BY KELLY HAND
The AAUP released its Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession on April 11. This year’s report, “Higher Education at a Crossroads,” puts into perspective data that demonstrate a modest increase in compensation for full-time faculty even as the percentages of tenured and tenure-track faculty have decreased over the past four decades. In this video, AAUP senior higher education researcher John Barnshaw discusses the report and its recommendation that institutions convert part-time faculty to full-time positions. The report includes cost estimates for full and partial conversion at various types of institutions.
The data on Figure 2 of your chart actually shows that the percentage of part-time faculty has been on a modest but certain decline since 2011. I suspect the raw numbers would reveal this more clearly, just as the raw numbers of full-time faculty also show a practically uninterrupted growth pattern for the past 40 years.
So why all the rhetoric about “adjunctification” that is, at most, flat in recent years and in all probability reversing due to the For-Profit Higher Ed implosion?
But most of the recent full-time hires have been off the tenure track, in other words, contingent.