The decline in tenured and tenure-track college and university faculty and the increase in nontenured full-time, part-time and adjunct instructors — a decades-long trend that shows no sign of slowing — is likely to have widespread impact across the higher education landscape.
The widening disproportion of the statuses of those paid to educate college students is clear and dramatic, according to national data provided by the American Association of University Professors.
From 1975 to 2015, the percentage of full-time tenured faculty declined from 29 percent to 21 percent, the percentage of full-time tenure-track faculty dropped from 16 percent to 8 percent, and the percentage of graduate student employees with teaching responsibilities slid from 21 percent to 14 percent. Over the same time period, the percentage of full-time nontenure-track faculty rose from 10 percent to 17 percent while the percentage of part-time faculty showed the biggest change, increasing from 24 percent to 40 percent.
In sum, tenure-line faculty dipped from 45 percent to 30 percent of total faculty while the share of contingent faculty rose from 55 percent to 70 percent. There now are more than twice as many instructors with lower pay and less job security than their tenure-line colleagues, despite the same classroom-performance responsibilities and expectations.
And there are wider implications, from erosion of power among tenured faculty to growing unionization efforts.
“Everything around this issue is going to get a lot harder in the years ahead,” says Dr. Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute and founder and executive director of its College Excellence Program, described it as “a really important trend to be monitoring.”
