Effects of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of teaching performance

Abstract

This study estimates the effect of professorial tenure on undergraduate ratings of learning, instructor quality, and course quality at the University of California, San Diego from Summer 2004 to Spring 2012. During this eight-year period, 120 assistant professors received tenure and 83 associate professors attained full rank. A differences-in-differences model controlling for teaching experience, study hours, response rate, and unobserved heterogeneity among terms, courses, and professors suggests that for a given professor, tenure does not have a significant impact on student ratings of teaching performance, at least in the immediate years after advancement. The results are similar for the promotion from associate to full professor.

Keywords:

• teacher quality
• tenure
• research universities
• student evaluations

JEL Classification:

• I21
• I23
• J01

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Neumark, Jan Brueckner, Gary Richardson, Dan Bogart, Michael Gou, Vicki Chan, Andrea Amurao, Diep Tran, RitikaPuri, Dung Pham, Debbie Lee, Michael Tran, Noreen Rahman, Komal Jain, Victoria Pevarnik, Kasia de la Parra, Andrew Fuenmayor, Ali Mushtaq, Julie Davanzo, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Kyong Wan Kang, and anonymous referees for helpful comments. I would like to thank the Policy and Records Administration and the student-run CAPE organization at UCSD for data.

Notes

1. Few studies find a measureable effect of tenure on K-12 teacher quality. In their study on the effects of teacher characteristics student achievement, Aaronson, Barrow, and Sander (2007) find that tenure explains at most one percent of variation in high school teacher quality.