Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction

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The best and brightest students will be less inclined to enroll in Ph. The Faculty Factor offers policy recommendations to ensure the American higher education system remains a leader in the global economy. One such proposal in The Faculty Factor to lessen the number of part-time and non-tenure track hires is to mandate the end of tenure at age This proposal recognizes that a central factor promoting the increase in part-time and non-tenure track faculty hiring is the inability of administrators, with the abolition of mandatory retirement, to meaningfully plan for their instructional and research staffing needs.

Finkelstein notes that a mandatory end to tenure at age 70 will allow administrators to better plan hiring needs, thus encouraging the continued hiring of tenure track faculty. Schuster, Claremont Graduate University.

• A Vision!
• Researcher reflects on studies of faculty issues.
• Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction.

In the decade since publishing The American Faculty , much has transpired in American higher education, especially the transformation to its core, the faculty. Finkelstein and Schuster collaborated with Valerie Martin-Conley, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs on The Faculty Factor to provide a comprehensive depiction of what it means to be a faculty member in American higher education in the second decade of the 21st century.

Trower, author of Success on the Tenure Track: This exhaustive, extremely well-written compendium on how the 'condition' of the faculty has transformed in recent decades is truly a magnum opus. Everyone who cares about the quality of American higher education must read this book and keep a copy ready-at-hand. He has also been a visiting lecturer or scholar at: Finkelstein co-authored a book with William Cummings reporting on the U.

Rosters of tenure track and tenured faculty in engineering and natural sciences were provided by the institution for 5 time points , , , , These snapshots allowed us to define three cohorts over seven-year intervals —, —, — We tracked each individual from start to end of a 7-year period, and assigned each to a category at the end of that period: These data allowed us to examine retention and promotion across the three faculty cohorts.

Impossible transitions such as full Professor to Assistant Professor are not listed. We then modeled these transitions via a semi-Markov process. Our fundamental equation tracks faculty demographics across the seven-year period as follows:. The 6x6 transition matrix A is populated with proportions obtained from data as in Table 1.

This matrix has a number of zeroes for impossible transitions such as Professor to Assistant Professor. If we assume that the transition matrix A and recruitment vector B remain constant, then we can iterate the equation across time to project faculty composition see Supplemental Information for a full explanation of methodological details. As iteration proceeds, the projections of faculty demographics in future time periods become more and more similar. Indeed, given sufficient time, this semi-Markov process drives the numbers of faculty by rank and gender to converge to a steady state:.

A fuller explanation is given in the S1 Text. Because we used institutional data, informed consent was not required. Indeed, women were recruited to the faculty at rates exceeding their current representation, showing that recruitment at all ranks drove the overall increase Fig 2B. Yet we simultaneously uncovered gender gaps in persistence and career progression. Women faculty, both pre- and post-tenure, resigned voluntarily at higher rates than men in each of the three cohorts Fig 2C ; a retention gender gap persisted over these 15 years.

The vast majority of Assistant Professors who were considered for promotion with tenure received positive results; indeed, no woman was denied tenure in the entire dataset Table 1. The retention gender gap therefore resulted from more voluntary departures of women than men: Retention at higher ranks Fig 2C was measured as a function of voluntary resignations of tenured Associate Professors and Professors ignoring retirements and deaths. A gender gap again characterized each cohort, and was largest in the third.

Gender representation of the faculty across time. Recruitment of women to the faculty C. Voluntary resignations among faculty.

Promotion rates for Associate Professors. Once tenured, female Associate Professors were promoted at lower rates than men in the first two cohorts; this promotion gender gap was erased in the third cohort Fig 2D. Finally, we further examined values for faculty recruitment, i.

These interim resignations Fig 3 were aggregated across all these individuals, even though their time on the faculty varied from 1 to 6 years. Despite vigorous hiring of women Assistant Professors Fig 1B , their short-term retention lagged behind that of men: Faculty who were hired and gone between census points represent substantial retention losses for the institution. Together, the gender gaps in recruitment, retention, and promotion suggested that demographic inertia was not solely responsible for the under-representation of women on the STEM faculty.

Rather, we wondered whether gender parity could ever be achieved with current practices. To assess that possibility, we used transition matrices to model faculty flux, and examined convergence behavior to characterize the end state. By assuming the flux fit a semi-Markov process i.

Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction

Fig 4A shows projections for each of the three cohorts. The simulated end states all show that, given current patterns of recruitment and retention, the proportion of women on the faculty will increase. Furthermore, in each successive cohort we see enhanced representation of women. Finally, representation of women among Professors increases dramatically at convergence for each cohort. With current patterns of recruitment and retention, women will always be under-represented on the faculty. Demographic inertia may maintain gender gaps in the short run, but we cannot ascribe long-term under-representation of women to that effect alone.

For all bars, the bottom white segment represents Assistant Professors, with Associate Professors above them and Professors as the top segment. A Actual representation of women on the faculty red and convergent state blue , given the respective transition matrix. We examined the sensitivity of these projections to gender gaps in faculty flux Fig 4B. We first artificially inflated recruitment of women Assistant Professors to equal that of men, then equated retention, and then both. The simulated convergence states Fig 4B are uniformly closer to gender parity than the current state or anticipated convergent state cf.

Not surprisingly, bringing both recruitment and retention of Assistant Professors to gender parity produced the best representation of women at convergence green bars in Fig 4b. Even so, gender parity was reached only for one such simulation. This simulation illustrates that post-tenure career progression is essential for gender parity as well. Indeed, comparisons of these simulations across cohorts is particularly instructive to disentangle effects of recruitment and retention across ranks.

Recruitment of women to Assistant Professorships was roughly constant across this time frame Fig 2B. The second cohort showed enhanced recruitment of women to both Associate Professor and Professor ranks, while the third showed vigorous recruitment to the highest rank Fig 2B. However, higher voluntary resignations of women faculty consistently undercut those recruitment efforts Fig 2C.

Improvement of promotion rates for women Associate Professors Fig 2D over time also worked to increase the seniority of women faculty.