Putting “Education” Back in Higher Ed
America's four-year colleges and universities have lost their way. Public trust in these institutions has plunged as their commitment to free inquiry and robust dialogue has come into question. They are further beset by doubts relating to cost, rigor, and relevance. While the problems have varied causes, the fundamental issue is that too many institutions of higher education are no longer focused on teaching. Education is simply not what colleges prioritize or reward, with troubling consequences for instruction, student learning, campus culture, and tuition costs.
Given the university's historic mission, this is an astonishing development. The earliest colleges were places where aspiring priests, lawyers, and physicians were trained. In the American colonies, institutions of higher education adopted that same mission. Harvard, Yale, William & Mary, and their imitators were places of teaching and learning. The royal charter establishing King's College (now Columbia University) charged the institution with the "Instruction and Education of Youth in the Learned Languages, and Liberal Arts and Sciences." In the 19th century, universities' educational mission expanded to new subjects and vocations as the federal government helped states found land-grant institutions to teach agriculture and mechanics.
Later, as the 20th century loomed, the German model of a research university offered a more ambitious, scientifically grounded vision of higher education. New institutions, like Johns Hopkins University and the University of Chicago, prioritized research and embraced the hard sciences. Initially, this was a healthy and natural evolution at a select number of institutions. Yet over time, fascination with the trappings of research — fueled by hundreds of billions in federal funding and the rise of publication as the paramount measure of scholarship — derailed broad swaths of higher education in unanticipated ways. By the 1960s, Christopher Jencks and David Riesman could note in The Academic Revolution that, given "a limited amount of time and energy," professors had learned "that in terms of professional standing and personal advancement it ma[de] more sense to throw [their efforts] into research than teaching." That dynamic would spread and swell with time.
More than a half-century later, the leaders of four-year institutions still pay lip service to teaching, learning, and faculty-student engagement. That is, after all, how legislators, taxpayers, and the broader public understand their mission. Eighty percent of Americans say that the most important measure of a university's quality is whether its professors are excellent teachers. But at many of the nation's 2,000 four-year colleges and universities, teaching and mentoring are a secondary concern. The consequences manifest in larger shifts across the academy.
Back in the mid-20th century, there were institutional routines and structures undergirding education. Core curricula, traditional disciplines, tough grading practices, strict codes of conduct, and a commitment to the classics added up to an academic culture with a strong gravitational pull. Students went to class, read books, wrote papers, and were expected to work hard.
Over time, the scaffolding that had supported four-year colleges fell apart. Core curricula gave way to menus of ephemera. Traditional disciplines were elbowed aside by a raft of identity-driven and boutique programs. Grade inflation reigned. Norms eroded, and the classics were largely jettisoned. The result is a culture with less gravity and more aimlessness.
At many of our best-known colleges and universities, faculty teach just two to four courses per year. In teaching's stead, they devote the lion's share of their time to research, bureaucratic duties, and grant chasing. In 2019, in a rare burst of candor, Notre Dame provost John McGreevy noted that his institution boasts whole departments where the faculty norm is a one-to-one teaching load (that is, one three-hour class in the fall and one in the spring) and that teaching loads have shrunk because colleges compete for faculty by promising they'll teach less.
This race to the bottom has prompted increased reliance on part-time faculty to handle instruction. Between 1999 and 2022, the growth in total faculty handily outpaced the 25% increase in undergraduate enrollment. Yet the share of full-time, tenure-track professors declined while the number of graduate teaching assistants jumped by more than a third. The actual work of teaching is increasingly shouldered by part-timers, adjunct faculty, and teaching assistants who, through no fault of their own, have limited opportunity or incentive to invest in students' academic lives.
In an environment where mentoring and role modeling are essential, the retreat from teaching has incurred extraordinary costs. If four-year colleges and universities broadly adopted the not-so-radical expectation that faculty devote half their working hours to instructional responsibilities, it would roughly double the time they spend teaching. This would produce sizeable benefits for students and institutions alike.
