Teaching Loads and Affordability: The University of Texas Data

 Thanks for telling us what we already know.  Big state schools have large lecture classes, small seminars, and a whole lot in between. 

Ummm, is someone forgetting about the research mission of the University of Texas?  Many of those doing little teaching are the research “stars” bringing in large research grants. Vedder says he managed to both teach a heavy load and do research. It’s very different for an economist doing secondary analysis of data or theoretical work sitting at his computer in his office, as compared to lab scientists, historians having to visit archives or anthropologists doing field work.

Every research university could offer a “cheaper” degree if all faculty were told they should stop doing research and do nothing but teach.  But what would be the value of that degree?  If you want to know, turn to the for-profit institutions for your answer.

There are many problems with Vedder’s analysis, but I’ll choose just one. 

Vedder asserts that, “The lawyers, accountants and physicians I know mostly work 8-hour days
five days a week, doing more during especially busy times (tax season
for accountants, trial time for lawyers, major surgeries or emergencies
for physicians). Most faculty offices in America are empty most of the
time, but especially on Fridays, summer months, etc. Why not ask faculty
to work in a manner like the rest of the population?” 

Vedder equates amount of work with amount of time in the office.  Now, every study of faculty work shows considerably more than 40 hours per week.  I’ll be the first to grant that only a percentage of these hours are spent in offices or labs, and I’ll say that higher ed has had a PR problem as a result.  But, honestly, if Vedder thinks having profs punch time clocks will magically increase productivity, he’s wrong.  I’m not denying that there are ways to enhance productivity.

I am saying that clocking butts on office chairs isn’t one of them.

Interesting and good idea to better spread around the larger class sizes. In practice, difficult to do. At my university, some departments don’t bring in the number of majors that other do, so not enough students to have all faculty teach a 100-student course. Would require more cross-disciplinary joint courses, or find ways for those departments to attract non-majors to large classes. But, if you add more 100-student courses, you also need to build more 100-seat classrooms. My university is very limited in number of larger classrooms.

I don’t personally know any faculty members who work only 8 hours a day 5 days a week. We can’t maintain current teaching preparation and loads, service obligations, write grant proposals, conduct research, and write books and journal papers without working evenings and weekends. I manage a short vacation every few years. Seeing empty offices is meaningless. Mine is a tiny cubicle with no room for many files or books or papers, so writing has to be done in my home office. Others need to spend much of their time in the lab. Summers are often for field work, travel to archives, etc. Professors only do a small portion of their work in the departmental office.   

I have to wonder why the Chronicle would give space to someone whose analytical skills are as weak as Mr. Vedder’s.  Granted, those of us who work at institutions of all kinds need to think creatively about bringing down tuition costs, and this may involve varying degrees of effort realignments and load shifting in various ways at various institutions.  But the comparison to “other professionals” is absurd; for one thing, as others have commented, many academics (most that I know) work in excess of 40 hours/week; moreover, at my institution and at many others, like teachers everywhere, academics are on “academic year” appointments, which means we get paid to do our jobs 9 or 10 months out of 12 month year.  I work in the humanities:  many of us conduct large amounts of research over the summer–and are, in effect, not paid to do so, as we are during the academic year when we teach and conduct research and provide university service and professional service at, typically, well in excess of 40 hours a week.  Were we to be put on a professional clock, paid over the summer while receiving a three-week paid vacation and paid for the research we do during the summer that we currently do for free, then the “savings” Mr. Vedder anticipates would rapidly disappear.  It is likely in any case that most faculty in the humanities–who are something like cash cows in terms of the amount of teaching we do in relation to the production of instructional revenue–will see their teaching loads go up as the valuation of our research (which largely does not produce revenue) goes down, but this will not be the result of some wise assessment that judiciously looks at a complex system and determines a fairer and more effective sharing of teaching loads, it will be because those who think that the funding of  research in the humanities is a “luxury” we can no longer afford, and who see us as more useful as teaching workhorses, will have won the day.  And none of that will bring down the costs of tuition in any dramatic way.  Now if the increasing glut of administrators who brainstorm, pay for, and generate policy based on such assessments of faculty productivity at Texas could be reduced in size and compelled to join in the teaching mission of the university on, even, a modest scale–then, we might see some savings that would generate real tuition decreases.  I wonder how likely it is that that will ever happen.

