Thursday, June 06, 2019

Do undergraduates benefit from campus and department reputation based on research?

I am preparing some content for the class I will teach this fall on The Economics of Organizations.  We begin the semester with some examples that in certain ways will be familiar to students.  I've decided to do that more slowly than in the past and to get a little deeper into the examples, to highlight the richness of the potential economic approaches one might bring to look at some of the questions raised by the examples.  Probably in the third class session we will consider the university as an organization, with some focus on the U of I.  I have a slide in my PowerPoint that says universities are brands, which is definitely true.  With each brand we associate a certain reputation.  For R1 universities, the academic reputation is typically based on well-known research done at the university.  (As everyone knows, the Four Color Map Theorem was proved at the U of I!). The issue in my title is whether undergraduates are able to internalize the benefit from that reputation.

The most obvious way such internalization might happen is by taking a course from the researcher or, if not that, then taking a course from one of the researcher's disciples.  But perhaps this only matters in a course designated as a special topic so the instructor can teach about the research  In other courses, where there is a fairly standard subject matter to cover, does the instructor's research inclinations and accomplishments matter to the student?  It's a good question, but I will defer it for a bit and then get back to it.  Let's also rule out the possibility of an undergraduate student working directly with a faculty member on the faculty member's research outside of the class setting.  That does happen some and the student clearly benefits from that, especially if the student plans on going to grad school.  I want to concentrate, however, on students who will enter the world of work after graduation and not go for an advanced degree.  Do they benefit from the U of I reputation simply by attending the university and having their resume say U of I, in the part of the document where they describe their education?

I am going to frame the question to the students this way.  For those who are from Illinois, I will ask what their next best choice of college was?  If it was a private college or university or a public university in another state, I will then note that because of the rather large tuition differential, their demand for the U of I is rather price inelastic - modest tuition increases wouldn't have changed the choice, unless they were getting a substantial scholarship from the other institution.  If it was another public university in the state, the situation is different as the U of I is the higher tuition school.  If the U of I was chosen then it must be taken to have higher quality (or some other factor is at play such as their friends are going to the U of I).  These other factors are a biggie in practice, but in our analysis we'll rule them out.  I will wave my hands a bit and say that if the students are on average better at the U of I, say as measured by their standardized test scores, then that might improve quality as students learn from other students and we can't sort out the different effects.  But then I'll want to get at the question, what makes the U of I a better school other than this student to student effect?

This much I've talked about in my classes before, but I thought to do something novel and get the class to look at some data that are publicly available.  So I built the Excel workbook linked below that has some interesting information to consider.

Excel Workbook

The are three spreadsheets. The first is from the Campus Profile that the unit which does institutional research, the Division of Management Information, provides for us.  It relates instructional staff to IUs (instructional units).  Each credit hour per student is an IU. The course I will teach gives 3 hours of credit and will have 60 students enrolled.  So I will be generating 180 IUs.  There are three categories of instructor:  Faculty and Visitors, Graduate Assistants (TAs), and Specialized Faculty.  The first category captures those who are tenured or are on the tenure track.  The third category might be referred to as adjuncts or in the Economics Department's euphemism, Teaching Faculty.  Frankly, I don't know how retirees like me are counted, but the campus is now down on using retirees for instruction, so they shouldn't impact the aggregates very much.

The data show an upward trend in undergraduate IUs, which if credit hours taken hasn't trended much at all, a reasonable assumption in my view, then it can be interpreted as an upward trend in enrollments.  There has also been an upward trend in the share of instruction done by Specialized Faculty - in introductory courses, for all undergraduate courses, and overall.  This is matched by a downward trend within each category in the share of instruction done by Graduate Assistants.  For regular faculty, my eyeballing of the overall data show the share pretty much flat until 2017, and then a big drop-off.  Off the top of my head, I can't explain that.  I need more information to understand what happened there.

The second spreadsheet gives some salary data - of Assistant Professors in Economics and of Teaching Faculty, who hold the title either of Lecturer or Clinical Professor.  Those on the tenure track who come to the U of I with their dissertation not yet completed,are also called Lecturers.  But for the Teaching Faculty, the designation means something else, as most if not all of them do have the PhD.  It is the lower peg on the rung of possible appointments for adjunct instructors.  Clinical Professor is the higher peg.  I believe the term used to refer to faculty who previously worked in industry and that their prior experience in industry was relevant for their current teaching.  But the term no longer has that connotation.

I first went to the Economics Department Website to download the names in each category.  Though they are publicly available, I decided to xxxxxx them out here so as not to get anyone bent out of shape.  I don't want to pinpoint particular individuals.  I just want to provide a general picture of what is going on.  If you click through the Assistant Professor names you get to their Web pages, many of which offer a further click through to their CVs (academic resumes).  They include when the person started at the U of I.  Starting date might matter somewhat for salary.  Indeed, the numbers seem to indicate some salary compression issues within rank, meaning newer people are hired at a salary above more experienced people.

After uploading all the names I went to the Daily Illini Salary Database and did a search by department.  Please note that when you do this you get results back for faculty and staff from the departments at all 3 campuses.  My interest here is only with the Urbana campus.  Then I simply copied and pasted the salaries for the names I had already put into the spreadsheet.

For good measure, I also put in my starting salary from back in 1980, both in 1980 dollars and inflation-adjusted to 2018 dollars, using this inflation calculator.  I know such calculations aren't beyond critique, but they are good enough for the exercise I wanted to do.  The upshot is that even adjunct instructors today are paid more in real terms than I was paid in 1980.  When I started, the standard teaching load was 2 courses per semester and I believe every instructor was tenured or on the tenure track.  I got a one course buyout my first semester to help me start my research portfolio, which in my case I used to finish my dissertation.  I also got summer money guaranteed for the first summer.  Now, I believe the standard teaching load is 3 courses a year, Assistant Professors get a course buyout every year in rank and I believe they get guaranteed summer money too, but on that last one I'm not sure.   In any event, it should be clear that Assistant Professors are given every chance to prove themselves as researchers and are well advised to devote their time to their research, if they want to get tenure. But in so doing, they become very expensive as teachers.  Is it any wonder then, that the category of Teaching Faculty emerged as a way to deal with, mainly, undergraduate instruction in a cost-effective manner.

The third spreadsheet gives a historical look at tuition, both in-state and out-of-state, base tuition and fees, as well as ancillary costs.  Alas the last 5 years are missing, but students probably are well aware of the current numbers, and the time trend from 1980 to 2014 is unmistakable.  Higher Education has experienced hyperinflation in that period.  The numbers show that.  Again I did an inflation adjustment to compare 1980 tuition to the tuition and fees in 2013-14.  There was about a 7-fold increase in real terms.  Note that the State of Illinois, which contributes tax revenue to the U of I, has had its share of the U of I budget decline substantially in this time interval.  So one explanation for the increase in tuition is to make up for that.  A second explanation is to cover the increased costs of instruction shown on the previous spreadsheet.  A third represents expenditure on capital improvements (DKH had no air conditioning back in 1980 and it was not with sufficient electric wiring to manage the needs of Internet usage).  Many business processes experienced large quality improvements (course registration is one prominent example).  There has also been a large expansion of student services.  I don't believe the Counseling Center or the Career Center existed back in 1980.  And the athletic facilities that students have access to now are a cut above what they had back then.

Nevertheless, one might focus more narrowly, just on courses and tuition.  There seems to have been a shift from research faculty to teaching faculty for undergraduates while at the same time tuition has been on the rise.  Can we translate that into saying something about quality of instruction and the tuition paid by students?

Some years ago when I used to watch Illini Football and Basketball on TV, I would make a point to watch the commercials about the university that were featured at halftime.  Invariably those commercials would feature a prominent researcher who was interacting with undergraduate students, with everyone seemingly upbeat and getting a lot out of the experience.  Some of that was obviously hype.  Was any of it reality?  As an old timer, I would like to say that there was some reality in it.  But I have to say there are reason to believe that the teaching faculty are better than the researchers at teaching undergrads.  One obvious reason is enthusiasm for the job.  Many researchers want everything they do to relate to their research in some way, shape, or form.  If they perceive that undergraduate instruction does not so relate, they will give it short shrift. How common this is I don't know, but it is something to consider.  There is also the matter of developing empathy for typical students.  Research Faculty tend to come from the top tier of students and they tend to teach to a conception of students based on their own experience that way.  It might be a wonderful way to engage future professors, but it may be a poor way to engage other students.  Further, such faculty tend to be quite theoretical in their orientation.  Students are far more practical about what they want to see in their classes.  There is a disconnect here.

Yet there are arguments that say Teaching Faculty are also compromised in their teaching.  The biggest of these is that such instructors are dependent on getting good course evaluations in order to keep their jobs.  As students are very grade conscious, the instructors design their courses so that students well understand the approach, view it is fair, and in fact it produces many high grades.  In that circumstance students will give good course ratings.  But to achieve that end there may be a lot of teaching to the test and not a lot of challenging the students to go beyond exam material.  So students may be able to notch up another A, but actually haven't learned much from the course.

If this is going on, should the students themselves be concerned about it?  Overtly, most don't appear to be, treating college as something to get through not as something to experience for itself.  And if they get better job interviews because they went to the U of I instead of Illinois State, maybe that's enough, for them.

It isn't enough for me and my instinct as a social scientist is that the market will catch up to what I perceive as a big imbalance this way.  What has been happening to students who major in the liberal arts, with regard to job opportunities after graduation, might start to happen to Econ majors.  Either the work they had been doing has been automated away or the quality of new grads is perceived as too low as to be worth the investment in developing the talent further.  But if that were to happen, then why pay the tuition in the first place?  I've been worried about this sort of unraveling for some time.  It hasn't happened yet.  And I've got my fingers crossed that it won't happen ever.  But I would like to be more proactive than that, if at all possible.  So I write blog posts, like this one.

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