A SCARCITY OF TEACHING DATA
Given rampant concerns about the state of higher education in America, why isn't more attention paid to faculty teaching load?
For starters, higher-education researchers evince remarkably little interest in how faculty use their time. "One of the closest guarded secrets in American higher education," noted Richard Vedder in his 2019 book Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America, "is the average teaching loads of faculty." Vedder was on to something. Since 1996, the University of Delaware has administered the annual National Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity, surveying faculty and teaching assistants about course loads and enrollment. The data, however, are "only available to four-year, non-profit institutions of higher education," meaning that independent researchers cannot peek behind the curtain. Tellingly, the study is being discontinued because the number of participating institutions "has slowly declined to unsustainable levels."
The U.S. Department of Education used to track faculty workloads through the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, but it stopped collecting these data two decades ago. The Higher Education Research Institute has collected self-reported data on faculty teaching loads since 1989, publishing gross aggregates from a faculty sample. However, access to anything that permits meaningful analysis by institution or discipline requires an extensive proposal accompanied by a theoretical framework, a fee, and a description of how any results will be shared.
Meanwhile, the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University has administered the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement since 2003, but it doesn't publish full results or information on individual institutions. While it publishes some aggregated data visualizations, institutional data on teaching and time use are only shared privately with participating institutions.
In late 2024, we searched a dozen higher-education research organizations — including the Association for the Study of Higher Education, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, Stanford's Institute for Higher Education Research, and the Center for Research on Undergraduate Education at the University of Iowa — for the terms "faculty teaching loads," "college course load," "teaching load," "professor course load," "professor schedule," and "faculty load." Of the 12 organizations we reviewed, 10 yielded zero results for every single term.
While academia doesn't appear interested in what faculty do all day, there have been a few scattered studies on the topic. One 2008 survey of scientists and engineers at 150 research institutions published in the Economics of Education Review found that tenured faculty reported spending about one-third of their time on teaching-related activity. Another study, published in Sociological Forum in 2012, found that tenure-track faculty reported spending 27% to 35% of their time on instructional tasks. In 2021, two assistant professors in the humanities logged their work routines in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They calculated that they devoted less than 16 hours per week to teaching, at least eight hours weekly to campus service (including campus programs and academic journals), and most of the rest to administrative tasks and research.
In short, a reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimate is that, at four-year institutions, teaching absorbs something like 25% to 40% of a full-time faculty member's week during the semester.
THE COMPETITION TO TEACH LESS
Across much of academia, teaching is viewed as a burden to be borne. Prized faculty are rewarded with fewer teaching obligations. Deans and department chairs negotiate for reduced teaching loads. Professors enviously discuss who has the lightest teaching responsibilities, viewing it as a badge of professional regard.
University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Zimmerman noted that faculty tend to characterize "research as their 'work' and teaching as their 'load'" — a habit which, as Zimmerman dryly remarked, speaks "volumes about academic priorities." John Cross and Edie Goldenberg reported that much undergraduate instruction has been delegated to adjunct faculty so that tenured scholars can better focus on research, grants, and administration. Richard Vedder has similarly noted that universities routinely "turn much of the critically important teaching of beginning undergraduates over to inexperienced graduate students."
John Boyer's University of Chicago: A History, published in 2015, documented the gradual reduction in teaching at that institution. Into the 1960s, the typical load at the University of Chicago was five or six courses a year. By the 1980s, it had declined by a third in the social sciences and humanities. Similarly, in Buying the Best: Cost Escalation in Elite Higher Education, Charles Clotfelter examined four highly regarded institutions — Duke University, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Carleton College — and found that, between 1977 and 1992, there was a notable decline in the courses taught by faculty.
At Notre Dame, John McGreevy has noted that faculty course loads "in the humanities, social sciences, and arts moved from 3-3 on a semester system in the 1970s to 3-2 and then 2-2 in the late 1980s." The trend continued into the '90s and 2000s. McGreevy recalled: "The first strike came in economics. 'We need to go 2-1,' the chair politely explained, 'because otherwise we can't hire anyone.' He was right, and so we did." Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, pointed out that leaders compete for "name" faculty, but "mak[ing] them happy and keep[ing] them from going off to the next university" means "you do not want to provoke them with talk about spending more time on their teaching." If professors received outside job offers, former University of Wisconsin-Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank would offer a reduced teaching load to try and retain them. The president of the American Association of University Professors at the time, Rudy Fichtenbaum, said Blank's response is likely a common practice.
