Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Every two out of three faculty members in U.S. postsecondary institutes are not currently tenure eligible, with most them holding part-time positions (National Center of Education Statistics 2015). Adjunct faculty teach the majority of undergraduate students and are the key to create teaching and learning environments. Such dramatic growth of adjunct faculty numbers since the 1970s mirrors the trend of general labor markets in the United States in the past few decades. However, anecdotal evidence suggests there are some major distinctions between adjunct faculty and contingent workers in other industries: contingent workers are typically younger, belong to an ethnic minority, have no high school degree, and come from low-income family; adjunct faculty, on the other hand, are typically in their mid-40s and hold post-graduate degrees.

There are two integrated questions related to such trends. First, what are the labor market experiences for adjuncts before and during their employment with a college? Second, can individual performance in alternative industries observable at the time of recruitment predict faculty quality? To explore these questions, this is the first study linking postsecondary faculty effectiveness with their labor market experience outside of college instruction. I obtained two pieces of data: the first are faculty’s employment history, including around 10 million unemployment insurance (UI) quarterly earning records for all employees in an entire state from 2001 to 2012; the second are student transcript records for all public two-year and four-year colleges in this state from academic year 2005 to 2012, which can be linked with the profile of the instructor who taught the corresponding course section. The profile includes information on the employment status with the college, academic rank, degrees obtained over time, and the UI records.

To assess adjunct faculty quality and its relationship with observable individual characteristics at the time of hire, I construct faculty valued-added models (Bettinger and Long, 2004). First, I estimate the effect of each faculty member on a set of student outcomes, including persistence, college completion and earnings. Second, I regress these estimates of faculty effects against their characteristics when employed, including average earning from a previous job, average industry earning of the previous job, and the percentile in the earning distribution of the previous job.

Preliminary results suggest that temporary economic hardship could be the major reason for adjunct faculty switching from other industries to higher education. They experience declines of up to 25% in total quarterly earnings before starting teaching. The decrease in earnings is more severe for supplemental adjunct faculty, who are on non-recurring temporary contracts with a college. Regression results suggest that adjunct instructors who were drawn from industries with higher average earnings and who were on the higher end of the industry earning distribution before teaching are significantly more effective. For example, an increase of $1,000 in average industry earnings of previous job is associated with a 0.04 SD increase in students’ subsequent credit enrollment in the subject area.