The small regional institution, located an hour south of Portland, recently announced that starting this fall, its grading scale will no longer include D’s and F’s. It will instead use “no credit,” or NC, for students who fail courses. The new mark will not affect students’ grade point averages, but they will not receive credit and will have to retake the course to meet their degree requirements.

D’s and F’s on a transcript historically represented a student’s inability to meet a course’s learning objectives and often dramatically lowered their grade point averages, a performance metric heavily weighed by graduate school admissions officers and sometimes even considered by employers.

Some higher ed observers wonder if the change is providing an academic cushion, or an easy out, for students who either have fallen behind, lack the necessary skills or academic grounding, or are not putting in the effort needed to pass a course. They also note that banishing D’s and F’s could contribute to the existing grade inflation problem in higher ed.

Jose Coll, Western Oregon’s provost, argues that the university’s new grading model actually does the opposite.

“In no way, shape or form as a provost have I asked our faculty to lower the standards of the courses,” he said. “If anything, now what it will do is increase rigor, because students are required to earn a D or better in any of their courses. No longer can a student move forward with a D-minus.”

Western Oregon is among a growing wave of colleges and universities that are exploring or have already implemented alternative grading systems. Some institutions, including Brown University, have used alternative grading structures for years—in Brown’s case, since 1969. Other institutions, including the University of California, Irvine, have not implemented a universal policy but are actively informing and encouraging instructors to implement alternative grading models voluntarily.

But not all higher education experts support the trend. Some academics and consultants argue that while the new system has good intentions, it may inadvertently erode the rigor of a college degree and cheapen its value.

Discussions of a new grading system started this past summer as Coll looked at the student retention rates at Western Oregon, at peer regional colleges and across the country. The numbers were dismal. The university’s data showed that over 65 percent of freshmen who had stopped out in the past five years had earned an F in their first quarter.

According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, the population of individuals with some credit and no degree is particularly high in Oregon. For every 1,000 undergraduates enrolled in the 2021–22 academic year, there were 3,967 Oregon residents who stopped out before completing their college programs. The only state with a higher rate was Alaska, which had 5,357 residents who’d left college without earning credentials per every 1,000 undergrads.

Higher education leaders across the country are wrestling with the fact that about 40.4 million people, or 12 percent of Americans, have some college credit but didn’t earn a degree or certificate.

“I do not want to contribute to the 40 million,” Coll said.

He initiated research shortly after he was appointed provost in July to pinpoint particular factors that were causing Western students to stop out—and the psychological influence of grade performance proved to be a key culprit.

Compared to the 65 percent of freshmen who earned an F in the first quarter of the academic year and stopped out, only 17 percent of students who failed a class during the COVID pandemic but were allowed to opt for a “satisfactory” or “no credit” mark stopped out.

“It didn’t send the same psychological signal of a failure,” Coll said. “It doesn’t have the same impact on their overall GPA. It’s salvageable and they can continue to move forward.”

After a series of meetings with the Faculty Senate to discuss changing the grading structure, Western Oregon’s administrators decided to make the no-credit model a campuswide practice. Coll said they saw it as an “opportunity to do what was best for students” and eliminate some barriers, particularly for first-generation and returning adult learners. The end goal is to raise overall retention to 80 percent.

“This policy aligns to our commitment for student success and to evaluate students based on their strengths and their ability to achieve a specific goal … versus this kind of historical fixation with either you do or don’t belong—have you failed a course or not?” he said.

Not all academics are as confident in the model as Coll. Mark Horowitz, an associate professor of sociology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, believes there is merit in the growing focus on student success, but he also worries that as the desire to maximize retention and degree attainment grows, the definition of success will be watered down.

“I’m worried that the degree will no longer signal competence or grit … and then what will it really be?” he said.

Horowitz emphasized he had no doubt in the “good faith” and “compassion” of individual policy changes like such as Western Oregon’s, but he said he fears the downsides in the larger context of higher ed.

“I’m not advocating for faculty to be hard-nosed … I’m not even suggesting that the old model of those [weed-out] classes is necessarily appropriate. But I am worried about where we’re going,” he said. “In an extreme case, you could put a degree in a vending machine. And if success is defined as getting the degree and it’s not focused on the process of getting there—that would be seen as high student success.”

