The transition from full-time tenured instructors to part-time non-tenured instructors, some at poverty wages, is now a long-term trend in higher education. (See Mitchell's recent post on the subject below). With the Texas legislature beginning its 140-day biennial session last month, recent bills filed there highlight the irreconcilable conflict between rising tuition and decreased classroom instruction costs. One bill in particular would freeze college tuition rates for a four-year period.
Prior to 2003, Texas public college and university tuition rates were set by the legislature. In 2003, Texas de-regulated tuition and public institutions won the right to set their own tuition. According to a Texas Tribune article, tuition in Texas has increased 148% — adjusted for inflation, this is an 80% increase in a 13-year period. I have not seen any indication that Texas colleges and universities have been immune to the national trend shifting classroom instruction from full-time to part-time faculty. So where does the adjunct savings go?
A recent article by Robert Ubell in IEEE Spectrum says cuts in state money to state colleges and universities and a "bloating … academic bureaucracy." account for the tuition crisis in higher education. On the latter point, Ubell writes:
While the number of new students and faculty hasn’t grown much, non-academic staff at colleges and universities has ballooned—more than doubling in a generation. What’s more, compensation for administrators is often far higher than faculty pay.
So, Udall says, as tuition rates rise at alarming rates, a lower and lower percentage of the tuition receipts goes toward actual classroom education. He adds:
Under stress, most schools have opted for cost-cutting. Perhaps most troubling, they have replaced full-time tenured faculty with cheaper adjuncts. According to a 2013 report, full-time tenured and tenure-track positions at U.S. universities fell from 78 percent of teaching staff in 1969 to just 33 percent in 2009. Over the same period, the share of non-tenured positions in the teaching staff more than tripled. On average, adjuncts earn just a third of what tenured faculty make and have no job security and few benefits; in a sense, they were the bellwethers of the gig economy. Despite these and other cuts, tuitions continued to climb.
Uball promotes massive open online courses (MOOC) as an cure for runaway tuition costs. Uball says these online courses, "make it possible to reach many thousands of students at a time, so long as they had a computer and a robust Internet connection capable of video streaming. " One quoted expert suggest MOOCs will render traditional brick and mortar schools almost obsolete. Online education has its place, but eliminating the college experience is equally problematic — the maturation and networking that occurs in the traditional college or university cannot be replaced with a laptop or tablet.