Who’s Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track

At community colleges, four out of five instructors worked outside the tenure track in 2007. At public research institutions, graduate students made up 41 percent of the instructional staff that year. And at all institutions, the proportion of instructors working part time continued to grow.

Those statistics, from a new report from the American Federation of Teachers, underscore a fact by now well established, that tenured and tenure-track professors are an ever-shrinking slice of the professoriate at American colleges and universities.

The report, “The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997-2007,” shows that the proportion of instructional staff members not on the tenure track — including graduate students — increased from two-thirds to 73 percent over that period.

That trend, if unchecked, will eventually reduce the proportion of tenured and tenure-track professors to “a tiny speck,” said Barbara Bowen, one of the federation’s vice presidents and chair of its committee on academic staffing.

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