Adjuncts and Retention

In our discussions here about academe’s use of adjunct faculty members, one issue that has arisen several times is the notion that full-time faculty members can — and should — provide much more support for students beyond the classroom than can be fairly asked of adjuncts. Since such support is demonstrably effective in promoting student success and retention, it’s worth considering how the high use of adjuncts affects retention and graduation rates.

Student-retention rates are affected by many, many institutional factors. For example, there is a fairly direct correlation between incoming students’ academic credentials and their first-to-second-year retention rates, which explains, in part, why the most selective institutions tend to have the highest retention. It could also be argued that such institutions have the highest-quality academic programs, and that, as they tend to be rich, they also tend to rely less on adjuncts — all of which are at least somewhat true. However, it’s very difficult to disentangle correlations and causations here in a way that will lead to rigorous conclusions.

For the rest of us at less-selective institutions, the picture is somewhat clearer. Students who are not exceptionally well-prepared for college do better with careful, sustained attention from faculty members, and that kind of attention is much more likely to come from full-time, rather than adjunct, instructors.

Excess use of adjunct faculty members, then, can actually cause a kind of spiral of decreasing retention, and here’s why. The make-or-break moment in retention generally occurs almost immediately in students’ first year of college. At institutions that employ a lot of adjuncts, generally most of them are teaching in general-education/core-curriculum courses that students encounter early in college. Thus, from a retention standpoint, adjunct faculty members are serving in the place where their service is contributing to poor retention.

In turn, poor retention actually increases the call to use adjunct faculty members. As fewer first- and second-year students progress into majors and upper-division curricula, the overall proportion of an institution’s credit-hour production shifts to general education. Even if full-time faculty members teach an increasing load of such courses, unless new hires are strictly required to teach them, the load will move to adjuncts, and that will happen regardless of how cooperative full-time faculty members are in adjusting their teaching loads.

Since I’ve been trying to provide actual numbers regarding adjuncts, here are a few more. When I was chair of an English department of 22 full-time faculty members (again at a university with a 4/4 teaching load), by the time I factored in various release times (mine for chairing, for example, as well as those for coordinating women’s studies, directing the honors program, and that sort of thing), if we staffed the entirety of our core-curriculum obligations with full-time faculty members, we would have been able to offer no more than 10 courses for majors over the entire academic year (we offered more than 140 sections of core courses each year). And this was at a respectable, and increasingly selective, small public university, albeit one without a large cohort of graduate teaching assistants. We actually did find a strategy to reduce the use and abuse of adjunct faculty members, but it was extremely complex and required a very large infusion of money.

To offer the same amount of courses with new full-time hires would have required hiring about a dozen more of them. Once again, the numbers just didn’t add up. However, increasing retention would have made a strong argument (in fact, it did) for further increases in full-time hiring, as it shifted the load balance back toward upper-division and graduate courses that posed stricter demands on faculty qualifications.

If these issues were easy to resolve, someone would have already done it.