Horowitz, his Seton Hall colleague Anthony L. Haynor and Kenneth Kickham of the University of Central Oklahoma quantified these doubts in a 2023 study titled “‘Undeserved’ Grades or ‘Underserved’ Students?” Their survey found that 47 percent of faculty respondents believed academic standards have declined in recent years, 37 percent admitted to routinely inflating grades and 33 percent admitted to having reduced the rigor of their courses.

Michael Poliakoff, president and CEO of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, believes Western Oregon’s is “one of a number of bad policies” that reflect a “state of standards dysphoria” in higher education. He noted that ACTA has heard a growing lack of confidence in college transcripts from Fortune 500 employers.

“Colleges need to go back to grading standards that are clear and that really indicate the level of achievement of their graduates,” he said. Increasing degree attainment “is not equity if it’s a ticket to nowhere.

“The equity would be to set real standards and to ensure that when students come they get the kind of support system they need to meet those standards,” Poliakoff added. “That’s harder work than simply shaving off the bottom rungs of the grades that students get.”

Coll responds to such critiques by explaining that although a no-credit mark will not alter the student’s GPA, their transcript will clearly show that they did not pass the course. Employers will also be able to see whether the student opted to retake the course and achieve a higher grade or substitute it with a different option—both of which indicate academic resilience in different ways.

“It’s gonna be extremely transparent,” Coll said.

But Horowitz said it is unrealistic to expect evaluators to go through each applicant’s transcript with a fine-tooth comb and look at the “microprocess” of obtaining a degree instead of having a traditional metric like GPA.

Megan W. Linos, director of learning experience design at the University of California, Irvine, said although her institution hasn’t adopted a universal policy, as it prioritizes academic freedom, administrators regularly promote new grading models and course structures that allow students to customize the learning experience to their own needs. “Equitable grading practices are urgently needed,” Linos said. “Not only because we really want to promote a culture of diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility in the classroom, but we also found that oftentimes the standard grading system doesn’t support students throughout the learning process.”

At UC Irvine, in addition to allowing professors to offer a pass-fail or no-credit option, some faculty members are implementing what is known as specifications grading. Under this course structure, professors outline a list of learning objectives that students must achieve by the end of the course. A-through-F grades remain, but students have the flexibility to decide how much time to dedicate to each objective and to repeat assessments in areas where they’ve struggled.

Like Colls, Linos doesn’t see these alternate models as less rigorous; rather, she argues that they are more supportive and promote success.

“The traditional grading style is really focused on evaluation instead of teaching and scaffolding,” she said. “When you talk about a model like specifications grading or a no-credit option, it empowers students to have a choice in how they would like to learn.”

This post appeared on Inside Higher Ed on January 25, 2024.

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Campus Reform obtained a campus-wide email sent by Paul Alvisatos, the Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost on this decision. While professors are being told not to proctor exams online, a “browser lockdown” software program appears to be the approved alternative. While it has not yet been implemented, the software would prevent students from switching between windows or tabs while taking online tests. 

“This tool does not provide remote visual proctoring via a webcam. We will continue to explore remote visual proctoring via webcam after due consideration, for potential use in this Spring Semester and future semesters,” Alvisatos wrote.

For professors who have already scheduled exams, the options are to either push back the exam date or consult other practices. One other practice includes the P/NP grading policy for the undergraduates of UC. If professors are found “proctoring exams” online, such as the use of Zoom, students have the ability to have their grades reconsidered and in most cases, approved. 

“To be clear, this is a campus directive requiring that all instructors refrain from using any other remote proctoring products and not otherwise engage in remote proctoring for the remainder of the spring 2020 semester,” the provost said. 

UC-Berkeley plans to “subjectively compare” grading systems in order to accommodate students and faculty.

Campus Reform reached out to National Association of Scholars Director of Research David Randall, who said in an emailed statement, “The University of California system ought to trust individual professors to be able to determine the best approach to online proctoring—and allow students an easy process to opt-in to request a pass/fail grade for the semester.”

