Changes in Faculty Composition Within the State University of New York System: 1985-2001

[Excerpt] The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a significant growth in the share of faculty members in American colleges and universities that are part-time or are full-time without tenure-track status. Growing student enrollments faced by academic institutions during tight financial times and growing differentials between the salaries of part-time and non-tenure track faculty on the one hand, and tenured and tenure-track faculty on the other hand, are among the explanations given for these trends. However, surprisingly, there has been no recent econometric evidence to test whether these hypotheses are true. Our study uses institutional level data provided to us by the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis of the State University of New York (SUNY) System to begin to address these issues. In the next section, we present background data on how the ratios of full-time lecturers to full-time professorial faculty and of part-time faculty to full-time faculty changed at SUNY during the fall 1985 to fall 2001 period. Counts of faculty numbers tell one little about who is actually teaching undergraduate students and so we also show how the share of undergraduate credit hours taught by part-time and non-tenure track faculty members increased during the part of the period for which we had access to credit hour data. Section III presents a simple conceptual framework that illustrates why an institution’s usage of part-time and non-tenure track faculty members should depend upon both the revenue per student received by the institution and the relative costs to the institution of the different types of faculty. While we have no data on the costs of part-time faculty members, we do have institutional level information for SUNY institutions for an eleven year period on the average salaries of tenured and tenure track faculty on the one hand, and of non-tenure track faculty on the other hand, as well as information on the revenue per student received by each institution each year. This enables us in section IV to estimate the roles that average salaries of both types of faculty members and revenues received by institutions play in explaining the observed changes in faculty composition

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

[Excerpt] In 2001, a twenty-day sit-in at Harvard University brought the living-wage debate to the forefront of American consciousness. After a six-month study, the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, a 19 member committee of faculty, staff, administrators and students that had been appointed by Harvard’s president as a result of the discussions to end the sit-in, recommended giving raises to the university’s lowest paid employees and relying more on collective bargaining in the future to assure that the wages paid by subcontractors did not undercut local union wage scales. A three-day sit-in at the University of Connecticut that related to the living wage issue also yielded a substantive victory for campus workers. The protesters there generated an almost two-dollar increase in wages, as well as substantial improvement in benefits for many of the university’s workers. Collectively these struggles represent a new battleground in American higher education. The growth of living wage movements on almost one hundred campuses reflects the large variation in the wages paid to college and university staff across the country. There are many potential explanations for these salary differences, including differences in local cost of living and differences in the resources that the academic institutions have available to pay faculty and staff salaries. One other possible explanation is the influence of staff unions. Previous studies of the impact of unions on salaries in academia have focused on faculty unions and have concluded that faculty unions have increased the salaries of their members relative to the salaries of faculty at academic institutions in which faculty are not covered by collective bargaining agreements by at best a small percentage amount. There have been no studies, however, of the impact of collective bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Our paper addresses this issue. After providing some background data on the number of blue-collar and white-collar employees covered by collective bargaining agreements at American higher education institutions, we use data from a 1997-1998 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (APPA) and other sources to estimate models that explain the variation in academic institutions’ salaries for a number of narrowly defined blue collar and white collar occupational groups that are employed by the academic institutions’ facilities divisions. Of primary interest to us, is the extent to which the salaries of academic staff covered by collective bargaining agreements exceed the salaries of otherwise comparable academic staff that are not covered by such agreements

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

Our study is the first study that addresses the impact of collective bargaining coverage on salaries in academia for employees other than faculty. We use data from a 1997-98 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and other sources to estimate the impact of staff unions on staff salaries in American higher education. Our best estimate is that for the occupations in our sample, collective bargaining coverage raises staff salaries by at most 10 to 20 percent relative to the salaries of comparable higher education employees not covered by union contracts.

10. The Academic Departments

Includes: Collective Bargaining, Labor Law, and Labor History: The Department of Economic and Social Statistics; Labor Economics and Income Security Department: A Parent Department: Human Resources and Administration; The Organizational Behavior Department; Evolution of the Human Resources and Administration Department

Do Trustees and Administrators Matter? Diversifying the Faculty Across Gender Lines

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities – trustees, presidents/chancellors, and provosts/academic vice presidents – plays in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large sample of American academic institutions. We find, other factors held constant including our estimate of the “expected” share of new hires that should be female, that institutions with female presidents/chancellors and female provosts/academic vice presidents, as well as those with a greater share of female trustees, increase their shares of female faculty at a more rapid rate. The magnitudes of the effects of these leaders are larger at smaller institutions, where central administrators may play a larger role in faculty hiring decisions. A critical share of female trustees must be reached before the gender composition of the board matters

Do Historically Black Colleges and Universities Enhance the College Attendance of African American Youths?

