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Center for the Study of Academic Labor

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/10217/234335

CSAL is an interdisciplinary research center that supports scholarship, commentary, artistry and activism on contingent academic labor and the future of higher education. This digital collection includes reports and data from faculty members and affiliates.

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Browsing Center for the Study of Academic Labor by Author "Academic Labor: Research & Artistry, publisher"

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    Contingency in higher education: evidence and explanation
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2017) Schulman, Steven, author; Academic Labor: Research & Artistry, publisher
    This paper summarizes recent evidence on the trends in contingency in higher education. Contingent faculty employment, defined as the sum of full-time non-tenure track faculty employment and part-time faculty employment, increased both absolutely and relative to all faculty positions between 2002 and 2015, despite a modest downturn after 2011. The long-term growth of contingency since 2002 has primarily occurred in doctoral degree universities. The short-term decline in contingency since 2011 has primarily occurred in public associates' degree colleges and in private for-profit colleges. The short-term decline in contingency since 2011 is due to the contraction of the for-profit sector combined with a one-time drop in public associates' degree colleges. The explanation of the long-term growth of contingency as an inevitable response to financial exigency is rejected. Contingency has increased due to the priorities of higher education administrators, not state budget cuts or other drops in revenue.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Instructional spending per student: patterns and explanations
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2019) Schulman, Steven, author; Academic Labor: Research & Artistry, publisher
    Most students know what they spend on tuition and other costs of attending college, but most do not know how much their colleges spend on their education in return. This paper provides figures on instructional spending per full-time equivalent student, broken down by institutional level and sector. Variations in this measure of educational spending can be substantial even among apparently similar institutions. A cross-sectional multiple regression model utilizing 2016 IPEDS data on every public and private non-profit college and university in the United States is used to explore the possible causes of these variations. It shows that instructional spending per student rises with the portion of the budget devoted to instruction. It falls with the non-tenure track portion of the instructional staff, with the prevalence of students from low-income backgrounds, and with tuition as a fraction of total revenue. These findings are mostly as expected, but most of the variation in instructional spending per student is still unexplained.