“This is generally the case, and not just for online proctoring. An asterisk on the transcript for ‘Spring 2020—Coronavirus Pandemic Conditions’ is easy enough to do. But we should presume that professors and students are able to take courses properly, with proper rigor and grading, and not place bureaucratic roadblocks in their way,” Randall added. 

Jonathan Pidluzny of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni echoed that point. 

“Individual faculty members are still the best judge of how best to assess learning outcomes in their courses,” he told Campus Reform. 

“Academic freedom requires allowing faculty to develop assessments based on their expertise and experience.  That is not to say that online proctoring services are unproblematic.  They can raise important privacy and accessibility concerns.  Universities should absolutely raise awareness of those concerns, so that faculty members can make an informed judgment,” said Pidluzny. 

While faculty members “should be encouraged” to “discuss alternative arrangements,” Pidluzny said UC-Berkeley’s “blanket prohibition is unnecessarily broad,’ saying that he prefers to “trust individual faculty members to devise assessment methods that balance these concerns against the academic integrity imperative — even under these difficult conditions.”

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“Our higher education system is controlled by what amounts to a cartel of existing colleges and universities, which use their power over the accreditation process to block innovative, low-cost competitors from entering the market,” Sen. Rubio said in a speech this summer. Last week he introduced a bill with Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) that would test a voluntary certification process for vocational and nontraditional education.

Six regional accrediting groups deputized by the Education Department determine whether a college is eligible to receive federal aid dollars, and a coterie of outfits bless specific programs like, say, engineering. The regional agencies appeared in the 19th century to distinguish rigorous institutions from diploma mills, but since the 1960s have morphed into wardens of billions in handouts and subsidized student loans.

These quality-assurance teams evaluate colleges periodically by asking questions such as: How many books does the library house? There’s no useful benchmark on what students learn, and by the way, a majority of four-year college graduates don’t learn enough to compare viewpoints in newspaper editorials, according to Education Department research.

Nothing but the accreditor’s up or down verdict is available to the public, but we know it’s harder to flunk than a sex-education course. In 1987 Southeastern University posted a 42% student-loan default rate, but the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools didn’t revoke its accreditation until 2009. The six agencies that approve more than 1,500 four-year colleges have in the past 15 years revoked accreditation for, wait for it, 18.

Then there’s grade inflation. Faculty and administrators from neighboring institutions perform the visits. They know the staff at the school they’re evaluating might soon check up on them, and so there’s a disincentive for intensive review. Add to this self-dealing that colleges pay dues to their accrediting organization—again, the one that decides if an institution qualifies for federal subsidies.

What do students get? Higher tuition, as colleges plow time and money into the process and pass on the costs. Stanford University said it spent $850,000 in 12 months of a multiyear process, and Duke University reported blowing $1.5 million over two years. Accreditors recommend changes—trimming faculty course loads, hiring more Ph.D.s—that drive up expenses without improving educational outcomes.

Most pernicious is that the cartel stifles innovation. Students can’t use federal aid at colleges that aren’t accredited, yet a school usually must serve students for years before winning approval. Accreditation amounts to monopoly enforcement, which is why in 2013 the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools swatted down an online program at Tiffin University.

Entrepreneurs have put the value of regional accreditation at $10 million, and those that finagle the seal are forced to operate like traditional colleges. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges, for instance, requires a detailed report months in advance for any proposed “substantive change.” Not exactly a start-up mentality.

Sen. Rubio’s legislation would allow the Education Department to add accreditors for innovations like boot camps where students learn to write code. The outfits (probably industry groups) could only bless programs at or above the 60th percentile in a basket of metrics— such as graduation rates, loan repayment stats, employment figures.

The bill also lays out avenues for nascent offerings, and puts authorizers on the hook for 25% of federal student-loans in default. Students would use Pell grant money for tuition, which means the proposal is geared toward low-income students.

Though an excellent start, the measure wouldn’t dismantle the gang of six lording over traditional colleges, where most students are educated, and the broader priority should be untangling aid and accreditation. Colleges submit detailed financials to the feds and could post independently audited statements online, as the American Council for Trustees and Alumni suggested in 2013, as well as program-specific, annually updated data about completion, default and more. This isn’t extra federal meddling; it’s streamlining what already exists.

