Incentives and the Skills Gap: Motivating Faculty and Universities to Do Better
Key Issues and Some Ideas on How to Address Them
In our first post in this series, we discussed the gap between what employers want and the graduates that higher education produces. The last two posts focused on how a lack of the right information at the right time underlies the skills gap, and solutions to address this information problem.
In this post and the next we tackle the problem of incentives: what reasons do students, faculty and universities, and employers have to take action to close the gap? How do misaligned incentives stand in the way of improved curriculum, course rigor, narrow versus broad preparation, and improved information sharing – and what can be done about this incentive problem?
Let’s start here. Students would be better prepared for long-term career success, and employers would experience smaller skills gaps in their preparation, if the following changes were to occur.
· Faculty designed courses and curriculum to provide students not only with rigorous disciplinary knowledge and skills (aligned with employer needs), but to build professional skills (communication, leadership and teamwork, …) by teaching in a manner that provided repeated exposure to opportunities to practice those skills.
· University leadership focused more on student outcomes and preparation for a career and less on athletics, rankings, or other measures of prestige.
· Students took challenging classes to push themselves and learn more, and engaged in non-required, but still essential, co-curricular opportunities to build needed professional and personal skills.
· Employers interacted more extensively with universities, sharing information about their needs and experiences with graduates, and sponsoring career preparation programming inside and outside the classroom.
We’ll tackle the first two in today’s post.
Faculty Incentives: Research, Rigor, and the Rest
Universities are multi-product firms, and we ask faculty to multi-task across four completely different activities that require completely different aptitudes. We ask them to produce:
· research
· students (teach courses, mentor, and advise)
· service to the university (develop curriculum, administer HR functions of hiring, development, evaluation, and promotion/firing for our faculty, and sit on endless organizing committees)
· service to their profession and/or to local firms, other stakeholders, and communities (called “extension” or “engagement” in land-grant and other universities with such an external focus).
You might wonder… why would you ask faculty to do all these things? And the answer is: because they have the subject matter expertise needed to do most of these tasks. How can an outside administrator or a staff member know what should be taught or what constitutes great research or who should be hired/promoted/fired in fields ranging from Accounting to Zoology? They can’t, and so we rely on faculty. Efforts to shift the task burden away from faculty toward less expensive staff members, particularly those tasks associated with running the university, gets criticized as “administrative bloat”.
How faculty allocate their time across these activities, and the quality of effort they put into each, depends a little on their intrinsic motivations but a lot on the incentives they experience within the university and within their profession. Which of these tasks we incentivize varies considerably across universities, and increasingly across faculty types as hiring practices have evolved to distinguish the duties of more research-oriented faculty from those with more teaching-, engagement-, or administratively-intensive assignments.
At a research-oriented university (say, R1 or R2 in the Carnegie Classification), tenured and tenure-track faculty spend the majority of their working time on research, and their compensation is most closely tied to research output. Some of this reflects internal evaluation mechanisms that reward research most heavily. More of it reflects the fact that significant raises (and promotions) depend on externally visible research success.
It is very hard to determine whether a scholar at another university is teaching well or offering great administrative service to the university. It is relatively easy to see if they are generating large grants, placing books with top publishers or articles in top journals, and being cited in the scholarly literature. And because it is easy to see these things, these achievements get rewarded on external (and therefore internal) markets.
A university could decide to unilaterally change this, down-weighting research excellence and up-weighting teaching or service to the university in order to get faculty to spend more time and effort on students and the institution. A likely consequence is that the university would quickly lose their very best scholars. A Nobel-prize winning economist we know once remarked, “My Dean doesn’t decide my salary. He only decides which university will pay it to me.” In contrast, down-weighting teaching and service generally doesn’t cause a university to lose faculty who excel in these areas because these traits are largely invisible to the external market.
Incentives to Teach Well
A starting point for any discussion on student preparation is the quality of classroom teaching. We have 60 plus years of teaching experience, and having each just prepped a set of new courses for our return to faculty from administration we can say with some confidence: teaching well takes a lot of work!