 The sheer amount that tuition has risen in the past decade is ridiculous. We need more accessibility and affordability in higher education or it will continue to cripple our generation.Students are at a record high for student loan debt by the time they graduation college. I saw a study recently that showed that between 2003-2009 (post tuition deregulation) tuition rose over 70%.
It’s about time we start looking at where we can cut costs. Higher education shouldn’t be a sacred cow. If they aren’t being run efficiently, then we need to start asking questions and making changes.

 We might as well carry Vedder’s logic to the obvious conclusion.  Reduce the UT Austin curriculum to create 32 or so large lecture classes, each with 10,000 or so students.  Now surely that will be a high quality education! 

Seriously, did anyone find any mention of the notion of “educational quality” in his post?  Is the measure of productivity to be simply the number of students pushed out the door?

 Your tuition has increased because the funding for “public” universities has decreased.  The two flagship research universities in Texas receive less than 20% of their funding from the state.  If not for funded research that faculty bring in, the REAL price of an education at UT or TAMU would be triple what it is now. 

In the end, there’s not much blood in that turnip. Looks good from the lofty view of aggregate statistics, not so good on the ground as those with both faculty and administrative experience will quickly recognize. Just two hints: think about assigning 100-student lectures and 450 students to each and every faculty member in studio disciplines and languages. Think about all the research that isn’t accounted for by external research dollars. It’s not simple, is it?

Interesting question.  I notionally count some participation in public debates in my area of expertise as work time, but more than 10% to 15% I count as my own time, and comments such as these outside my area are definitely in my own time.  

The people this article is talking about would then presumably be offered the salaries of “professional physicians, lawyers and accountants”, right? 

Disclosure: I’m one of the UT Austin faculty who looks best by this measure, since I teach some big introductory courses. I welcome Vedder’s information as relevant to thinking about costs of programs and faculty. But one should be very cautious about drawing conclusions, for several reasons.

1. It’s no harder to teach large lecture courses than to teach small seminars. So, none of this has anything to do with faculty effort. One dissertation student requires more work than an introductory class of 300.

2. Within a given department in a given semester, some people teach large lecture courses; some teach junior/senior level courses for majors; some teach graduate seminars. These are all important contributions to the overall enterprise. And it’s not clear how to shift the overall balance among them in a way that wouldn’t damage the university’s ability to fulfill its mission.

3. Some non-tenure-track faculty are lecturers who teach courses on an as-needed basis. Some teach introductory language courses. (You don’t need to hire a flock of experts in Spanish Literature to teach Spanish I.) Others are internationally famous Adjunct Professors who teach advanced students. Generalizations about their roles can be misleading.

4. The teaching productivity of larger departments–Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, History, English, Government, Philosophy, and Spanish, to name a few–is already very high, and could be higher still if we didn’t expect students to do homework and write papers in introductory courses. But we do–and that’s a good thing.

5. Smaller departments shouldn’t be viewed as unproductive. But they are relatively expensive in cost-per-student terms. Some are politically “protected” Studies programs, but many are language programs. UT is one of the few universities offering Danish, Serbo-Croatian, Urdu, Malay, Sanskrit, and more than three dozen other rarely taught languages. Isn’t it important that military personnel, foreign service officers, and people interested in international business can go somewhere in the United States to study them?

6. There is only one faculty member in my department whose compensation is in the neighborhood of $200,000. (And he’s worth it–he’s part of the reason students come here.) My own salary, after more than 30 years, is less than half that. Every year some of my students go on to Harvard or Yale Law School and then accept entering salaries that are higher than mine. I’m not complaining; I get to work on what I think is important, not what someone else tells me to do. But the vast majority of professors at Tier I institutions are people who graduated near the top of their class, with top scores, went to top graduate programs, and have become among the very best in the world at what they do. Where else do you find large numbers of such people working for five-figure salaries?

