quality of college teachers had improved. His research showed that, whereas 42.2 percent of full-time staff held a doctorate in 1953, the percentage had increased to 49 in 1956. He not only pointed out that many staff members already employed proceeded to complete the doctorate but also indicated that a selective factor probably was present among those staff members who resigned.Alpren (1962) applied a different criterion of adequate preparation. Through surveying all 92 of the colleges and universities offering doctorate 391 at BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIV on March 16, 2015 http://rer.aera.net Downloaded from REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH Vol. XXXIII, No. 4