Faculty Support for Student Success

The notice that a new study on the effect of adjunct appointments on student success brings with it the news that is not a real surprise, those schools who rely more heavily on adjunct faculty appointments lag behind institutions with fewer adjunct appointments in terms of traditional models of student success.

The study will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Higher Education. While the study confirms what we have suspected (known might be a better word), it also identifies what some of those factors are. It is not adjunct faculty per se, but how faculty are supported and made part of the institutional structure. It is the faculty members involvement in the institutional life--office time, committee time, advising time, and even just the time to socialize with other faculty. If it takes a village to educate a child, then we might expand that metaphor and recognize that it is the institutional community that educates our college students. In short, our students do better when they are taught by members of the community. What we need to do is figure out how to ensure that all faculty are members of the institutional community.