7. Most UT Austin faculty teach two courses per semester. What would happen if you made us teach three? Or four? There are many universities that do that–and they aren’t Tier 1 research institutions. Why does that matter? Contrast Austin with Stillwater, Fort Collins, Pullman, Terre Haute, or Chico to get some idea.

I’m torn between seeing the obvious fallacies in this article’s argument and finding, nonetheless, some merit in a few of the suggestions floated here (for example, reducing the disparity in teaching load between  the tenured “stars” and the hardworking adjuncts who would actually love to have the chance to devote a little time to research occasionally) and rationalizing the teaching load to increase professors’  exposure students without actually increasing the teaching load (the 2-2 load where only one course is a big lecture seems quite attractive to me). I also like the idea that CHOOSING to do more teaching in exchange for less research (as opposed to having this scenario thrust upon one) could be an option.  The problem with the current system is that if you’re lucky enough to get a TT job at a major university, you HAVE to choose research over teaching, even if your research isn’t really “urgent” (does the world really *need* me to churn out 2 peer-reviewed articles about obscure Russian literature every year?) and even if you’re acknowledged as an effective teacher and enjoy being in the classroom.  On the flip side, of course, the less fortunate are stuck in low-paid adjunct jobs that keep them so busy they despair of their research’s ever seeing the light of day.

But, of course, the interesting ideas outlined above are seriously undermined by the article’s fallacies, which include: (1) equating office time with work time: I don’t know anyone in the professoriate who works less than 60 hours a week, assuming that  committee meetings, answering student email, and suchlike busywork count as work time; (2) equating research productivity with research funding, a model that only really works with the physical sciences since as others have pointed out, humanities research is cheap and attracts very  little funding (but much more often  results in the publication of entire books, as opposed to posters!). Simplistic measures like “number of dollars of funding received” or “number of pages produced” cannot capture productivity.  And finally (3) sad to say, that attractive idea of everyone teaching a 2-2 load of which one course is a 100-student lecture will only work if you can persuade (or force) *students* to distribute themselves evenly among fields.  I would love to teach a 100-student lecture occasionally.  The problem is that only 25 students per year can actually be tempted into a lecture course on Soviet literature.  I believe it’s nonetheless important for SOMEONE in the U.S. to know something about Soviet literature; my field is small, but it deserves to exist.  It does mean, though, that no matter how willing I am to teach more students, there simply aren’t more students there for me to teach.

What a ridiculous article. Comes from the same sweatshop labor mindset that says that primary school teacher unions are “exploiting the system” and taking home too much pay.

And a degree for only $10,000? Jesus, people happily pay cell phone bills for their smart phones on the order of $100-$200 per month, but they think a 4-year degree to prepare them for their job should cost $10k? What the hell?

You are correct in noting that some outsize growth comes from administrative bloat. 

That said, teaching productivity has declined roughly 50% in 50 years. A full load was 12 hours when I was an undergraduate, most of my professors had active research agendas as well. It dropped to 9 by the time I was in a doctoral program. Vedder is advocating a minimum six hour load and finding that such change would cut tuition in half. Would you not agree that those figures, assuming they are correct, point to a real problem? 

Also note the positive correlation between high output teachers and high output researchers. This is not a surprise and is true of life in general. Find a truly busy person to get something done; the person who has surplus time may be too busy telling you how hard he works.

“What a ridiculous article. Comes from the same sweatshop labor mindset that says that primary school teacher unions are “exploiting the system” and taking home too much pay.”

I disagree. Look at the mathematical implication of the fact that increasing the minimum load to six hours would cut tuition in half, leaving the same top line budget in place. Look at the relations between teaching and research grants. What does any of this have to do with pay? It is about work vs. non-work.   

The wealthy private schools would enjoy a field day picking off the faculty stars without even having to offer much more in salary. They could merely offer a bit more pay and the old standard R-1 teaching load. Research funds would follow the key profs and the poor publics end up on the losing end two times. Brilliant. You could hardly have come up with a better way to further diminish public higher education. Might as well just set up a big dispenser with the sign “State U Diplomas–Take One”. That’s how much real value those degrees will have if anyone follows these suggestions. 
Has this guy ever considered unintended consequences and push back??

