OUS Faculty Recruitment and Retention Issues

Summary - Key Points

• 1. At least a third of all faculty searches undertaken in recent years in OUS universities have ended in failure (position not filled) or with a diminished result (not filled with the first-choice candidate). At some campuses, the proportion is approaching half of all searches.
• 2. Available data on failed and diminished searches understate the problem, especially since potential finalists frequently self-select out of the pool once they learn about the salary level, or never enter the pool after making inquiries about the salary level, historical salaries paid, and trends for the campus.
• 3. Although overall retention rates may appear to be stable, the detailed data reveal worrisome trends:
• A disproportionate loss of senior faculty, beyond what would be expected through retirement.
• Increasing losses of mid-career faculty at the peak of their productivity and accomplishment.
• 4. The data reported here do not capture faculty at risk of leaving or the consequences of current losses for future retention. Recent departures at UO's College of Education are an example of the snowball effect of the loss of a key faculty member.
• 5. The difficulties facing OUS universities in recruiting and retaining faculty in a competitive market are the result of:
• Low salaries compared to those offered by most other universities
• Inability to provide support in the form of equipment, labs, and graduate assistants
• Dim prospects for future resources to carry out their academic work
• Increasing workload and frustration at not being able to provide the needed level of advising and guidance to students
• Lack of resources (available at competing universities) to address "trailing spouse" issues
• 6. The result is that the number of regular rank faculty has decreased by 10% over the past 10 years. Meanwhile, enrollment has increased by 30% or nearly 20,000 students.
• 7. As enrollment growth has outpaced instructional capacity, particularly after the large number of faculty retirements in 2002-03, OUS universities have turned to part-time and adjunct faculty to meet teaching needs.
• 8. Since part-time and adjunct faculty chiefly provide classroom instruction, the growing numbers of students have placed a greater burden on the shrinking pool of regular rank faculty who are the principal providers of non-classroom instruction, including:
• Student advising
• Thesis and student research guidance
• Mentoring
• Extracurricular student projects
• Program, curriculum, and course development
• 9. OUS universities are facing a set of interconnected issues involving increasing losses of senior and mid-career faculty, the inability to replace them because of diminished resources now and dim prospects for the future, growing student demand, and increasing frustration on the part of both students and faculty. Failed or Diminished Faculty Searches At least a third of all OUS faculty searches in recent years have ended in failure (position not filled) or with a diminished result (not filled with the first-choice candidate). At some campuses, the proportion of unsuccessful searches is approaching half. Oregon State University and the University of Oregon have each averaged 60 to 75 failed or diminished searches over the past 3 years. About half of these unsuccessful searches ended in failure. Of the completed-but-diminished searches, about 80% were filled with the second-choice candidate; 20% of these searches were filled with the third or fourth choice candidate. The available information on failed and diminished searches is shown in the attached Table 1a and Table 1b.

In many professional disciplines -- e.g., engineering, technology fields, architecture, and journalism -- departments encounter stiff competition from private industry in their recruitment of faculty. For some campuses, the heavier instruction load is an issue. All campuses must deal with trailing spouse issues in their searches, particularly as the number of academic couples increases. While many other universities have the resources and flexibility to accommodate this changing academic personnel landscape, OUS institutions do not. In several of the cases noted in Table 1, spousal issues were a factor in the candidate's rejection of an offer.

As distressing as these documented cases are, they understate the problem. Some failed searches represent a gradual transition from diminished to failed, as offers extended to second, third, and fourth choice candidates are rejected. OUS universities report that candidates frequently self-select out of the pool once they learn about the salary level and, more recently, the salary freeze. Other potential candidates never enter the pool after making inquiries about the salary level. These cases are not reflected in the available data, but are part of the challenges our universities face in maintaining a quality faculty resource.

Faculty Losses

The data in Table 3 show that, over the past 5 years, 80% of separating faculty left either early in their career (29% within the first 6 years) or relatively late (51% after 20 years or more). Not surprisingly, the high incidence of early leaving conforms to institutional tenure practices: 77% of those who left within the first 6 years held the rank of assistant professor.

