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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
AHRC Email Alert April 2013
Campus Technology FREE Webinar: Implementing Innovative Learning Environments – The Future of the Connected Classroom
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Monday, April 8, 2013
AAUP Releases New Faculty Salary Survey
Dear Colleague,
Salaries for full-time faculty members at American colleges and universities continue to recover slowly from the ongoing recession in higher education, but the longer-term trends are not promising. That’s the finding in this year’s annual report on faculty compensation and the economics of higher education (http://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/2012-13salarysurvey) issued by the American Association of University Professors.
The report provides current data collected by the AAUP on salary and benefits for full-time faculty members at more than 1,100 colleges and universities. It also presents in-depth analysis of three perennial concerns and provides new data on each: The continuing rise of contingent (non-tenure-track) employment for faculty members, the sharp decline in state appropriations for higher education even after the end of the Great Recession in the broader economy, and the growing salary disadvantage for faculty members teaching in the public sector.
- The
large majority (76 percent) of college and university instructional
appointments across the nation are now contingent: full-time faculty
members off the tenure track, part-time faculty members, and graduate
student employees. The AAUP report provides an update on the overall
employment trend and a recap of important data on part-time faculty pay
released in the last year. The Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW),
of which the AAUP is a founding member, issued a report last year that
found part-time faculty members earned a median of $2,700 for teaching a
three-month course.
This year’s report provides an entirely new analysis of compensation and working conditions specifically for full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, also derived from the CAW survey. The majority of new full-time faculty appointments have been off the tenure track for two decades now, but the category has previously been defined mostly by what it is not. The new analysis finds that full-time non-tenure-track faculty members earned a median academic year salary of $47,500 in fall 2010, similar to the pay of entry-level faculty members found in the AAUP data for that year. The difference, however, is that non-tenure-track faculty members have only limited-term appointments that do not constitute a career path, and they struggle with some of the same inadequate support for quality instruction faced by part-time faculty members. The report looks at four aspects of support aside from salary and benefits. - Two
further public policy issues affecting higher education are included in
the report: state appropriations and the pay disadvantage for public-sector
faculty. The report includes a state-by-state analysis of changes in
higher education appropriations during the recessionary period. The totals
across all 50 states show an 18 percent decline in higher education
appropriations between 2008 and 2013, but there are wide variations.
- Finally,
the report provides a new depiction of the continuing salary disadvantage
for faculty members in the public sector. The AAUP data for 2012-13
indicate that full-time faculty members teaching at public colleges and
universities earn 7 to 35 percent less than their colleagues in comparable
positions at private institutions. This difference accumulates over the
course of an academic career, and makes it increasingly difficult for
public institutions to hire and retain the best faculty members.
The salary disadvantage experienced by faculty members at public colleges and universities, and the continued growth in exploitative contingent employment practices, are thus matters of significant public policy. The disinvestment from fully supported and compensated faculty positions in the public sector means that the majority of students will be deprived of the most engaged instructors and mentors. Elected leaders consistently proclaim that investing in higher education is a state and national imperative, yet the data on state appropriations and public-private faculty salary disparities belie these proclamations. Public officials need to hear from their constituents about the value of higher education, and, importantly, about the critical role of faculty members in providing that education.
The complete report (including the institutional listings of average salary by rank and gender and aggregate tables for comparison) is available on our website, and AAUP members will also receive a hard copy of this year’s report in the mail as part of their member subscription to Academe. Non-members may order a copy by visiting the online AAUP store (http://www.aaup2.org/store.htm) for $95.00 or calling (202) 737-5900.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions about this report, please let us know (aaupfcs@aaup.org). This is always a busy time of year, but we try to respond to every message. We look forward to hearing from you.
The mission of the AAUP is to advance
academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values
and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education's
contribution to the common good. By joining, faculty members, academic
professionals, and graduate students help to shape the future of the profession
and proclaim their dedication to the education community. Visit the AAUP website
and Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.