Recently, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have become the center of intense policy debates. Do HBCUs enhance the college attendance of African American youths? Previous research has been inconclusive. Among other improvements, our study adjusts for the relative availability of HBCU enrollment opportunities in each state. We find that African Americans are more likely to choose HBCUs over other colleges if more HBCU openings are available. However, more HBCU openings don\u27t increase overall African American enrollment. As we have shown elsewhere, attendance at an HBCU does enhance African American students\u27 college graduation rates

The Paradoxical Forces for the Classical Electromagnetic Lag Associated with the Aharonov-Bohm Phase Shift

The classical electromagnetic lag assocated with the Aharonov-Bohm phase shift is obtained by using a Darwin-Lagrangian analysis similar to that given by Coleman and Van Vleck to identify the puzzling forces of the Shockley-James paradox. The classical forces cause changes in particle velocities and so produce a relative lag leading to the same phase shift as predicted by Aharonov and Bohm and observed in experiments. An experiment is proposed to test for this lag aspect implied by the classical analysis but not present in the currently-accepted quantum topological description of the phase shift.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

Psychology students’ perception of and engagement with feedback as a function of year of study

Undergraduate students’ perception of feedback and level of engagement with the feedback they receive have gained increasing attention in the educational literature recently to identify areas which require educators’ attention. However, research in this area has generally been based on limited self-selecting samples, and has not considered how students’ relationship with feedback may alter depending on their year of study. To address this, a survey measuring students’ views and practices regarding feedback was completed at a higher education institution by 447 first-, second- and third-year psychology students, representing 77% of the cohort. Findings revealed that third years responded more negatively in both areas than their first- and second-year counterparts, whose ratings on these aspects themselves were far from optimal. These findings highlight the need for early interventions to improve students’ perception of and engagement with feedback in the earlier years, and to prevent the recorded deterioration later on in the degree course

Photophysics, Molecular Reorientation in Solution and X-Ray Structure of a New Fluorescent Probe 1,7-Diazaperylene

A new fluorescent molecule 1,7-diazaperylene (DP) has been investigated by means of time-resolved and steady-state polarized fluorescence spectroscopy, as well as X-ray spectroscopy. Absorption and fluorescence spectra of DP in solution are similar to those of perylene. However, absorption and fluorescence spectra of 2,8-dimethoxy DP and 2,8-dipentyloxy DP in solution are red-shifted by ca. 55 nm relative to perylene. The fluorescence decay of DP is exponential with a lifetime of 5.1 ns in ethanol, 4.9 ns in glycerol and 4.3 ns in paraffin oil. The radiative lifetime in ethanol was calculated to be 6.3 ns for DP, 8.0 ns for 2,8-dimethoxy DP and 7.6 ns for 2,8-dipentyloxy DP. The calculated fluorescence quantum yields of 0.8 for DP and its alkoxy derivatives in ethanol, are in good agreement with those obtained from measurements. The calculated Förster radius is 37.2 ± 1 Å for DP and 41.9 ± 1 Å for its alkoxy derivatives in ethanol. Examining the S0 S1 transition, we obtain a limiting fluorescence anisotropy of r0 0.38 for DP and its alkoxy derivatives. The rotational rates of DP in paraffin oil and glycerol were compared to that of perylene. In paraffin oil both molecules show an almost identical biexponential decay of the fluorescence anisotropy, which is compatible with a rotational motion like an oblate ellipsoid. The fluorescence anisotropy is monoexponential for DP in glycerol, and DP appears to rotate like a spherical particle while perylene in glycerol appears to rotate like an oblate ellipsoid. Moreover, the rotational diffusion constant, corresponding to rotation about an axis in the aromatic plane (D), is the same for both DP and perylene in glycerol

The Academics Athletics Trade-off: Universities and Intercollegiate Athletics

This analysis focuses on several key issues in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The intrinsic benefits of athletic programs are discussed in the first section. Trends in graduation rates and academic performance among athletes and how they correlate with the general student body are discussed in the second section. Finally, an overview of the revenues and expenses of athletic department budgets are discussed in an effort to gain a better understanding of the allocation of funds to athletics. In spite of recent growth in revenues and expenses, the athletic department budget comprises on average only 5 percent of the entire university budget at an FBS school, though spending and revenues have increased dramatically in recent years. In the grand scheme of things, American higher education faces several other, arguably more pressing, areas of reform. However, athletics is a significant and growing dimension of higher education that warrants in-depth examination