The “mathematical implication” is merely an assertion on the part of Vedder and the two students–one still his undergraduate?–who co-authored the paper. If you believe that it would actually halve tuition, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Earlier, I said, “. . . assuming they are correct . . . .” I cannot vouch for these numbers but they pass the smell test in that they align with a number of related metrics. In getting this claim out we can be certain that naysayers will be trying to disprove it and change agents will be reinforcing it with other metrics. For what its worth, my money is on the the general validity of the claim. I say this not to harm public higher education but to create the self-awareness that it has slipped into a state of disrepair that threatens its very future. Efficiency is not everything but neither is it irrelevant. Everywhere I have taught, a small but significant percent of the most highly paid faculty worked “the system” to do as little as they could while they poured their efforts into independent consulting the payments for which they did not share with the university. As we tell our students, it doesn’t take too many zeros to lower your mean to an unacceptable level.

Is that you, Richard? If so, please fill us in on your teaching load. And while you’re at it, I’d be interested to know about any income derived from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and exactly who bankrolls that outfit.

If in fact there are considerable numbers of faculty teaching relatively few students (I don’t know and, not working in Texas, I will not take time to review the data), there would appear to be some inefficiencies, perhaps some programs that are too small to justify.

However, I am troubled by the glib relationship assumed between grant dollars and research: “Arguably, the most interesting statistic relates to the teaching load of
the faculty getting the most research-grant money—it was only modestly
lower than that of the faculty receiving the least amount of funds. In
other words, it looks like there is a good-sized cadre of highly
productive faculty at UT who both do lots of research and also teach a
fairly respectable amount—but there is, lamentably, also a big group
that does not do a great deal of either, probably because they don’t
have to.” Grants are much greater in certain fields, especially science and engineering disciplines that require expensive equipment in order to prepare students for the workplace and advance cutting-edge research; grants are much smaller in disciplines like literature or religion. Grants totals are not a meaningful guide to the research productivity. 

jan89,

As I said in an earlier comment, the generalizations seem to align with other findings in public universities. This does not mean they are correct here. If you have facts to assert that Mr. Vedder is wrong, produce them. So far as I can tell, all of the source material is public information. My suggestion would be to evaluate the central claim; i.e., teaching productivity in that system is so low that “rising” to meet what is obviously a low bar would produce enough surplus revenue to reduce tuition by 50%. That is a straightforward empirical claim the merit of which can be assessed reasonably quickly. What I see here (not from you) is defensiveness posing as personal attacks and sleight of hand changes of the subject. If it turns out that Mr. Vedder is correct, be prepared to stand up and call for change. Higher education’s extreme conservatism is going to be its undoing. In my opinion, we are witnessing that undoing right now; much of the good will go down with the bad.

Budgets have increased because many universities have expanded their departments, course offerings, and buildings.  They’ve become better institutions and offer their students more opportunitiies. 

Jan89, This misses my main point. What has declined for the past 40 or more years is average hours taught, and the credits delivered and degrees conferred per dollar, after adjusting for inflation and other  relevant indicators. What has increased over the same period, is how much faculty are paid per student, per credit, etc. again adjusting for inflation, etc. On a per-credit or per student basis, faculty compensation has increased at 2-5 times the CPI. Given that this has been going on for so many years, the situation described by Mr. Vedder is a conservative not a radical assessment of the problem. Separately, I did not read Mr. Vedder’s analysis as suggesting that “most” professors were under-performing (I don’t think he ever said “lazy”; many of the under-performing ones I know are moonlighting at for-profits, sometimes against their university contracts). I read him as saying that enough are under-performing that we could gain the efficiencies he described by requiring everyone to come up to a level that is probably still below the performance of the top quartile.

Much of the time research contributes to knowledge.   When done right, it sparks curiosity both among other scholars and among students.  The most original research on Victorian literature will never cure cancer, but it might just spark the kind of curiosity and originality needed among those who go on to cure cancer.