Faculty Focus: Course Evaluations: Helping Students Reflect on Their Feedback
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/course-evaluations-helping-students-reflect-on-their-feedback/
I always hesitate to do posts on student ratings. Every teacher has opinions, a lot of which aren’t supported by the research. But this post is on a topic about which there is little disagreement. Students don’t take the process all that seriously, especially now that they complete rating forms online. Few take the time to provide teachers with quality feedback. They mark the rating boxes quickly and dash off a few poorly worded comments. Most of the time it’s not a process that benefits teachers or students, which is sad because it could be an experience with learning potential for both.
Yes, students can learn from activities that involve them in providing instructional feedback, especially if it’s focused on their learning experiences in class. Most students have little insight into themselves as learners. So, if the assessment activity gets them thinking about how they learn and what teaching policies, practices, and behavior expedite their efforts to learn, it can be a beneficial activity for them as well as for the teacher.
The trick is coming up with feedback activities that garner these benefits and I just found a great example. Professor La Lopa, who teaches hospitality and tourism management at Purdue University, has students in his 200-level Human Resource Management course write a reflective paper on quality teaching and its assessment. (I can hear some of you wondering about the appropriateness of the assignment. His article, referenced below, explains the context which more than justified it for me.) What’s most creative about the assignment are some of the prompts students respond to in the paper. Here’s a condensed and slightly edited version of some of them.
- How
would you describe your ideal professor? Include a description of the
classroom setting (number of students, physical space, etc). Paint as
clear a picture for me as possible so I can envision your ideal college
professor and class.
- Now
describe the typical teacher you have actually experienced in your courses
here. What is the typical classroom setting like?
- If you
could put one
question on a course evaluation what would it be and why would
you ask it?
- If you
were the president of your college or university, what method would you
use to evaluate the [teaching] performance of college professors?
The article is worth reading for the quotes excerpted from the student papers alone. Their observations demonstrate just how well an assignment like this gets students thinking about good teaching, its assessment, and its relationship to learning.
There are lots of potential spin-offs from an activity framed around these questions. The most frequently mentioned characteristics of the “ideal” professor could be shared and discussed. Why these characteristics? Are these characteristics that support efforts to learn? How? Why? How about the teacher writing a short description of the “ideal” student followed by another short description of the “typical” student? I wonder if the one question teachers would add to the course evaluation would be anything like the question students would add. Maybe the best way to evaluate professors is by how well their students learn. Is that a good idea? Why? Why not?
There’s lots of research documenting that students don’t believe that their feedback is taken seriously by institutions or instructors, which in part explains the poor quality of the feedback they provide. And there’s lots of research documenting that if faculty talk with students about assessment feedback it improves end-of-course ratings. It’s a visible sign that teachers care and are willing to work with students, even if we don’t make all the changes they propose. Good feedback activities like the one described here have one final benefit: they can be learning experiences for students.
Please share the ways you collect, respond to, and use feedback from students. We’re especially interested in those ways that also encourage students to encounter themselves as learners.
Reference: La Lopa, J. (2011). Student reflection on quality teaching and how to assess it in higher education. Journal of Culinary Science & Technology, 9 (4), 282-292.
UCD CFD Blog Rethinking the Bottom Line for Internationalization: What Are Students Learning?
Rethinking the Bottom Line for Internationalization: What Are Students Learning?
Rethinking the Bottom Line for Internationalization: What Are Students Learning?
From The Chronicle, March 21, 2013
The following is a guest post by Madeleine F. Green, a senior fellow at Nafsa: the Association of International Educators and a senior program consultant at the Teagle Foundation.
I am working with student and faculty leaders in the Honors and Leaders Program at CU Denver in planning a possible Maymester to Ireland in 2014. As a US Fulbright Scholar Alum and Fulbright Ambassador Emerita, I so believe in international initiatives and cultural ambassadorship. There’s much to consider, here.
