Where is the Job Market for College Teachers?

Robert Martin, an emeritus professor at Centre College, has a very interesting article on college teaching in today’s Inside Higher Ed.  Here is a taste, but I would encourage you to read the entire piece.

Now, suppose we have two fully informed young people: one aspires to be a world-class scholar and the other aspires to be a world-class teacher. They are about to make their career choices. The fully informed potential scholar chooses an academic career and the fully informed potential teacher decides to apply her talents to some other career. The few talented potential teachers who choose college teaching careers are those who derive significant personal satisfaction from teaching (despite the lack of public acclaim or financial rewards) or are very risk-averse (they crave the economic security provided by a tenured position).

What does this mean for college prices and quality? Since there are few rewards for teaching, faculty members focus too much on scholarship. Rather aspiring to be well-balanced teacher/scholars, faculty members become slaves to scholarship. We have a similar result for institutions. “Mission creep” among colleges and universities is partially due to the imbalance in the rewards for teaching and research. Colleges and universities try to become research institutions, rather than world-class undergraduate teaching institutions. As great teachers are discouraged from becoming professors, and as professors are discouraged from focusing on teaching, undergraduate teaching quality declines steadily over time.

Some may argue that an active research agenda improves teaching quality, but the evidence proves otherwise. A meta-analysis of the studies looking at the relationship between research and teaching by John Hattie and H. W. Marsh finds that they are completely unrelated. Nor is it hard to imagine why — more research means less time for teaching.

I am intrigued by this last point.  I have heard it made before and my initial reaction has always been skeptical. Stay tuned–when I get the time I am going to read Hattie and Marsh and perhaps write something about it here.

RECOMMENDED READING

The Author’s Corner with Trent Brown What, Then, Does Calvin University Mean?* Misha Matsumoto Yee is the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History National History Teacher of the Year! College and university faculty members are disengaging