Are tenure track professors better teachers?

This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student's first term at Northwes...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The review of economics and statistics 2015-10, Vol.97 (4), p.715-724
Main Authors: Figlio, David N, Schapiro, Morton Owen, Soter, Kevin B
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Betriebszugehörigkeit
Bildungsniveau
Hochschullehrer
Illinois
Learning
Student
Studies
Tenure
University professors
University students
Value added
Wirtschaftspädagogik
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus contingent faculty on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student's first term at Northwestern and employ an identification strategy in which we control for both student-level fixed effects and next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which contingent faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from contingent faculty in their firstterm courses. This result is driven by the fact that the bottom quarter of tenure track/tenured faculty (as indicted by our measure of teaching effectiveness) has lower "value added" than their contingent counterparts. Differences between contingent and tenure track/tenured faculty are present across a wide variety of subject areas and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern's averages and less-qualified students.
ISSN:0034-6535
1530-9142
DOI:10.1162/REST_a_00529