___________________________________________________________________________________
For many, if not most, institutions, “success” in internationalization is a bit of a numbers game. It is defined by the number of students going abroad, the number of international students and the amount of revenue they generate, and the number of campuses abroad or courses offered with an international focus.
But what do these numbers mean for student learning? Although many colleges and universities cite producing “global citizens” as a goal, few have a clear set of learning outcomes associated with this label, a map of the learning experiences that will produce this learning, or an assessment plan in place to determine what students are actually learning and what that means for curricular improvement. Clearly, institutional performance and the student-learning perspectives can be related to each other, but one cannot assume causality in either direction. As anyone who has tried to assess student learning knows, a given set of institutional activities or the participation rates in various courses or programs does not tell you anything about what knowledge students are obtaining.
Consider the example of study abroad. It is no longer deemed acceptable to cite the “it changed my life” argument as the self-evident truth of its impact. Education-abroad professionals, researchers, and faculty members are looking seriously at outcomes, especially in light of the rapid growth of short-term overseas programs. What are realistic learning goals for these short experiences, and how do they compare to longer-term experiences? In a word, there is wide agreement that “being there” does not automatically result in learning, let alone “transformation.”
To further complicate matters, education abroad is only one approach to learning about the world. And as Mark Salisbury points out in his recent opinion article, U.S. higher education can’t put all its eggs in the study-abroad basket, no matter how wonderful it is. Although it is difficult to estimate the proportion of students who study abroad for credit sometime during their undergraduate careers, data from the International Institute of Education tell us that only 274,000 students out of more than 20 million enrolled in postsecondary education studied abroad in 2010-11.
Thus, the key question for higher-education institutions is how the overwhelming majority of students who do not go abroad will learn about the world and develop the intercultural skills they will need as citizens and workers. To address this question, institutions will need to be very clear about what knowledge, attitude, and skills students must learn, where and how they will acquire them, and what constitutes evidence of such learning.
The crucial first step is to articulate a series of agreed-upon global-learning outcomes. As is often the case in academe, the process is as important as the product. Having an inclusive process will enable a wide variety of people to relate the exercise to their own work. Global learning should belong to everyone. Here, there is help available. For Nafsa: the Association of International Educators, I wrote “Measuring and Assessing Internationalization,” which includes sample learning outcomes developed by a variety of institutions and guidance on how to develop a process that focuses on global-student learning.
The next step is identifying which courses and programs deal with these learning outcomes. Having a global or international requirement as part of the general education program is one common way to ensure that every student gets at least a small dose of global learning. Such a requirement is a good foundation, but does not go far enough. Institutions also need to look at majors, programs, and individual courses, as well as campus life and education abroad. In a word, global learning is not a one-time event.
The third step involves assessment. Assessment enables institutions to find out whether they are really producing “globally competent” graduates. This is indeed tricky business, for some institutions are much more serious about assessment than others, and capacity varies tremendously. Many faculty members find the language and trappings of assessment annoying and trivializing, and consider it a creation of the bureaucrats that distracts them from their real work. Yet, if you ask faculty members “how do you know what your students are learning?,” that can lead to some interesting and serious conversations. Successful assessment requires ownership by faculty, an investment in faculty development, and a process that is both manageable and continually focused on improving student learning.
And finally, institutions must apply what they learned from assessment to improving curriculum and teaching. This loops the conversation back to whether the goals are the appropriate ones (they need not be cast in stone), and what modifications could be made in content or pedagogy to improve student learning.
As internationalization becomes more central to U.S. higher education, it will be important to shine the spotlight on students. Although internationalization, alas, is increasingly a matter of numbers, profile, and branding, the real measure of success should be how well students are equipped to live and work in a rapidly changing global environment.
From The Chronicle, March 21, 2013
The following is a guest post by Madeleine F. Green, a senior fellow at Nafsa: the Association of International Educators and a senior program consultant at the Teagle Foundation.
