Friday Interview: UNC System Faculty Work Loads Explored

As state legislators grappled this year with a multibillion-dollar budget hole, the University of North Carolina’s $2.8 billion appropriation faced increased scrutiny. More than one-third of the UNC system’s academic expenses go to faculty salaries. Does North Carolina get much bang for those bucks? Jay Schalin, director of state policy for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, discussed the issue with Donna Martinez for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

Martinez: What got you interested in the specific question of faculty work load and productivity?

Schalin: Well, there were a couple of things. I’d been working on a study with [Emory University English professor] Mark Bauerlein on faculty research in general. But more specifically, I was at an Education Appropriations meeting at the legislature early this year, and the UNC system cited a figure of 3.37 classes per professor per semester, and that didn’t seem quite right to me.

Martinez: Why not? Why did that stand out to you?

Schalin: Well, because of our familiarity with the UNC system, we figured it would be a lot less. We know many professors who teach one class a term. It just did not quite sit right.

Martinez: You were so curious and interested in that figure that you began to do some research and analysis, and you’ve written about it. It’s a piece called “Breaking a Runaway Train,” and it can be found at www. popecenter.org. Jay, what did you decide to do? How did you analyze this to be fair to the UNC system, but to come to a number that you felt was accurate?

Schalin: Well, a lot of measures of faculty work loads try to incorporate all kinds of things like research, administrative duties, reading about their subject to keep current. And this is so complex and so difficult, I just decided to ignore all that and try to answer one basic question: How many classes do professors teach?

Martinez: What did you find once you looked at that question?

Schalin: Well, I decided to use a high and a low method rather than trying to find one number. Sometimes that’s a more accurate way of doing things. I bent over backward to be fair to the professors. My one measure — the one that gives the higher number — I even give credit for teaching a class to a professor who does no more than supervise one doctoral dissertation for a whole semester. The other one, I required them to supervise three doctoral dissertations to get credit for one class, because there are a lot of different types of classes. It gets pretty complex.

Martinez: So you’ve come up with a range.

Schalin: Right. I came up with a range, and for the higher number, the more lenient number, it came out to 2.68 classes per professor, per semester. And the low was right around two [classes per professor, per semester].

Martinez: Now what does that say to you as someone who analyzes higher education as your career field? What does that say about the UNC system?

Schalin: I think that they’re overdoing some stuff besides teaching. There seems to be a lot of room for them to teach more. Some of the schools, the smaller schools — the one that I used for my study was UNC-Asheville — and its professors are legally required to teach an average of four classes per semester. And the high measure for them was only 2.67. So I’m wondering whether there’s an oversight problem or some kind of management problem in which they’ve completely given up on trying to enforce this four classes per semester rule.

Martinez: Interesting that that would be the requirement, but yet it’s not being met. You kind of wonder if state legislators are going to be looking into that type of information because, Jay, one of the things you get at in your piece is that there is efficiency and savings that could be made in the UNC system.

Schalin: I don’t have a precise number, but just doing some work on the back of a napkin, we could probably come up with about $100 million in savings a year by doing such things as enforcing the rules, requiring English or humanities professors at the research-intensive universities like UNC-Chapel Hill to teach a little more instead of giving them the same number of classes a semester that the science and technology people teach, because they’re doing much more valuable research.

Martinez: You also made note of your findings related to UNC-Greensboro. I believe their nursing program … you looked at the faculty work load there.

Schalin: Yes. Nursing is very teaching intensive. … UNC has been claiming that there is a shortage of nursing professors, so I thought that they would have a fairly high average number of classes taught. But they don’t. And this is also surprising because nurses generally aren’t doing the medical research. That’s usually for the chemists, the biologists, and the doctors.

Martinez: Jay, we often hear from folks who are very supportive of the UNC system being able to hire more faculty and to pay them quite well, that there is intense competition around the country for the best and the brightest of these folks to teach on college campuses. And you write about that in your piece. Is there still intense competition?

Schalin: There’s a lot less. Every state, or just about every state, is going through this same type of budget crisis. Some are going through one even worse. A lot of professors are happy to have a job right now. Certainly there’s competition for the top researchers in the sciences. But for most professors, they should be, a lot of them would be, willing to work for less than they have asked for in the past.

Martinez: Jay, you also write that you believe we are entering a new reality in higher education. Tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that.

Schalin: Well, the model of higher education was developed — that we’re still in — was developed in the late 1800s and the first half of the 20th century. At that time, very few people went to school. It was a very narrow elite of wealthy people at the top, or upper middle-class people, too. And then there were some gifted and talented people at the lower income brackets who got scholarships. And only right before World War II, in 1940, only 5 percent of the population over age 25 had college degrees. Today, it’s starting to get close to 30 percent, I believe. So you’ve got six times as many people going to college. That means maybe we have to stop considering this four-year residential college model. And we also have to start thinking about changing some of the research requirements for professors and get them to concentrate more on teaching.