These leaders are describing a collective-action problem. McGreevy tells of asking why Yale's political-science department shifted to a 2-1 teaching load, only to be told it was because Harvard had done so. McGreevy explained, "when one program reduces teaching schedules, faculty members at other programs use competing offers to begin the process of forcing change across the academic ecosystem."
PUBLISHING AND GRANT CHASING
If faculty spend less time teaching than they used to, what are they doing instead? After all, we don't mean to suggest that faculty are layabouts. While some may be, the bigger problem is that hardworking faculty at four-year institutions feel compelled to direct their energy toward activities that don't involve teaching. In particular, faculty are diverting enormous amounts of time to pursuing grants and publishing articles that may end up barely being read.
We want to be clear here: Academic research is a good thing. Professors should be active scholars. Grant-funded research can be immensely valuable, and the resulting science has yielded miraculous medical and technological advances. It is also true, however, that the preoccupation with publication and grant procurement has had real, negative impacts on higher education.
A century ago, scholarly publication was the only way for a far-flung community of scholars to disseminate research, advance science, and share findings. Publication was slow and expensive. The available tools made writing laborious, while data analysis was limited, arduous, and time-consuming. Consequently, publication was an instrumental activity that scholars did occasionally, when they had something that merited the time and effort. In 1900, just 139 scholarly journals existed. That scarcity served as a rough sort of quality control.
In recent decades, the landscape has changed profoundly. As publication became cheap, easy, and profitable (for publishers), journals proliferated. Today, there are more than 24,000 scholarly journals — including publications in niche fields like Rangifer (Research, Management and Husbandry of Reindeer and other Northern Ungulates) and the Journal of Travel Research — that offer countless pages to be filled. Faculty across four-year colleges, not just those in research institutions, feel pressed to show that they're busy publishing. As academics have published ever more work, expectations for publishing have increased in tandem.
The result has been runaway publication inflation. The same technologies that have made it faster and easier to write, collaborate, share ideas, and engage across vast distances have diluted the distinctiveness and quality of what is published.
The relentless pursuit of research grants has introduced similar distortions to scholarly life. The federal government's decision after World War II to invest in research partnerships with universities made good sense. It has yielded astonishing breakthroughs in national defense, technology, medicine, engineering, and more. Over the decades, however, hundreds of billions in federal research funding and the allure of generous overhead rates — and the prestige that such funding confers — have transformed four-year institutions in unfortunate ways. Research has eclipsed teaching and learning in the upper echelons of higher education, and that emphasis has trickled down to imitators, would-be competitors, and institutions eager for respect.
Today, the trend seems to be accelerating. As Colorado State's Kimberly French and several colleagues noted in 2020: "Even within teaching-oriented institutions, faculty are increasingly research productive, in an effort to generate funds and emulate the professional status awarded to their colleagues in research universities." The result is an ever-accelerating paper chase. Between 2007 and 2011, scholars across 290 Ph.D.-granting institutions in the United States published 158,000 journal articles. The period between 2015 and 2019 saw that figure jump by more than a third, to 215,000 journal articles. Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit summed things up nicely in 2018, writing in International Higher Education: "[T]here are too many books and articles of marginal quality, predatory journals are on the rise, and there is a tremendous pressure on academics worldwide to publish."
The incentive to churn out papers has yielded fragile studies and tough-to-replicate findings in psychology, medical science, biology, economics, and the social sciences. A 2016 survey in Nature found that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce published experimental results. And there's reason to suspect that things are getting worse. Data from the Center for Scientific Integrity show a steep increase in the number of retractions by year of publication. Approximately 10,000 papers published in 2022 were retracted, up sharply from 1,400 papers in 2012 and a mere 300 in 2002. The pressure to publish has fostered a culture of careless, unreliable, and even fraudulent scholarship.
