What percentage of professors are part time?

At many schools, the percentage is going to be high.  I’ll explain why you should care in a minute, but first here are some startling statistics from the Association of American Colleges and Universities about tenured professors:

• Tenured college professors now represent less than one-third of today’s faculty.
• Over the next decade, 40% to 60% of college professors will retire.
• Among full-time faculty, 32% of teachers are not on the tenure track.
• More than 50% of new full-time hires are not on the tenure track.
• About 80% of part-time and  67% of full-time non-tenure track professors don’t hold doctorates.

Why should you care?

Studies have shown that freshmen are more likely to drop out of school if part-time professors are teaching their classes and, in particular, introductory classes. Part-timers trying to make a living must run from campus to campus to pay the bills, which means office hours are rare or non existent to help struggling kids.

Research also suggests that professors, including those with tenure, are less likely to put as much effort into teaching when there are many part-time teachers on campus. Strange but true!

When colleges mistreat part-time professors with zero job security, low pay and no resources, it ultimately hurts students.

Bottom Line:  When evaluating a school, ask about the use of part-time teachers in introductory courses and also in your intended major. The fewer part-time teachers, the better.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

Learn More:

Why College Professors Are Failing Students

College Visit: 31 Questions You Need to Ask

If you do, rid yourself of the habit. College graduates who write like their college professors could find their job search even harder. The business world favors employees who can write simple, declarative sentences.

In contrast, college professors are masters at obfuscation. They write stilted prose. They embrace words with five or six syllables. They crowd their papers with sentences jammed with lots of clauses. If people talked the way these pedantic profs wrote, our ears would ache.

Perhaps I’m more sensitive to ostentatious writing because I was a journalism major. My professors at the University of Missouri School of Journalism persuasively shared with me the the joys of writing simply. I still own my collegiate copy of The Elements of Style by E.B. White.

After attending journalism school, which might be the only academic refuge that truly values good writing, I couldn’t tolerate stuffy prose. I quit graduate school after one semester because I just couldn’t stomach the bombastic textbook content.

I am writing this college blog post because I ran across an academic-sentence generator at the University of Chicago’s writing program that lets you write like a professor. The software encourages you to pick different words and then it strings them together into the sort of sentences that you routinely see  in academia.

When I used the academic-sentence generator, here is the winner that I came up with:

The illusion of desire is homologous with the fantasy of linguistic transparency.

Have fun with the software, but in real life, don’t write like that!

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she writes another college blog at CBSMoneyWatch.com.

Further Reading:

Writing a Winning College Essay

The College Essay Word Count

I wanted to share with you three college posts that I wrote this week for my other college blog at CBSMoneyWatch. Hope you enjoy them!

Is Your College Professor Autistic?

It never occurred to me that a college professor could be autistic. But an economist at George Mason University wrote a convincing commentary in The Chronicle of Higher Education that there are lots of autistic professors.

Take the College Scholarship Quiz

On this post test your knowledge of what it takes to earn a college scholarship.

Six Great College Websites

If you didn’t do so great on the scholarship quiz, you can research college strategies by visiting the websites that I shared on this post. I included some of the websites that I think parents and teenagers would find most helpful.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution.