Quiz of the day: Is Wildavsky’s claim about faculty correct?

In the executive summary of an American Enterprise Institute-sponsored paper by Ben Wildavsky released yesterday, I found the following statement:

… faculty [at for-profits] tends to look quite different from those at many traditional not-for-profit institutions. First and foremost, they are instructors rather than researchers. (p. 2)

Note the subtitle of the 16-page paper: “An Interview-Based Comparison of Traditional and For-Profit Higher Education.” Is there any evidence to back up this claim? A few interviews. Ah… for any graduate students tempted to try this for a dissertation where I’m sitting on the committee ((Here, I’m talking about conducting interviews to answer questions about broad social patterns, not the experiences of the interviewees.)), here’s the quiz of the day: What do officially-collected data about higher education in the United States say about all faculty in the country at public and non-profit colleges and universities? Is there anything that confirms or even suggests the modal identity of faculty as researchers that Wildavsky claims here?

Answer: One can reasonably infer that a clear majority of all faculty at public or non-profit colleges and universities are focused on teaching, not research. The data here come from the 2009-2010 tables on all faculty and full-time faculty from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (or IPEDS), a survey of all colleges and universities in the United States. ((Or all degree-granting institutions covered under Title IV, which defines institutional eligibility for federal student loans. Note: the tables exclude colleges of medicine, which are complicated even in comparison with the rest of higher ed.)) According to IPEDS, in 2009-2010, there were 1.1 million part-time and full-time faculty reported by public and non-profit colleges and universities. Of those 1.1 million faculty, 373,000 taught at two-year institutions (almost all at public two-year colleges), and we can safely assume that all or almost all of those faculty are focused on teaching or teaching-related duties. A similar number, 326,000 faculty, were part-time at four-year colleges and universities. There might be a limited number of part-time faculty who have research duties, but as with junior and community colleges, we can infer that most of the part-time faculty at four-year institutions are there in an adjunct or similarly teaching-focused role. Finally, of full-time faculty at four-year colleges and universities, 76,000 were instructors, lecturers, or unranked faculty–most of whom focus on teaching of one sort or another. ((There are small discrepancies between the tables on the total number of full-time faculty at four-year institutions in each sector, on the order of 1,000 for each category, which doesn’t change the larger story. Since one table refers to “instructional staff” and the other to “faculty,” it’s important to look at the gross numbers, though I suspect the staff at each institution completing the IPEDS form use identical or almost-identical definitions.))

In sum, of the 1.1 million faculty who taught at public or non-profit colleges and universities in 2009-2010, 774,000 are part of groups we can infer focus on teaching. That’s 67% of the total. In other words, Wildavsky is blowing smoke. Or wait… is there another explanation? Stay tuned…