| Over the past few decades, American colleges and universities have begun to rely increasingly on adjunct faculty given tighter budget constraints. Critics allege that students attending such schools face negative consequences, such as lower-quality classroom instruction and lower graduation rates, while others argue that students benefit from the professional labor market experience of adjunct faculty. This paper contributes to this debate on the quality of adjunct faculty and the consequences of attending a school that has a greater reliance on adjunct faculty. I use college graduates' earnings data from PayScale, Inc. as well as data from IPEDS related to faculty composition and other institutional characteristics in order to estimate the impact of adjunct faculty on college graduates' earnings. Initially, my results suggest that a greater share of both adjunct and tenured faculty at a school is associated with an earnings reward. There is also an earnings gap that slightly favors an increase in tenured faculty. There is, however, a negative although statistically insignificant effect of both adjunct and tenured faculty on earnings upon using institution fixed effects. |
