With so many contract instructors teaching our classes, students are being taught by working professionals, rather than by professors whose full-time job is to focus on students. This is having a negative effect on both the quality of the education we receive, and the perception of the value that our degrees hold.
Students are paying for a high-quality education, but instead they are receiving lectures that are read out of a textbook by contract instructors, who generally don’t get much training or practical experience in even the most basic aspects of teaching—such as creating questions.
This is an issue for a few reasons, but mainly because it is changing the way universities are perceived and contributes to students having to attend graduate school in order for their education to be a distinguishing factor in the workplace.
Universities are being run more like big corporations and less like educational institutions. For example, despite the Board of Governors voting to raise tuition over the next two years, more than 50 per cent of our teachers are contract instructors, who are paid a minimal salary for the work that they do providing us with a “higher education.” If instructors are being paid less due to the hiring of more contract instructors, but our tuition is going up, where is the money going?
If the idea of a university education keeps along this path of capitalist corporate greed, rather than a public institute of academia that values the progression of knowledge and research above all else, the value of a degree will dwindle even further than it already has.
The issue of minimal pay for contract professors has a huge part in this. Professors and contract instructors alike should be required to complete formal training in teaching in order to be qualified as university professors—after all, if primary and secondary school teachers have to go through years of training, why is it that professors and instructors are not required to complete any similar formal training?
But to make matters worse, if contract instructors are not paid as professors are, then teaching is likely not their primary source of income or a job they can regularly rely on. Have you ever read an exam question and thought, “What on earth is this professor trying to say?” It’s easy to see why this is happening, along with why detailed plans to achieve course objectives are not set out or met, grading of papers/exams tends to take far too long, and why course evaluations, such as exam questions, can be unclear.
Furthermore, not being full-time instructors means they often don’t receive the same resources full-time professors do, such as their own offices, making it even more difficult for students to meet with professors when they do have questions.
University is on its way to becoming a place that is full of students who go to school to pass and gather enough credits to graduate, rather than to attain a greater knowledge of the world around them—students who want to achieve the proper assortment of letters and digits on a transcript rather than a “higher education.”
The fact that Carleton University is somewhat run like a corporation and presents itself as a public institution is creating a loss of value for the consumer—students.
We are paying for a higher education, but are generally just receiving information from people who receive less teaching training than elementary school teachers, and who are given fewer resources to teach us.
Is this what modern “higher education” means?