Moreover, much of what gets published has little to no impact. The 2018 Oxford University Press book Measuring Research reported that 70% of the arts and humanities studies published in the Web of Science, an index of scholarly journals, in 1990 were not cited within 25 years of publication. A 2019 analysis of Scopus, a database of peer-reviewed literature, found that roughly 36% of arts and humanities papers, books, and chapters published between 1995 and 2015 had zero citations. Much of what's published in academia today is transactional, destined to be ignored. Such a state of affairs makes the case for reconsidering when publication represents a useful contribution — especially when it comes at the expense of time devoted to teaching and learning.
PUTTING FIRST THINGS FIRST
Students, parents, voters, and policymakers tend to imagine that the primary purpose of a four-year college is educating students. That's why the public confers enormous sums in direct support, grants, aid, and subsidized loans to help students attend college. But higher education has lost sight of this mission. It's time for a reset.
With limited exceptions, teaching should be a professor's core responsibility. Implementing that reality will require overhauling expectations and incentives. Institutions of higher education will need to engage professors in reimagining academic culture and collect the information necessary to ensure that campuses operate according to this mission. There should and will be exceptions, but those should be exceptions — not the norm.
Today, even at colleges that label themselves "teaching-centered institutions," instructing students is too often treated as a burden. Hiring, promotion, and pay are driven more by publication and grants than by quality instruction. Those leading four-year institutions need to ask themselves two simple questions: Do we think teaching is a critical part of our mission? And if so, how does that influence our definition of a good scholar?
While the most appealing examples of non-teaching activity — receiving National Institutes of Health grants, engaging in big-dollar research collaborations, publishing widely cited research, and the like — can be both intrinsically valuable and meaningfully contribute to an institution's mission, those exemplary instances are rare. They do not excuse the time, money, and labor devoted to administrative work, grant management, mediocre conference papers, or jargon-laden articles written for niche journals. There is certainly a swath of research and disciplinary activity that deserves to be supported and recognized. But quality matters. And none of this should obscure the fact that most colleges exist primarily to teach students.
Colleges and universities dedicated to education should give pride of place to a faculty member's commitment to teaching and competence as an instructor. This means putting a premium on faculty who willingly teach essential courses, make exceptional efforts to mentor and engage students, and help make colleagues more effective instructors. Such activity should be reflected in hiring, promotion, compensation, and the distribution of non-monetary perks. While some dimensions of this activity are challenging to measure, that's no excuse for deviating from the educational mission.
Giving teaching its due will involve resetting expectations. Most four-year colleges employ faculty on a nine-month contract. That commitment typically requires faculty to teach 13 weeks in the fall and 13 in the spring, or 26 weeks of the 40 or so covered by the contract. Today, faculty tend to devote approximately 15 hours a week (or less) to teaching during those semesters. Colleges would do well to radically overhaul this norm: The expectation should be that faculty commit 30 to 32 hours per week to instructional tasks during those 26 weeks when students are on campus.
While the particulars vary, a thumbnail estimate is that a typical course entails roughly seven hours of instructional responsibility per week during a semester: three hours of teaching and another four hours of planning, grading, and engaging with students during office hours. Some faculty will insist that this figure is too low, while others will quietly admit that it's too high due to teaching assistants, limited office hours, canceled classes, and the convenience of virtual instruction. Considerations like subject, student makeup, and pedagogy also come into play.
If faculty devote 30 to 32 hours to teaching per week for 26 weeks a year, with other burdens appropriately reduced, they would devote about 800 hours annually to instruction. If faculty work a 40-hour week for a 40-week year, typical faculty members would devote approximately 50% of their salaried time to teaching. That would double the amount of teaching a typical faculty member engages in annually. At the same time, it would leave the other half of their nine-month work year for research, university service, and related pursuits, as well as three months each summer.