Amen. This is the dirty little secret. You could also have mentioned the number of redundant journals that have sprung up to support the publish or perish initiative that took off in the 70′s and 80′s. I have no problem with any kind of research agenda, however obscure. I have a problem with being forced to participate in the research and co-author games that we all know are phony, and I have a problem with substituting much (not all) of the research for teaching. My doctoral mentor carried a nine hour load for three quarters and a six hour summer quarter load while he managed funded research for 18 years that I know of. He was competent. Today, I see whining profs who are carrying a six hour load and asking for half or all of it off so they can plan to do some research. Poor babies. We are looking at the dumbing down of the professoriate.

You need to reread what I said above and below. As for Mr. Vedder’s paper, I took it as an economic analysis in contrast to most of the defensive responses I am seeing here. BTW: I’ve been in Texas twice in my life, both times to fly an airplane back to another state. I have no pony in this race but I see significant waste everywhere I look in public higher education. Mr. Vedder is merely systematizing one facet of that waste and you and some others are, predictably, wishing he would look the other way.

These all seem like valid points but they will have no impact unless you take a systematic approach. Nitpicking is seen for what it is.

Determine the number and percent of misclassification. Determine that the errors are not random and do not end up canceling each other out. If they do not, estimate the impact on the 50% reduction claim and produce a revised claim. If the claim changes by more than 10% percent, write a piece for CHE and submit it to the local TX papers. 

You need to be prepared. If you get to zero, or close, you have a real case. However, if your findings show that requiring all instructors to teach at a level that the public and common sense would not deem unreasonable, would reduce tuition by even as little as 10%, you will not get nor deserve much support. Most folks have been hit hard by the recession and they see no reason why TX faculty should not share the pain. I think I agree with them.

I’m not making a counter argument. I’m trying to help you. Now you make ridiculous claims that I am Vedder, etc. If you want to remain ineffective, have at it. This is my last attempt.

moved to correct postion in thread

Doesn’t describe my colleagues. First we don’t spend enough time in the classroom, now it’s not enough time in the office. Personally it’s not enough time in the lab or the library. Maybe it’s just not enough time for all that’s expected? Perhaps if the majority of faculty were paid like the other professions Vedder mentions?

Kudos!!! Change and human beings in the same sentence – dangerous!! 

In my experiences, many  bosess, lacking proper manners and good old fashion ettiquette, do not know how to manage people, let alone be agents of change or inspire others. I have witnessed many institutions, non-profit, for profit, as well as community centers and assocations, etc., hire senior executives, who many times, have had no idea about administration, particular needs of the unit they run, etc. Yet, new management, more oftern than not, rushes to implement and deploy “new world order” without taking the pulse of the institutional culture nor reaching out to those who address the needs of the unit in what I refer to as “workers in the trenches” possessing deep and realistic knowledge of what works and what does not work via processes, flow of information, etc.

You have to trust, value, and respect those who possess the knowledge bases and who have worked directly in those areas which you deem need to change. Seek out their feedback and ideas – its’s simple – don’t overcomplicate: go to the source. Someone in that organization originally hired them for their knowledge so why now is that knowledge no longer being listened to or tapped ?? Micomanaging, barking orders, pushing agenda, policy, strategic planning, etc. with no real data, is disrespect, never works, wastes everyones time, and takes focus from work. It takes the same time and energy to be decent and polite and the bonus is - you will earn points as a human being. If you can’t respect them, why are you there?? At least respect yourself and speak up – politely, with respect, and data to support your claims and concerns for your unit.

Larry Scott would be the obvious one.

Unfortunately, the “big thinkers” in college sports aren’t people who think there are any moral, ethical, or academic problems in them. College sports’ “big thinkers” are cable TV execs, advertisers, and mobile app designers who–while the people recommended by the commenters, the op-ed’ers, institute heads, chin-stroking professors, et al. are bloviating, attending conferences, tsk-tsking to each other–are designing more ways to put big-time college sports in the public’s paying face 24/7/365. The unfortunate exception in commenters’ recommendations is Larry Scott, who’s more of a corrupter than the aggregate of drivers who park in a certain corporate lot in Bristol, CT. He is to solving college sports’ “problems” what Larry Flynt was to feminism.

There is a guy in Germany at the Georg-August University Goettingen that is doing extensive work on the topic of college athletics! Very interesting thoughts