Frederick M. Hess & Richard B. Keck (Manhattan Institute), It’s Time for College Professors to Teach:
Higher education is plagued by concerns about the return on investment of a four-year degree, low rates of degree completion, and the mental and emotional health of students. A factor in all these concerns is the frustrating reality that, at far too many of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a secondary concern. This has had unfortunate consequences for costs, instruction, and campus culture. It also presents an opportunity for governing boards and public officials to step up.
It is no coincidence that the nation’s most expensive colleges are those at which faculty teach just two to four courses per year (amounting to three or six hours a week of classroom time each semester). At these institutions, faculty devote the lion’s share of their time to research, bureaucratic duties, and chasing grants. In a burst of candor, John McGreevy, provost at Notre Dame, revealed that his institution boasts whole departments in which the faculty norm is a 1-1 teaching load (that is, teaching one three-hour class in the fall and one in the spring). Indeed, McGreevy notes that teaching loads at the leading colleges have shrunk precisely because colleges compete for faculty by promising that they’ll teach less.
The result? Colleges have resorted to relying on part-time faculty to provide the requisite teaching. Between 1999 and 2022, the 45% growth in faculty substantially outpaced the 25% increase in undergraduate enrollment. At the same time, the share of full-time professors on the tenure track declined from 72% in 2002 to 62% in 2023. The number of graduate teaching assistants jumped by 40% in that same period. The result is that more and more teaching is being shouldered by part-timers, adjunct faculty, and teaching assistants, who have limited opportunity or incentive to invest themselves in students’ academic lives.
At community colleges and many regional institutions, faculty routinely teach four or more courses each semester. If colleges adopted the not-so-radical norm that faculty should devote half their working hours to instructional responsibilities, it would have massive benefits for colleges: reducing costs, alleviating the need for adjunct faculty, and increasing faculty–student interaction.
So why don’t we talk more about faculty workload, given the familiar concerns about college costs, the student experience, and the “adjunctification” of higher education? For starters, higher-education research organizations seem disinclined to release data on faculty work time to the public. …
Might a shift in focus from research to teaching repel faculty who don’t want to teach? Possibly. But this should be seen, in the lexicon of Silicon Valley, as a feature—not a bug. Institutions of higher education should seek faculty who want to teach. There is no shortage of potential academics. The National Science Foundation notes that slightly fewer than 58,000 doctorates were awarded in the U.S. in 2023, and barely a third of those recipients have found employment in academe. Given the surplus, colleges should screen for faculty who take teaching and mentoring seriously. It would help, of course, if doctoral programs prepared future professors to do this work.
Inevitably, a proposal like this will be read with one eye on the politics of our polarized age; some may read it as an attack on higher education and college faculty, and embrace or reject it or those grounds. But we’d urge such readers to think twice: this is not a tale of individual culpability but about how larger dynamics have distorted institutional priorities and professional work. We suspect that many in higher education would welcome the chance to devote more time to teaching if they were confident that it would be valued and that the demands of busywork and pressures of publication would lessen. There is a win–win to be found for students, scholars, and the nation. But it will take bold leadership to make it happen.
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