California community colleges rely too much on part-time faculty; misspend funds

The ROI of elite private universities like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford are still very high. The private universities that should be worried are the ones that don't have an elite reputation but still charge the same tuition (or higher tuition, if you account for financial aid) as the elite universities.

While it’s easy to say to administration… it’s more complicated than that. Salary for professors didn’t increase much, but benefits increased massively (because of the increased cost of health care and pensions). administrators also get paid more. Higher ed is a labor intensive business, and labor intensive businesses are expensive.

Unfortunately, this article misses the mark and distracts from the overall problem.

If you poll that vast number of college dropouts regarding the issues for why they dropped out, you will find a common picture. Its finances or its unfairly structured or misrepresented classes.

Some professors structure their courses in an optimized to fail way. These are often called Weed-out classes, Engineering has the most, Economics has a decent amount, and the degrees with no real business applications have the least.

Structure aside, students need two things to succeed. The classes must be taught and tested in a determinable way, that means you either teach the methodology or heuristics to come to a single answer for questions involved, or you test the material which has one right answer. You don't have an open-ended question that has 3 correct answers, where you have to guess which one is correct because there's no single unique answer that is correct. Or vocabulary used with multiple meanings depending on how you read it, or lecture material that mismatches what's actually on the exams.

Also, you set expectations of how much time spent per class is needed must be accurate up front. If either of those two core things are not enforced (and I can tell you neither of those are enforced in any legitimate way now or for the past 20 years), then students will consistently fail or withdraw.

The general rule of thumb is a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week. That is not always the case, some classes are structured in a way where no matter how much time you spend, you won't be able to prepare for the material being tested. If you are a full time student with 4 classes and you have one class like this, then its possible the class will cause you to fail the other 3, or you could potential have financial aid clawed back unless you self-fund at which case its a simple loss.

You cannot succeed in school without being able to control basic academic outcomes. Courses structured with 24 mostly equal assignments and a final exam have to get at least a 70% on each assignment on average. The results that fall in that range (above 70%, are 30% with slight deviations depending on weightings of the total points). So you end up with a .3 probability raised to the 24th or 25th power. That's somewhere around ~8.4 * 10^-14. Not taking into account factors like difficulty of the individual questions or other factors.

Most classes that are generally labelled Weed-out courses have such a low probability of success that they should never have been sold to the student, but the student couldn't identify the issues until after its too late. Put another way, this is fraud on the colleges part, and while there are pathways to appeal issues with specific professors; it rarely works out because there is an informal structure that punishes people for going this route, with no real enforcement or accountability. I've gone to a chair person and Dean before and had them say they don't have the seniority to challenge a tenured professor that's been teaching for 25 years (who structured their class so the only way to pass was academic dishonesty, where a blind eye was turned to the passing around of answer keys in class from student's that previously failed)... In other words, you only pass/get a degree if you are on the take. You know what happened with each successive exam after that, they were all fails, and the professor stopped covering the material or providing any help during office hours.

Over the past two decades, I've attempted 53 units where I had to withdraw. Slightly more than half are from courses like what I describe. I started on the engineering route, then failing that business, and now its just any degree to supplement a decade of professional experience. There's no accountability, and the people capable of making changes have no incentive, there's a reason graduation rates hover between 5% and 30% a year. Its optimized to fail people for captive repeat customers.

If as a student, the course is structured so you cannot control basic academic outcomes, you shouldn't have to pay, but that will never happen; and an entire industry of exploitative behavior has adapted to this over the past 20 years. Its sad because its completely unnecessary and serves only one purpose to profit off people in a way that they can't seek bankruptcy protection, which causes debt slavery, where they cannot succeed/have opportunities without a qualifier (such as a degree).

There are two kinds of job.

* Adjunct lecturer/temporary faculty: These are people hired for just one semester for a specific course, for fairly minimal salary. Ads for these are posted usually 3 to 6 months before the semester starts, and you can just apply to them.

* Visiting faculty: If you are actually really good, sometimes Universities will hire you as a visiting faculty. There is a case-by-case negotiated contract (usually 1 or 2 courses per year, with whatever other constraints you have). The difference from the first choice is that you have some choice in the course you get to teach, and how you teach it.

I would recommend starting from the first choice, and teaching a large standard course where other faculty are around to help you. Teaching well is very difficult (and teaching badly is relatively easy), and people's future is at stake, so its best to start slow and learn the ropes before attempting something difficult.

My understanding is that weed-out courses largely only happen in the US, and not in Europe or Asia. In the latter, students are usually admitted into a major, sometimes after passing an entrance exam. In the US, admissions are much more "holistic" and students have much more freedom to choose their major. This inevitably results in some people who have very low aptitude for a major enrolled in it. So Departments have decided that, because they can't change the admission process, the next best thing is to weed out students with a difficult course. This usually results in a large number of qualified students also being forced out, which is very unfortunate.

I don't think there is any solution to this other than fixing the admission process. If you ever become a professor, you will quickly realize, how much even a handful of bad students can bring down the level of a senior elective. The 80:20 rule applies, where 80 percent of your time gets spent on 20 percent of the weakest students. Its a zero-sum game with the profs time. This does not discount the fact that the academy is filled with profs who have no interest in teaching.

> a 3 unit course should require no more than 9 hours of work / week

As a prof, I don't agree. Semester enrolled credits x 3 should be the total time the student has to work per week. Its ridiculous notion to normalize each course to the same amount of time/week - some subjects are simply more difficult. Its up to the department to thoughtfully structure the curriculum so students have a mix of difficult and easy courses in every semester. Even as a student, I was quite glad that I got to spend 20hrs/week on Quantum Mechanics 2, and 5hrs/week on Intro to Journalism in that same semester.