WILL WE RUN OUT OF COLLEGE TEACHERS?
No; there will always be someone to fill classroom vacancies. Butquality is almost certain to drop unless something is done quickly
WHERE WILL THE TEACHERS COME FROM?
The number of students enrolled in America's colleges and universities this year exceeds last year's figure by more than a quarter million. In ten years it should pass six million—nearly double today's enrollment.
The number of teachers also may have to double. Some educators say that within a decade 495,000 may be needed—more than twice the present number.
Can we hope to meet the demand? If so, what is likely to happen to the quality of teaching in the process?
"Great numbers of youngsters will flood into our colleges and universities whether we are prepared or not," a report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has pointed out. "These youngsters will be taught—taught well or taught badly. And the demand for teachers will somehow be at least partly met—if not with well-prepared teachers then with illprepared, if not with superior teachers then with inferior ones."
MOST IMMEDIATE is the problem of finding enough qualified teachers to meet classes next fall. College administrators must scramble to do so.
"The staffing problems are the worst in my 30 years' experience at hiring teaching staff," said one college president, replying to a survey by the U.S. Office of Education's Division of Higher Education.
"The securing and retaining of well-trained, effective teachers is the outstanding problem confronting all colleges today," said another.
One logical place to start reckoning with the teacher shortage is on the present faculties of American colleges and universities. The shortage is hardly alleviated by the fact that substantial numbers of men and women find it necessary to leave college teaching each year, for largely financial reasons. So serious is this problem—and so relevant is it to the college alumnus and alumna-that a separate article in this report is devoted to it.
The scarcity of funds has led most colleges and universities to seek at least short-range solutions to the teacher shortage by other means.
Difficulty in finding young new teachers to fill faculty vacancies is turning the attention of more and more administrators to the other end of the academic line, where tried and able teachers are about to retire. A few institutions have modified the upper age limits for faculty. Others are keeping selected faculty members on the payroll past the usual retirement age. A number of institutions are filling their own vacancies with the cream of the men and women retired elsewhere, and two organizations, the Association of American Colleges and the American Association of University Professors, with the aid of a grant from the Ford Foundation, have set up a "Retired Professors Registry" to facilitate the process.
Old restraints and handicaps for the woman teacher are disappearing in the colleges. Indeed, there are special opportunities for her, as she earns her standing alongside the man who teaches. But there is no room for complacency here. We can no longer take it for granted that the woman teacher will be any more available than the man, for she exercises the privilege of her sex to change her mind about teaching as about other matters. Says Dean Nancy Duke Lewis of Pembroke College: "The day has passed when we could assume that every woman who earned her Ph.D. would go into college teaching. She needs something positive today to attract her to the colleges because of the welcome that awaits her talents in business, industry, government, or the foundations. Her freedom to choose comes at a time when undergraduate women particularly need distinguished women scholars to inspire them to do their best in the classroom and laboratory—and certainly to encourage them to elect college teaching as a career."
SOME HARD-PRESSED ADMINISTRATORS find themselves forced to accelerate promotions and salary increases in order to attract and hold faculty members. Many are being forced to settle for less qualified teachers.
In an effort to attract and keep teachers, most colleges are providing such necessities as improved research facilities and secretarial help to relieve faculty members of paperwork and administrative burdens, thus giving faculty members more time to concentrate on teaching and research.
In the process of revising their curricula many colleges are eliminating courses that overlap one another or are considered frivolous. Some are increasing the size of lecture classes and eliminating classes they deem too small.
Finally, somewhat in desperation (but also with the firm conviction that the technological age must, after all, have something of value to offer even to the most basic and fundamental exercises of education), experiments are being conducted with teaching by films and television.
At Penn State, where televised instruction is in its ninth semester, TV has met with mixed reactions. Students consider it a good technique for teaching courses with large enrollments—and their performance in courses employing television has been as good as that of students having personal contact with their teachers. The reaction of faculty members has been less favorable. But acceptance appears to be growing: the number of courses offered on television has grown steadily, and the number of faculty members teaching via TV has grown, also.
Elsewhere, teachers are far from unanimity on the subject of TV. "Must the TV technicians take over the colleges?" asked Professor Ernest Earnest of Temple University in an article title last fall. "Like the conventional lecture system, TV lends itself to the sausage-stuffing concept of education," Professor Earnest said. The classroom, he argued, "is the place for testing ideas and skills, for the interchange of ideas"—objectives difficult to attain when one's teacher is merely a shadow on a fluorescent screen.
The TV pioneers, however, believe the medium, used properly, holds great promise for the future.
FOR THE LONG RUN, the traditional sources of supply for college teaching fall far short of meeting the demand. The Ph.D., for example, long regarded by many colleges and universities as the ideal "driver's license" for teachers, is awarded to fewer than 9,000 persons per year. Even if, as is probable, the number of students enrolled in Ph.D. programs rises over the next few years, it will be a long time before they have traveled the full route to the degree.
Meanwhile, the demand for Ph.D.'s grows, as industry, consulting firms, and government compete for many of the men and women who do obtain the degree. Thus, at the very time that a great increase is occurring in the number of undergraduates who must be taught, the supply of new college teachers with the rank of Ph.D. is even shorter than usual.
"During each of the past four years," reported the National Education Association in 1958, "the average level of preparation of newly employed teachers has fallen. Four years ago no less than 31.4 per cent of the new teachers held the earned doctor's degree. Last year only 23.5 per cent were at this high level of preparation.'
