Academic Staffing in a Post-Echo-Boom World

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education released a Special Supplement on Admissions and Student Aid.  Now given the fact that college costs are soaring and our financial aid system is somewhat of a mess—if that is what you call it when paying for higher education starts to look like mortgaging a house—the Supplement is certainly timely.  But the article and issue that caught my attention as I read through it had neither to do with college costs nor financial aid.  It had to do with something we all know is looming: the projected post-echo-boom enrollment drop.

According to an article in the Supplement entitled “After the Deluge, the Drought” (sorry, subscription required):

As the last of the baby boomers’ children make their way through high school, the number of new graduates is expected to peak this year at 3.34 million.  It is then expected to decline gradually until 2015. [snip]

In addition:

The number of white graduates, however, is expected to decline for the foreseeable future, from 1.9 million this year to 1.59 million by 2022, the commission says. During that same period, the percentage of graduates with no family history of attending college is expected to rise.

Okay . . . so what does this have to do with academic staffing?  Over the jump we go.

This of course is not rocket science and I am surely not the first one to start talking about it am I?  Here it is. 

Ever since colleges and universities have been shifting instructional work from full-time tenure-track faculty to contingent faculty, one of the rationales has been the long term enrollment patterns.  The explanation was that contingent faculty ranks were growing at the rate they were to cover a large, but temporary increase in enrollment that the boomers and then the echo-boomers represented.  Whether we accept that rationale or not, let’s go with it for a minute.

If we buy that theory, doesn’t it seem plausible that the opposite should be true as well?  Colleges are bracing for enrollment drops.  The Chronicle article is full of strategies that colleges are coming up with to try and soften the landing—grass-roots marketing, targeting minority groups, going out of state, etc.—but are they thinking about staffing patterns in the same way? 

This seems like it will be a real test of the staffing-enrollment correlation theory. As enrollments constrict, will colleges and universities look to get back to a more healthy balance of full-time and part-time faculty?  Will colleges and universities recognize that they need to think critically about the relationship between how they treat their instructional staff and student persistence since they can’t just count on a glut of new applicants to replace those who stop out?  Will they recognize that as they have more students entering that require more assistance and guidance with the whole institution of higher education that they need to invest appropriately in those who staff the classes at the introductory level and beyond rather than underpay those who are working with the students that need the greatest investment of time and attention?

It is hard to say how these questions will be answered as there seems to be little discussion of this side of the equation—and there are a host of related issues such as what appears to be a serious retirement trend in the faculty ranks and the fact that the numbers of “permanent part-timers” without job protections is significant, making them particularly vulnerable in this situation.  But of course, that discussion is only going to happen if we insist on it at every level as I am pretty sure it isn’t going to be part of the discussion at this conference.

Update:  Dean Dad gave us a shout out and a conversation has started up about this topic over there (although we would love to have your comments on the staffing angle here!).