Declining Teaching Loads Contribute to Growing College Costs

By Julia Lawrence. One way of tackling the increasing cost of college education would be to reverse the trend of declining teaching loads as described in a recent report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Education Sector. Titled Selling Students Short: Declining Teaching Loads at Colleges and Universities, the report argues that while faculty salaries compromise the biggest part of college spending, their workload has consistently gone down for decades. It’s difficult to get accurate information about teaching loads since the only recent survey conducted on the issue by the Department of Education provides no detail and only has aggregate data available to the public via its Data Analysis System. Not only is the information for a particular university impossible to obtain, there’s also a simple paucity of data since the survey has only been conducted four times since 1987 and not once since 2004. Read more...