In practice, this shift would allow for smaller classes, reduce bottlenecks that make it harder for students to graduate on time, and lower costs by reducing the need to hire part-time adjuncts and teaching assistants. Coupled with an increased number of office hours, this shift would strengthen the focus on instruction and the bond between students and faculty.
Two complementary changes need to be made to enable faculty to take teaching more seriously. The first is to recalibrate expectations for faculty publishing. The second is to radically reduce the amount of time faculty devote to administrative duties. If faculty are expected to act like educators, they need the time and the bandwidth to do so.
The problem with reducing administrative duties is that colleges are remarkably vague regarding faculty responsibilities. Their duties are dotted with open-ended tasks like administering departments, participating in outreach initiatives, bringing guest speakers to campus, reviewing manuscripts, advising student groups, and so forth. The resulting sprawl can create the sense that there's no reasonable way for faculty to take on more teaching. Again, we want to be clear: The point is not that all of this activity is unnecessary. Some of it can be valuable. The important questions are how valuable it is and how much time it should entail.
College leaders need to make and honor a commitment to minimizing obligations that compete with teaching. Part of the appeal here, for college officials and policymakers alike, is that there are large financial upsides to ensuring that professors have more time to teach. In 2023-24, the nine-month average salary for an associate professor at a four-year public institution was just under $100,000. If that professor taught five courses a year, the faculty cost-per-course (before accounting for benefits) would be $20,000. If that same scholar taught eight courses a year, the cost-per-course would be closer to $12,000. The potential savings are enormous, especially when we appreciate that this would both dramatically shrink the need for adjuncts and potentially permit institutions to provide more instruction with a slightly smaller faculty.
There is, of course, a vital place for research institutions in the higher-education firmament, and we don't mean to dismiss or demean their contributions. It makes sense for them to consider research work, grant dollars, and publications in hiring and tenure decisions. But there is no evidence that those things make for good teaching. Students seeking a quality, cost-effective undergraduate education should treat institutions where teaching is a peripheral concern with caution.
Institutions that emphasize research owe it to prospective students to be clear about their priorities. Any designated research institution that chooses to maintain modest teaching loads and research-centric personnel policies should — as a condition of eligibility for public grants, loans, or aid — be required to appropriately label all web pages and marketing materials. We'd recommend something like: "This is a research institution. Faculty are hired and evaluated based primarily on their research. Classroom teaching will often be done by part-time faculty or graduate assistants. This may affect course availability, mentoring, and instructional quality."
A FINAL WORD
The takeaway here is not that college leaders should obsess about course loads or any other narrow gauge of faculty work. It's that teaching and learning have been eclipsed over time and that they must reclaim a more prominent place in higher education.
Today, faculty can teach for years without anyone — colleague or administrator — ever seeing them do so, much less offering feedback on their work. Except in the most unusual of circumstances, educating students is something that faculty are left to figure out on their own. There's rarely training in graduate school or meaningful mentoring from institutions or professional associations. Teaching is neither prioritized nor supported. It's time for this to change.
Might a shift in focus from research to teaching repel faculty who don't want to teach? Sure. And this should be seen, in the lexicon of Silicon Valley, as a feature, not a bug. Institutions of higher education that value teaching should seek faculty who want to teach. There's no shortage of potential academics: The National Science Foundation notes that there were 58,000 doctorates awarded in the United States in 2023, of whom barely a third have found employment in academia. Given the surplus, colleges should screen for faculty who will take teaching and mentoring seriously. It would also help if doctoral programs prepared future professors to do this work. A commitment to encouraging just that, therefore, should become a priority for campus leaders and policymakers.
Inevitably, a proposal like this will be read in light of the ongoing tumult in higher education. Thus, some may read it as another attack on colleges or college faculty. But we'd urge such readers to think twice. This is not a tale of individual culpability, but of misaligned incentives. Larger dynamics have distorted institutional priorities and professional work. We suspect that many faculty members would welcome a respite from the publication paper chase, and would be delighted to devote more time to teaching if they were confident that it would be rewarded and other demands would be lessened. There is a win-win to be found for students, scholars, and the nation here. But it'll take leadership to make that happen.
