More on the Public-Private Difference

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education published the results of a job satisfaction study. It shows a sag in satisfaction in mid-career, but overall very positive reviews for jobs in academia.

71 percent of faculty members give high marks to collaborative governance on their campuses; 68 percent of tenured professors agree their colleges support a strong teaching environment; a nearly equal percentage of male employees (82 percent) and female employees (83 percent) say their institutions provide resources for work-life balance; and both groups are similarly satisfied with their jobs as a whole (86 percent for men and 88 percent for women).

These numbers are much higher than what I'd expect talking to friends and colleagues. There are two reasons for this.

First, the article notes, "The percentages of positive responses were fairly high because the study was not a random national sample but instead was conducted only at institutions that felt confident enough in the quality of their workplaces to participate in the Great Colleges to Work For survey."

Second, public universities do significantly worse than the privates:

Faculty members at public colleges have less confidence in their senior leadership than do professors at private colleges (65 percent to 56 percent). Among the more-senior faculty members — full and associate professors — the news is even worse for public-university leaders. Just under half of public-college professors in the top two ranks have confidence in their senior leadership, compared with 66 percent and 60 percent, respectively, at private colleges. . . .

In several other key categories as well, private colleges outperformed public institutions. Professors at nearly every rank gave their private institutions higher marks for research and scholarship opportunities. At private colleges, 79 percent of faculty members ranked their teaching environment positively, compared with 71 percent at public institutions.

Employees over all at private institutions ranked their compensation and benefits better than those at public institutions did (66 percent to 63 percent), as well as their work-life balance (84 percent to 78 percent). One area where publics performed better than privates: health-care benefits (75 percent to 68 percent).

I have written a whole book on this topic and am bleakly satisfied to get some confirmation that there is fairly widespread awareness of the deterioration of working conditions in public higher ed.

Stagnation in professorial careers is an equally interesting issue, and this study is one of the first I've seen to take this on so directly:

For faculty members especially, the midcareer point is fraught with anxiety about what's next. After receiving tenure, they are no long-er protected from a heavy load of committee work. Some remain stuck as associate professors for years without a promotion. And unless they are superstars in their fields, it's not easy to get a job elsewhere.

"Faculty careers are flat unless you go into administration," says Saranna Thornton, a professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College. "Even if you become a full professor, you essentially do what you did as an associate professor."

The flat career can poison the individual and the institution: associate professors feel themselves to be dead-enders long before they get labeled as deadwood by their peers, chairs, and deans. And decades of flat or declining funding means long series of ideas that are never actually implemented, which makes the stuck feeling worse.