Faculty load - credit-hour model

[gadfly50]

Irregardless, as my wife and I like to say, the model you describe is "pay per head" piecework, which I fully support. Let market demand decide compensation. If you (the general you) can't earn what you think you deserve, you are welcome to find another job.

Your view has an appealing logic, but I think it misses some of the unique factors at play, including whether the "piece" you are working on is the class or the student. The workload increase for an extra class is drastically more than for extra students in the same class. This model switches from being paid per class to being paid per student. Both could be describe as subject to the market demand you mention, but I think the per class model is actually a more exact correspondence to the work being done.

Also, market demand is an odd thing in higher ed, as faculty don't actually "sell" credit to the students direct. They are not contractors of the student (as they might be e.g. in a private tutoring scenario). The college sells the credits, populates the market (admissions), and also determines the customer base of any faculty member (by prescribing classes). So much is out of the control of the faculty member. Your model would seem to me like asking pilots to accept a pay cut every time the plane flies less than full. Certainly, airlines can't go on having half empty planes and they might need to cut the route, and even eventually fire the pilot. But it seems be a fallacy to suggest that the pilot herself should have a pay cut for the passenger base, when that is entirely out of her control.

Of course, anyone can leave any job if they don't like it, though in the real world, many faculty would find it very hard to get another academic or even professional-level job so we are stuck with trying to fight battles to be treated fairly in the institutions and profession we are in.

[gadfly50]

Yikes. So if a faculty is to earn, say, $60,000 that means each student in a class is worth $100.

Do you get paid extra if you end up teaching 610 credit hours because of high enrollment? That can be some bitter fights among faculty over who gets the extra $1,000. Do they get it paid that semester or can they apply it toward future semesters?

What if someone ends up with only 598 credit hours? Do they owe the college $200?

I believe there will still be "overloads" that would compensate you for numbers taught over the quota, though the rate is hazy (is it worked out as a proportion of your salary per your ratio? That is impossible since everyone earns different. I imagine it will be a set amount...though it is not clear if the same amount will apply if you are, say. 10 over in one existing class compared to teaching a whole new class with 10 more (this is where the work of prepping classes gets erased in this model, as I always assumed my $x000 overload stipend was compensating the preparation of a whole new class, not just the number of students in it).

If you ended up with 598 credit hours you would need to find two more students to teach (I'm sure in reality this will be fudged, but anything under 590 the expectation would be you are teaching another class to make up your quota)

[gadfly50]

This approach sounds a lot better. Use a minimum enrolment number for each class so that you only get credit for teaching it if the course is popular enough. That helps eliminate courses for which there is no longer demand, which is the management goal.

I agree that could be the management goal. I actually think it is not quite the goal at play in this institution. In reality virtually no class meets the de facto student enrollment number threshold implied by the new system (something like 30 students per class) outside of some gen ed and a handful of major classes in the biggest departments. In that sense, if you adopted the minimum student per class model, you'd eliminate every program except gen ed. and a handful of other classes.

The management scheme is to continue to offer all these low-enrolled classes but to make faculty teach more of them.  i.e. basically to increase to a 6-6 or 7-7 load without saying that (though for a handful of faculty, they'll actually see load reduction as they do teach in classes with a big pool of students to fish from, which is the basic injustice of the proposed system)

The proposed model makes it far to easy to game the system in ways that don't meet the management goal. If the number is based on initial enrolment in a course, you could serve cake on the first day and discuss the syllabus on the second leading to most dropping. Students would be happy to participate in that ruse.

If the number is based on completions, then grade inflation will go way up, now at the instructors initiative. Overfill classrooms (or have virtual overflow sessions) to get high numbers but don't worry about learning. 

Departments will have vicious battles over distribution requirements since any courses taken outside the major is a loss to the department.

Yes - the problem is everyone is competing not for new students from the street (which is what the "pay as you teach model" seems to imply) but stealing from the existing pool. Me meeting my quota (with cake and easy grades) means Dr. Smith loses their summer as they have to teach two more classes. The revenue remains exactly the same. We just turn on each other.

[Caracal]

This... sounds like a total scheduling nightmare. It also sounds like a policy that will be used to cut back otherwise full-time positions without actually having to officially cut them.

Yes I have no idea how they are proposing the scheduling. You won't know how many students you have till close to start of semester when registration is confirmed. So what if you don't have enough? Add one, two, three more classes with one week's notice to prep them? Or agree to teach six as a kind of insurance, then pull out when you know you don't need them, leaving the need to find adjuncts with a week's notice? And what if there are simply not enough students for you to teach even if you wanted to? All of these questions are why I am hoping to find an institution that does this to see how it works (or doesn't!)

I honestly wouldn't even bother treating this as a serious idea. If your institution lacks either a faculty governance structure or competent adults in charge, it could actually be implemented, but it would  just be a recipe for institutional collapse. Calculating faculty teaching loads in this way doesn't fit with the way higher education is structured for all of the obvious reasons involving majors and requirements. If the concern was that some faculty weren't teaching enough students, there are all kinds of ways you could try to address that (for example require departments with lower enrollments to teach more gen-ed classes, or raise the number of classes required to 5 but count classes with enrollments over a certain number as two classes) These things might be a bad idea but at least they would be workable in some sense, unlike this idea.

[gadfly50]

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[gadfly50]

I honestly wouldn't even bother treating this as a serious idea. If your institution lacks either a faculty governance structure or competent adults in charge, it could actually be implemented, but it would  just be a recipe for institutional collapse. Calculating faculty teaching loads in this way doesn't fit with the way higher education is structured for all of the obvious reasons involving majors and requirements. If the concern was that some faculty weren't teaching enough students, there are all kinds of ways you could try to address that (for example require departments with lower enrollments to teach more gen-ed classes, or raise the number of classes required to 5 but count classes with enrollments over a certain number as two classes) These things might be a bad idea but at least they would be workable in some sense, unlike this idea.

It does indeed lack a faculty governance structure. Never strong, it's been reduced further by the current administration. You are right, and I said something similar in a meeting this week. It's a (a) bad idea and (b) unworkable idea. You could do (a) without it being unworkable. We'd hate it, but it would at least be rational.
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[pgher]

In my department, courses over a certain enrollment count as 1.5, over another threshold count as 2. Teaching a larger class is more work, but it's not a simple scaling factor. Larger classes get graders, for example, so the workload does not scale linearly.