At the same time, in recent years a greater proportion of senior faculty members (professors or associate professors) who leave OUS are doing so relatively early in their career. In the seven years prior to and shortly after the adoption of Measure 5 in November 1990 - that is, from 1986-87 through 1992-93 - only 13% of professors or associate professors who left OUS did so during their first nine years within the system. Between 1993-94 and 2001-02, that proportion had grown to 20%. Moreover, recently there has been an increase in the proportion of departing senior faculty who leave before attaining 20 years of service. In the eight years from 1991-92 through 1998-99, 35% of senior faculty who left OUS did so before attaining 20 years of service; in the three following years (i.e., 1999-00 through 2001-02), that proportion had increased to 47% - nearly half of the leavers.

This development has significantly reduced the percentage of full professors among OUS faculty. Between 1993-94 and 2003-04, the number of full professors declined by 30%, and the number of associate professors dropped by 6%, while the number of tenure-track assistant professors increased by 28%. In effect, the university system has exchanged tenured full professors for tenure-track assistant professors, an exchange that has taken place almost entirely in the last five years. The extraordinarily large number of faculty retirements in 2002-03 has placed a huge burden on the university system in replacing them in a competitive faculty market.

OUS universities are finding that too many of the associate professors who might have been expected to be promoted and take their place among the senior ranks are instead leaving OUS. In many cases, these are faculty who are approaching the peak of their career, young enough not to be too vested in the retirement system but distinguished enough in their professional accomplishments to be highly attractive to other universities or, in some cases, to industry.

In many cases, the reasons that create challenges in recruiting new faculty are the same reasons current faculty leave: salary, the prospects for future resources, and spousal issues. Excluding retirements, OUS campuses report that 80% of the faculty who leave do so for salary related reasons. A few examples:

• At OSU, all of the faculty who left the university for other employment accepted offers with more attractive salary. Ten went to other universities and three to a state or federal agency. Other faculty are "at risk" -- that is, they are receiving active offers or inquiries from other institutions and are likely to leave. One case involves a dual career issue for an engineering professor -- both husband and wife are professors and have expressed a strong preference to stay in Oregon if the spouse can find a tenure track position in OUS -- but OSU is likely to lose this professor if both of them can find tenure track positions in another state. OUS does not have the resources to compete with other states in this way.
• At UO in the just the past few months, four distinguished faculty in the College of Education (two of them ethnic minority faculty) have announced they are leaving for better-funded and better-supported positions in other states. Their loss puts the College of Education's top-five national ranking in jeopardy. UO has also lost a prominent faculty member in Chemistry to the University of California-Santa Barbara. UO's Department of Chemistry includes leading faculty in a number of research areas, including materials science, biochemistry, and innovative efforts in "green chemistry," and UO is unlikely to replace this faculty member with someone of comparable quality. All five of these faculty have been responsible for bringing more than $20 million in research grants to UO in the past two years.
• At PSU, all of the faculty who left in the past four years did so because of better salary offers from out of state universities, and in some of the cases, because of better supporting resources. One associate professor with a national reputation in modeling and remediating pollutants in ground water left, taking $500,000 per year in sponsored research with him. A highly productive Native American faculty member in the state's only graduate social work program left to take a position at $20,000 more per year.
• Not surprisingly, OIT faces particular problems in competition from industry: out of 11 departures over the past three years, 4 returned to industry. What may be unexpected, however, is that two others were offered higher salaries at community colleges. OIT is also in the unfortunate position of paying average salaries to faculty that are below the average for their bachelor's recipients: the average starting salary of an OIT bachelor's degree recipient is $45,400, while the average salary of an OIT assistant professor (possessing a doctorate) is $43,100.
• At WOU, 11 out of the 13 departures over the past 4 years have been for reasons related to salary. Along with salary, course load is a major reason: 6 left because the course load at the recruiting university was lower.

Part-Time and Adjunct Faculty

Although these faculty provide excellent instruction and are an important resource in meeting instructional demands, their growing proportion is worrisome. Part-time and adjunct faculty do not provide many of the important instructional services provided by regular rank faculty, such as student advising and mentoring, thesis guidance, work on extracurricular student projects, or curriculum and course development. As enrollment has increased over the past 10 years, the burden of providing this kind of non-classroom instruction has been placed on a shrinking pool of regular rank faculty. Under these circumstances, students inevitably receive less attention than they should, and faculty feel frustrated at their inability to provide the level of service they would like. The growing student-faculty ratios are evidence of the overall resource concerns that underlie faculty departures and difficulties in successful faculty recruitment.

The current number and percentage of part-time/adjunct faculty are displayed in Table 4.

Tables

• Table 1a and Table 1b
• Table 2
• Table 3
• Table 4.