"The working conditions of instructors are the learning conditions of students"

A guest post from Ed Kazarian:

President Obama has just released his Plan to Make College More Affordable and the critiques have been coming fast and furious (for instance). A major feature of the plan is the requirement for collecting and presenting data on student outcomes; adding a requirement for faculty work conditions data would make this a much better plan. Here's how.

Much of the student data the President is asking for—graduation rates, average debt loads and earnings of graduates, percentages of students who pursue advanced degrees, and the income levels of students who attend an institution—is already easily available and factors into many of the rankings that are currently published.

But the narrow focus on student data elides the factor that may well count the most when it comes to good student outcomes: faculty working conditions. As the slogan goes "the working conditions of teachers are the learning conditions of students."

Indeed, recent studies of the ever-growing reliance on adjuncts support this intuitively plausible link; poor working conditions for faculty hurt student outcomes. And as we know, cost savings from deterioritating faculty working conditions have not been passed on to students in the form of lower tuition -- quite the opposite. And this remains true despite the fact that working conditions, as Tressie McMillan Cottom helpfully reminds us, are one of the things universities can best be expected to control given the current state of the economy—far more so than factors like post-graduation salaries. Unfortunately, colleges and universities do their very best to report working condition data in a partial, obscure, and generally loaded way that makes what they do tell us effectively useless for analytical or critical purposes.

So in addition to what the President is already asking for, here's the data that I'd like to see the Department of Education require universities to disclose in a universal, easily comparable format as a condition for receiving Federal Student Aid funds.  

• Information on salaries for all employees, including detailed breakdowns of
  • academic vs. non-academic employee salaries
  • full time vs. part-time faculty (with part time salaries listed both in raw numbers and with a projection of what they would make were they to be full-time employees [FTE])
  • tenure and tenure-track vs. non-tenure track faculty salaries
• Information on what a FTE course load is for all the above faculty categories
• Information about how much of the total instructional work of the institution (and in various departments and programs) is being done by folks in the above faculty categories
• Information about how much research and course-development support folks in the above faculty categories receive
• Information about how much service folks in the above faculty categories are doing (ideally, this information should be gathered by surveying them about their actual activities, rather than relying on nominal expectations from job descriptions--and it should explicitly disclose the difference)

If we had accurate information about academic working conditions and institutional governance in a publicly available, easily comparable form covering a wide range of institutions, then we could have cross-institutional organizing on how to make real changes that protect the welfare of both students and faculty and move all of HE toward a more sustainable footing.