I am working with student and faculty leaders in the Honors and Leaders Program at CU Denver in planning a possible Maymester to Ireland in 2014. As a US Fulbright Scholar Alum and Fulbright Ambassador Emerita, I so believe in international initiatives and cultural ambassadorship. There’s much to consider, here.
___________________________________________________________________________________
For many, if not most, institutions, “success” in internationalization is a bit of a numbers game. It is defined by the number of students going abroad, the number of international students and the amount of revenue they generate, and the number of campuses abroad or courses offered with an international focus.
But what do these numbers mean for student learning? Although many colleges and universities cite producing “global citizens” as a goal, few have a clear set of learning outcomes associated with this label, a map of the learning experiences that will produce this learning, or an assessment plan in place to determine what students are actually learning and what that means for curricular improvement. Clearly, institutional performance and the student-learning perspectives can be related to each other, but one cannot assume causality in either direction. As anyone who has tried to assess student learning knows, a given set of institutional activities or the participation rates in various courses or programs does not tell you anything about what knowledge students are obtaining.
Consider the example of study abroad. It is no longer deemed acceptable to cite the “it changed my life” argument as the self-evident truth of its impact. Education-abroad professionals, researchers, and faculty members are looking seriously at outcomes, especially in light of the rapid growth of short-term overseas programs. What are realistic learning goals for these short experiences, and how do they compare to longer-term experiences? In a word, there is wide agreement that “being there” does not automatically result in learning, let alone “transformation.”
To further complicate matters, education abroad is only one approach to learning about the world. And as Mark Salisbury points out in his recent opinion article, U.S. higher education can’t put all its eggs in the study-abroad basket, no matter how wonderful it is. Although it is difficult to estimate the proportion of students who study abroad for credit sometime during their undergraduate careers, data from the International Institute of Education tell us that only 274,000 students out of more than 20 million enrolled in postsecondary education studied abroad in 2010-11.
Thus, the key question for higher-education institutions is how the overwhelming majority of students who do not go abroad will learn about the world and develop the intercultural skills they will need as citizens and workers. To address this question, institutions will need to be very clear about what knowledge, attitude, and skills students must learn, where and how they will acquire them, and what constitutes evidence of such learning.
The crucial first step is to articulate a series of agreed-upon global-learning outcomes. As is often the case in academe, the process is as important as the product. Having an inclusive process will enable a wide variety of people to relate the exercise to their own work. Global learning should belong to everyone. Here, there is help available. For Nafsa: the Association of International Educators, I wrote “Measuring and Assessing Internationalization,” which includes sample learning outcomes developed by a variety of institutions and guidance on how to develop a process that focuses on global-student learning.
The next step is identifying which courses and programs deal with these learning outcomes. Having a global or international requirement as part of the general education program is one common way to ensure that every student gets at least a small dose of global learning. Such a requirement is a good foundation, but does not go far enough. Institutions also need to look at majors, programs, and individual courses, as well as campus life and education abroad. In a word, global learning is not a one-time event.
The third step involves assessment. Assessment enables institutions to find out whether they are really producing “globally competent” graduates. This is indeed tricky business, for some institutions are much more serious about assessment than others, and capacity varies tremendously. Many faculty members find the language and trappings of assessment annoying and trivializing, and consider it a creation of the bureaucrats that distracts them from their real work. Yet, if you ask faculty members “how do you know what your students are learning?,” that can lead to some interesting and serious conversations. Successful assessment requires ownership by faculty, an investment in faculty development, and a process that is both manageable and continually focused on improving student learning.
And finally, institutions must apply what they learned from assessment to improving curriculum and teaching. This loops the conversation back to whether the goals are the appropriate ones (they need not be cast in stone), and what modifications could be made in content or pedagogy to improve student learning.
As internationalization becomes more central to U.S. higher education, it will be important to shine the spotlight on students. Although internationalization, alas, is increasingly a matter of numbers, profile, and branding, the real measure of success should be how well students are equipped to live and work in a rapidly changing global environment.
Education Admin Web Advisor: Issue 23, Spril 8, 2013
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