That is true of classical lecture and exam formats, but it is especially true when we make classes highly interactive and engaging. And it is especially true when we use assessments (writing, open-ended problem solving, project-based assignments) that require more of students and build their professional skills. Computer grade-able multiple-choice exams are a very low-cost assessment tool, particularly as class sizes grow to achieve cost-savings in the university. Grading long essays for a 50-student course, particularly in a world where ChatGPT has fast become a ubiquitous part of the lazy student’s toolkit? Give us a break.
Introducing/maintaining rigor in courses is similarly disincentivized. Why? Suppose we want to take teaching really seriously. What might we do?
· We would invest heavily in professional development for faculty, both creating institutional support for best practices and use of technology, and require faculty to participate.
· We would ask faculty to submit an advance copy of their syllabus and assessments to a committee of their peers to ensure that learning outcomes are clear and consistent with the broader curricula, and that assessments are fair but challenging.
· We would send other faculty to regularly observe the classroom to ensure that the style of teaching was engaging, and that students were motivated and participating.
· We would ask students to reflect qualitatively on the experience and how it could be better in addition to providing quantitative scoring of the course.
· Finally, we would use the outputs of this process to make decisions about faculty raises and promotions.
Some universities do all the above. In the universities we are aware of (in Denmark, for example), there is an enormous investment of time to ensure courses meet standards. And the cost of that investment is significant: faculty spend so much time creating, refining, and evaluating other courses that they only have time to teach perhaps one or two classes a year. Every element of this more comprehensive approach to producing and evaluating teaching quality is expensive, with one exception: asking students to provide quantitative scoring of the course.
And whaddayaknow, student evaluations are the most common way universities measure teaching quality and their quantitative summary measures the most important teaching input into raises and promotions.
What do we know about student evaluations? Students don’t know what they don’t know, which includes knowing whether a course is preparing them for a great professional career. Students like fun classes and classes where they get a good grade. Students systematically downgrade instructors who don’t look like the authors of this article, with systematic differences in scores based on instructor demographics such as gender.
Students’ future selves may be really grateful for tough courses that challenged them and made them think. But their future selves aren’t filling out the end-of-term evaluations. The 19-year-olds stewing over a C- on an exam are.
Curriculum Not Courses
Student learning takes place across an entire curriculum, and a singular experience with one professor represents perhaps 1/40th of the set of courses taken and an even smaller part of the overall college learning experience. Curricular change requires coordinated action across dozens of courses and faculty, and the incentives to innovate there are weaker still. Which is to say, faculty might be incentivized to improve their individual courses and especially bad teaching can have severe consequences including termination.
But nobody is getting fired if the curriculum as a whole is an incoherent mess.
Related, there is an important distinction between faculty teaching well and students learning well that is relevant to this discussion. Most universities provide some incentives for faculty to teach well. But there are no incentives whatsoever connected to whether students actually learn material and can use it at some later date.
The lack of incentives for student learning stems from several factors. First, the breadth and depth of material covered and assessed in an individual course means that the faculty teaching that course are usually the only ones who really know whether students are learning the material. And for obvious reasons we don’t rely on faculty-reported data on student learning in their course to assess and reward/promote/terminate that same faculty member.
There are a few exceptions where student learning could be used to assess the quality of curriculum and instruction. Some degree programs (accounting, medical fields, engineering) culminate in graduates taking comprehensive exams offered by bodies external to the university to assess the competence and fitness of the graduate to practice professionally.
In addition, university-level accreditation bodies do ask universities to develop specific learning outcomes for their programs and assess whether students are meeting these learning outcomes. As a practical matter, developing and using these learning outcomes (a very onerous process) to truly drive curriculum change doesn’t usually get far beyond the core curriculum. Accreditation for specific disciplines can be more targeted, and loss of accreditation can have real consequences for programs.
But we are not aware of instances in which such learning outcomes are used to evaluate individual faculty.