HERE ARE SOME of the causes of concern about the Ph.D., to which educators are directing their attention:
► The Ph.D. program, as it now exists in most graduate schools, does not sufficiently emphasize the development of teaching skills. As a result, many Ph.D.'s go into teaching with little or no idea how to teach, and make a mess of it when they try. Many who don't go into teaching might have done so, had a greater emphasis been laid upon it when they were graduate students.
► The Ph.D. program is indefinite in its time requirements: they vary from school to school, from department to department, from student to student, far more than seems warranted. "Generally the Ph.D. takes at least four years to get," says a committee of the Association of Graduate Schools. "More often it takes six or seven, and not infrequently ten to fifteen. ... If we put our heads to the matter, certainly we ought to be able to say to a good student: 'With a leeway of not more than one year, it will take you so and so long to take the Ph.D.' "
► "Uncertainty about the time required," says the Association's Committee on Policies in Graduate Education, "leads in turn to another kind of uncertainty—financial uncertainty. Doubt and confusion on this score have a host of disastrous effects. Many superior men, facing unknowns here, abandon thoughts about working for a Ph.D. and realistically go off to law or the like "
ALTHOUGH ROUGHLY HALF of the teachers in America's colleges and universities hold the Ph.D., more than three quarters of the newcomers to college and university teaching, these days, don't have one. In the years ahead, it appears inevitable that the proportion of Ph.D.'s to non-Ph.D.'s on America's faculties will diminish.
Next in line, after the doctorate, is the master's degree. For centuries the master's was "the" degree, until, with the growth of the Ph.D. in America, it began to be moved into a back seat. In Great Britain its prestige is still high.
But in America the M.A. has, in' some graduate schools, deteriorated. Where the M.A.'s standards have been kept high, on the other hand, able students have been able to prepare themselves, not only adequately but well, for college teaching.
Today the M.A. is one source of hope in the teacher shortage. "If the M.A. were of universal dignity and good standing," says the report of the Committee on Policies in Graduate Education, "... this ancient degree could bring us succor in the decade ahead....
"The nub of the problem ... is to get rid of 'good' and 'bad' M.A.'s and to set up generally a 'rehabilitated' degree which will have such worth in its own right that a man entering graduate school will consider the possibility of working toward the M.A. as the first step to the Ph.D...."
One problem would remain. "If you have a master's degree you are still a mister and if you have a Ph.D., no matter where it is from, you are a doctor," Dean G. Bruce Dearing, of the University of Delaware, has said. "The town looks at you differently. Business looks at you differently. The dean may; it depends on how discriminating he is."
The problem won't be solved, W. R. Dennes, former dean of the graduate school of the University of California at Berkeley, has said, "until universities have the courage ... to select men very largely on the quality of work they have done and soft-pedal this matter of degrees."
A point for parents and prospective students to remember—and one of which alumni and alumnae might remind them—is that counting the number of Ph.D.'s in a college catalogue is not the only, or even necessarily the best, way to judge the worth of an educational institution or its faculty's abilities. To base one's judgment solely on such a count is quite a temptation, as William James noted 56 years ago in "The Ph.D. Octopus": "The dazzled reader of the list, the parent or student, says to himself, 'This must be a terribly distinguished crowd- their titles shine like the stars in the firmament; Ph.D.'s, Sc.D.'s, and Litt.D.'s bespangle the page as if they were sprinkled over it from a pepper caster.' "
The Ph.D. will remain higher education's most honored earned degree. It stands for a depth of scholarship and productive research to which the master has not yet addressed himself so intensively. But many educational leaders expect the doctoral programs to give more emphasis to teaching. At the same time the master's degree will be strengthened and given more prestige.
In the process the graduate schools will have taken a long step toward solving the shortage of qualified college teachers.
SOME OF THE CHANGES being made by colleges and universities to meet the teacher shortage constitute reasonable and overdue reforms. Other changes are admittedly desperate—and possibly dangerous— attempts to meet today's needs.
The central problem is to get more young people interested in college teaching. Here, college alumni and alumnae have an opportunity to provide a badly needed service to higher education and to superior young people themselves. The problem of teacher supply is not one with which the college administrator is able to cope alone.
President J. Seelye Bixler, of Colby College, recently said: "Let us cultivate a teacher-centered point of view. There is tragedy as well as truth in the old saying that in Europe when you meet a teacher you tip your hat, whereas over here you tap your head. Our debt to our teachers is very great, and fortunately we are beginning to realize that we must make some attempt to balance the account. Money and prestige are among the first requirements.
"Most important is independence. Too often we sit back with the comfortable feeling that our teachers have all the freedom they desire. We forget that the payoff comes in times of stress. Are we really willing to allow them independence of thought when a national emergency is in the offing? Are we ready to defend them against all pressure groups and to acknowledge their right to act as critics of our customs, our institutions, and even our national policy? Evidence abounds that for some of our more vociferous compatriots this is too much. They see no reason why such privileges should be offered or why a teacher should not express his patriotism in the same outworn and often irrelevant shibboleths they find so dear and so hard to give up. Surely our educational task has not been completed until we have persuaded them that a teacher should be a pioneer, a leader, and at times a nonconformist with a recognized right to dissent. As Howard Mumford Jones has observed, we can hardly allow ourselves to become a nation proud of machines that think and suspicious of any man who tries to."
By lending their support to programs designed to improve the climate for teachers at their own colleges, alumni can do much to alter the conviction held by many that teaching is tolerable only to martyrs.
