Higher ed can be monolithic, but we have a lot of idiosyncrasies. One institution-specific practice that can really affect our daily lives is the teaching credit that faculty get for teaching lab sections. A lot of us are wondering how it works at other places.
Continue readingteaching load
How university endowments predict, and don’t predict, teaching loads
StandardIt’s typically exciting to find out that your hypothesis is wrong – and I was wrong! Here’s my back-of-the-metaphorical-envelope analysis of the poll that y’all completed a few weeks ago.
I predicted that teaching loads were negatively associated with endowment size. I expected that the more money an institution had, the less that the faculty taught. I also thought that this effect would be most robust at small liberal arts colleges (SLACs). But, nope, that’s not the case.
Continue readingWhy do some places have high teaching loads and others have low teaching loads? [poll]
StandardOf course, institutions with more money have lower teaching loads. I have a specific hypothesis: Endowment size predicts teaching loads, like this:
But is this true? If it’s true, how true is it? How much variance is there? Does enrollment matter, such that it’s endowment-per-student? I’d like an answer to these questions, in the realm of non-PhD-granting institutions. If you have a minute, and you’re faculty at one of these places, could you humor me by filling out this quiz? If you have another minute, maybe pass it to colleagues at other institutions? The reward will be a post with the findings. It’s embedded below, but if you want a direct link, here you go.
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Small Pond Science 