Apart from the practical difficulties just raised, student learning is not specifically incentivized because learning happens outside individual classrooms. It happens through the progressive accumulation of understanding over a sequence of well-organized courses and class-adjacent material in the co-curriculum. It happens through a learning environment that includes meaningful peer-to-peer interactions.
And to a surprising degree it occurs in courses that students think are not taught well at all! (We recommend the book Range by David Epstein for more on this point.) The fact that learning can arise specifically from creating “desirable difficulties” for students means that carefully designed randomized control trials have shown that there can be a negative relationship between our measures of teaching effectiveness and actual student learning.
All of this raises a profound question for universities. Who exactly is responsible for assuring that students learn? If everyone is responsible then as a practical matter no one is accountable.
Solutions: Aligning Faculty and University Incentives on Teaching and Curricular Excellence
While the challenges outlined above are daunting we believe they could be addressed through the commitment of real resources. We think universities should:
1. Elevate teaching and learning success as a marker of the university’s prestige and reputation in the same way that research dollars, rankings, and athletics success are currently emphasized. To use a line from one of our colleagues, universities should aspire to be recognized as “T1” (top tier teaching and learning) institutions, not merely “R1” institutions.
2. Define what teaching and learning excellence means at the institution. What is great teaching (and student learning) and how will it be assessed – in as objective and efficient fashion as is possible? Use the definition to shape faculty professional development and assessment. We are biased, but we like what our university has done in this regard.
3. Invest significant resources in institutional teaching and learning support to identify and promote best practices, broaden the use of advanced learning technologies, support experiential learning through investments in staff, and provide coaching and mentoring to developing faculty.
4. Require participation of newer faculty in professional development courses and seminars aimed at improving course design and learning outcomes. To ensure meaningful participation, we would reduce faculty teaching loads for the first year or two to ensure sufficient time to benefit from this learning process.
5. Increase rewards for and internal visibility of excellence in course design, innovation and delivery to place it on a par with research excellence. As an example, in 2018 Purdue created ten 150th Anniversary Professorships to be awarded on the basis of teaching excellence. That was expensive – each professorship is funded by the university until the ten $1.5M endowments are in place – but it provided a profound signal about the university’s commitment to the teaching mission. Of course, one could do this on a smaller scale to make it more affordable. But the larger the award the stronger the signal.
6. Elevate the importance of curricular and co-curricular design, innovation and delivery rather than only emphasizing individual teaching excellence. This could be done internally, with universities requiring units to regularly provide evidence of deep and thoughtful curricular review and/or awarding significant funds to winning departments for both innovative design and student outcomes. It could also be done externally, with professional organizations and employers creating nationally competitive prizes that highlight programs whose construction produces that kind of graduates employers aspire to hire.
7. (Most controversial). Make faculty individually and collectively accountable and rewardable for enrollments and holistic student outcomes.
At some level this is what RCM (Responsibility Centered Management) budget models do… they reward departments for generating student credit hours and/or majors. We have seen this be most effective with new graduate offerings that incentivize faculty innovation by rewarding departments with a share of the tuition revenue generated from new programs. These funds can be used for research, to support PhD students, for summer salary, or other benefits faculty appreciate. When faculty share in program success, programs become more successful.
But one could go much further with this. Raise pools or one-time bonuses could be tied to student performance. Faculty may strongly dislike this because while they are accustomed to being harshly evaluated and rewarded (or not) based on individual productivity, they are not at all accustomed to being held accountable for joint output. But the reality in the work world is that bonuses flow to individual contributors when that contributor is productive AND the firm as a whole does well. Why should faculty be different?
And, of course, we are seeing examples of faculty being held accountable for declining enrollments and student outcomes, but regrettably this occurs only when departments close and the faculty laid off. Presumably there are many opportunities to improve within programs not facing the death penalty!
Next week: students and employers and incentives.
“Finding Equilibrium” is coauthored by Jay Akridge, Professor of Agricultural Economics, Trustee Chair in Teaching and Learning Excellence, and Provost Emeritus at Purdue University and David Hummels, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Dean Emeritus at the Daniels School of Business at Purdue.