Contingent Faculty Employment and Financial Stress in Public Universities

ABSTRACT

Numerous observers and critics of higher education, including some policymakers, have suggested that hiring and maintaining faculty on tenure lines is a primary source of inefficiency in colleges and universities. These “disrupters” argue that reducing commitments to tenure will lead to cost savings and more effective adaptations to changing markets for various degrees. Does increasing hiring of “contingent” (non-tenure-line) faculty indeed bring financial benefits? In this analysis, we use longitudinal data to examine that hypothesis in financially stressed public master’s and doctoral institutions over the period 2003 to 2014. The analysis provides no support for the hypothesis. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty
• institutional finances
• financial stress
• public universities

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Ozan Jaquette for his generosity in sharing data and thank Paul Yakoboski and Karley Riffe for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As Bowen and Tobin (2015) have noted, there are no precise data on exact percentage changes in types of faculty employment, because of limitations in survey and reporting protocols. For that reason, we provide a general estimate here based on the best sources currently available, including Finkelstein et al. (2016), American Association of University Professors (2018), and Simonton (2019).

2. E.g., see Osterman (1987).

3. E.g., see Christensen and Eyring (2011).

4. The term “contingent” is used to suggest the same characteristics as those being covered by terms like “secondary labor,” “externalized labor,” “flexible workforce,” and “dual-labor-markets” in a variety of social-science literatures (e.g., see Kalleberg et al., 2000; Rebitzer & Taylor, 1991).

5. Well-known management authority Peter Drucker is among those expressing this view (see Lenzner & Johnson, 1997).

6. The tightening of age-discrimination laws in the 1980s and Congress’s ending of mandatory-retirement provisions in higher education in 1994 both contributed to rising seniority levels across colleges and universities (Ehrenberg, 2006). And, despite initial hopes, there is little evidence of successful institutional efforts to install “post-tenure review” as a powerful measure to ensure faculty quality (O’Meara, 2004).

7. For example, institutions might initially choose to use contingent faculty to reduce risks when piloting new curricular programming, but may later commit to more traditional appointments if the new academic additions are succeeding strategically.

8. For example, as noted earlier, moving to contingent faculty could actually be a part of a strategy of increasing reliance on tenure-track faculty, through redirecting the costs of those faculty to other activities for generating revenue and prestige.

9. This possibility is noted and explored by Zhang and Ehrenberg (2010), with mixed findings.

10. Bauman (2019) describes recent tensions around public institutions’ reserves between state officials and university leaders.

11. It should also be noted that limitations in available financial and personnel data preclude a similar analysis of PRRs in private and for-profit institutions.

12. Because of changes in the standard accounting definitions of net assets in the 2014–15 academic year, some institutions experienced rapid changes in variables measuring institutional finances and financial health. We chose, therefore, to limit the modeling end date to the 2013–14 academic year to account for these changes, rather than extending the analysis to 2015–16.

13. In keeping with standard approaches, we use the latter year to refer to fiscal and academic years spanning two calendar years (e.g., 2003 here refers to the 2002–2003 academic and fiscal year).

14. See especially (Jaquette & Parra, 2014, 2016) warnings about “parent-child” problems in those data.

15. We performed the Granger causality test post-estimation to test for reverse causality, or the possibility that PRR may cause NTT. Results of the Granger test show that we can reject both the null and alternative hypotheses, suggesting that PRR may cause NTT. However, the reverse Granger test also shows that we can reject the null and alternative hypotheses that NTT does not cause PRR. These findings suggest that the two variables are inextricably linked, meriting further analysis to disentangle the effects of each variable.

16. We did examine similar models in those segments in additional analyses, however, and found similar results.

17. The hypothesis that the academic effects of contingent faculty are mediated by the level of support they are provided is worth future analysis. Indeed, the results of our analysis point precisely to the need to do such work when data are available. We believe the present analysis has taken a useful first step that helps justify the need for pursuing the data needed to study the mediation hypothesis.

18. Much earlier, Clark (1963, pp. 53–54) had noted wryly that members of “the sociological tribe rarely visit the land of the physicist and have little idea what they do over there. If the sociologist were to step into the building occupied by the English department, they would encounter the cold stares if not the slingshots of the hostile natives.”

19. This would reflect the findings of Osterman (1987) in other settings.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded in part by a research grant to the first author from the TIAA Institute, titled “Workforce Flexibility and Strategic Outcomes in Colleges and Universities.” That support is gratefully acknowledged.