Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Professors and instructors are a chief input into the higher education production process, yet we know very little about their specific role in promoting student success. Though growing evidence that teacher quality is an important determinant of student achievement in K12 has led many school districts to identify and reward teachers with high value-added, these practices have not made inroads into higher education. Thus relatively little is known about the importance of or correlates of instructor effectiveness in postsecondary education or whether colleges could improve student performance by altering how instructors are recruited, rewarded, or allocated.

In this paper we measure the variation in postsecondary teacher effectiveness and estimate its relationship to instructor characteristics such as overall and course-specific teaching experience, current teaching load, and salary. We also document the dynamics of teacher mobility as it relates to effectiveness. We estimate effectiveness using value-added models of student achievement, applied both to short-run and longer-run student outcomes, such as current and future course performance, respectively. We exploit the fact that students cannot select instructors when registering for courses, thus instructor assignment is effectively random.  We explore this issue in the context of a very large, for-profit university that offers both online and in-person courses in a wide array of fields and degree programs at many campuses across the country.  We focus on instructors of the 30,000 course sections of introductory college agebra, which is required for all Bachelor's students, yet often is a roadblock to student progress.  We find considerable variation in instructor effectiveness that has little relationship to compensation.