| Survey Finds Early-Career Faculty Members Unsatisfied
A survey published in August 2007 by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, a project of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, found that junior faculty members are generally unsatisfied with the effectiveness of their institutions’ policies and practices on tenure, teaching and research expectations, and work/family balance. In fact, of 16 policies and practices assessed in COACHE’s survey of almost 7,000 new faculty, none was rated as even “fairly effective” by the faculty members who indicated that such policies are important to them.
Seventy-seven colleges and universities, both public and private, participated in the survey. In addition to measuring perceived effectiveness, the survey questioned respondents on how important the institutional policies were to them. In general, women and minority faculty members rated institutional policies—including research leave, stop-the-clock tenure plans, and mentoring—as more important to their career success than their male and white counterparts rated such policies. The findings indicate that there is much room for improvement in the way institutions support their junior faculty members.
FINDINGS
Work Expectations
Nature of Work
The COACHE survey asked respondents how satisfied they were with the teaching, research, and departmental support aspects of their positions.
- Female faculty members were overall significantly less satisfied than their male peers with how they spent their time.
- Faculty of color were less satisfied than their white colleagues with the level of courses they taught, the amount of discretion they had over course material, and the quality of the undergraduates in their classes.
- College faculty were more satisfied than university faculty with all aspects of their teaching responsibilities.
- Public institution faculty were significantly less satisfied than their private institution counterparts with the amount of external research funding they were expected to find.
Policies and Practices
- Junior faculty reported that the policies most important for their success were travel funding to present papers or conduct research, and limits on teaching load.
- Overall, female faculty rated every policy as significantly more important to their success than their male peers’ ratings of the same policies.
- Stop-the-clock tenure policies were most important to female college faculty and least important to male university faculty.
Effectiveness and Satisfaction
- Across all demographic categories, the least effective policy was professional assistance for obtaining external grants; the most effective policy was informal mentoring.
- On five questions about junior faculty satisfaction with professional/personal life balance, all respondents reported being somewhat unsatisfied with their ability to strike an acceptable balance.
- University faculty reported less satisfaction with their institutions’ support for having and raising children than their counterparts working at colleges.
- Male and white faculty were significantly more in agreement with the statement “My department treats junior faculty fairly,” than were female and minority faculty.
The COACHE study is available for download in PDF format from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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DID
YOU KNOW?
- Overall, junior faculty members agreed with the statement, “If it had to do it over again, I would accept my current position.”
- Faculty at public institutions were less satisfied with their place of work than those at private institutions.
- Faculty of color were significantly less satisfied with their overall compensation than their white colleagues.
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