Today, AFT releases a new report, Reversing Course: The Troubled State of Academic Staffing and a Path Forward, which provides further data on higher education's continuing reliance on underpaid contingent faculty and the parallel decline in the number of full-time tenure-track faculty. The report looks not only at the numbers of contingent faculty now in the workforce, but also at the number of classes and students they are teaching as well as what they earn. This analysis is followed by a new interactive model to help colleges, unions and other faculty organizations, or even states begin to calculate the cost of reversing this trend.

What will it cost a college to move to parity pay for contingent faculty over five or 10 years? How much will it take to increase the number of full-time faculty on the tenure track by 10 percent over the next decade? And what would it take to do both? These are the kinds of questions that the model allows us to begin to answer.

We repeatedly hear it said that reversing the academic staffing crisis is too expensive, end of story. We don't agree. Yes, it will take money, but that does not make it impossible. Just like any other problem that requires investment, the first step is to identify what the goal is and what the cost will be. Then you can begin the process of planning and adjusting priorities to meet the goal. Rather than just paying lip service to how important higher education is to the future of our country, it is time that legislators, policy makers and administrators sit down and work with us to put their money where their mouths are.

• Read the Report (PDF)
  
• Download the Interactive Excel Model
• Read the Press Release

Media coverage of Reversing Course:

• Inside Higher Ed
• USA Today
• Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)

Hit that "Read More" button if you have some thoughts you want to share!

Update:   I know many were concerned by the original title of the USA Today article.  Apparently so was the author Mary Beth Marklein who got it changed--here is what she said in the comment thread.

Thanks to all who are commenting here. As dossthane notes, the studies -- and the story -- note that part-time or contingent faculty are not the cause of any problems related to education quality. Nevertheless, I, like SUNY Steve, winced when I saw the original headline: "Studies Link Part-time College Faculty to Worse Education." I asked this morning that it be changed. I admit that the revised headline doesn't really get to the heart of this complex issue, either. But at least it doesn't give the impression that the studies or the story are pointing a finger at contingent faculty.