Simple, clear standards would make it easier to revoke funding from schools junking their numbers, and accreditation agencies could return to their origins as voluntary self-improvement groups. That would foster competition, let consumers decide what’s valuable—and cross off one reason why we’re all worried that education costs too much.

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Some basic education subjects have been abandoned or replaced in attempts to improve education, but what has resulted is an inferior product. For example, penmanship courses are considered obsolete. Cursive writing has been ignored and there are college graduates who only know how to print (we know that from applications for employment), and spelling is a problem for them, along with expressing themselves in writing. This lack of core courses is evident in our elementary schools. Don’t blame the teachers, they teach what the schools mandate.

A failure in education is in the teaching of American history, government and economics. College students are earning degrees and have a total ignorance of American history. The sixth annual analysis of core curricula of 1,098 four-year colleges and universities by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that only 18 percent of schools require an American history course to graduate, 13 percent require a foreign language and 3 percent economics. The results of the survey were published in The Wall Street Journal.

It is easier to earn a college degree today than in the past. Few colleges and universities mandate courses in what are considered rigorous core subjects. Of course, in some lines of studies, core subjects are taken, and those students are getting a good education—and they are motivated. But there are what we used to call “Mickey Mouse” courses and degree paths that are, to put it bluntly, not much of a challenge to students. Michael Poliakoff, who directed the survey, and who was quoted in The Journal, said at some colleges and universities today, “It’s like saying to a lot of 18-year-olds, the cafeteria is open, you kids just eat whatever you like.”

The report has been dismissed by some college presidents as arbitrary, but there is growing unease about the value of a university degree at a time of grade inflation and employer complaints that graduates are entering the workforce without basic skills such as critical thinking, The Journal reported. Poliakoff says the lack of a rigorous core curriculum is behind the failure to learn. He adds that the nation’s civic and economic health is at stake.

We all know that education must begin in the home and that we are graduating some high school students who really haven’t earned the diploma that is given to them. On the other hand, we do have bright students who are taking tough courses and making the grade. We talked to a mother the other day whose high school freshman son is taking a college credit course in physics. 

Somewhere along the educational journey, the tinkers took control of the curriculum and they have dumbed down education.

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The ailing economy is partly to blame, but colleges and universities are failing to do little more than saddle their graduates with crippling debt. Many academic institutions no longer teach the skills, like writing a coherent sentence or correctly adding fractions, to prepare the young to be effective members of society. The traditional liberal arts education that once provided a bedrock of knowledge has been discarded for academic fads, many of them as useless as a Ph.D. in gender studies.

The graduates have learned to be in touch with their feelings, to show superior sensitivity and to be masters of appreciation of diversity, but none of these attributes, learned at such great expense, does much to build a successful society. This came through in a 2012 poll of young Americans that found that just 52 percent of respondents could identify the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, fewer than half knew that George Washington commanded troops at Yorktown, barely a third knew the length of congressional terms and fewer than 20 percent could correctly name James Madison as the father of the Constitution. However, for whatever consolation this may be to Mom and Dad, who paid for it, more than 96 percent of respondents correctly identified Lady Gaga.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based organization focused on encouraging high academic standards in higher education, researched whether major colleges and universities across America require students to take core courses in seven key subjects: English composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics and science.

Among the more than 1,000 colleges and universities included in the council’s study, only 22 schools earned an “A” grade for requiring students to complete each of the core subjects. Only one of these schools, the University of Georgia, is a flagship public university. Most of the top performing colleges are either military service academies, such as the Air Force Academy and the Coast Guard Academy, or religiously affiliated schools, such as Baylor and Pepperdine.

The most prestigious (and expensive) colleges in America fared the worst at equipping their students with broad knowledge needed to succeed. Harvard and Yale earned a D. Brown scored an F, requiring classes in none of the seven core liberal arts subjects to graduate.

Well-regarded state schools such as the University of California at Berkeley, the state universities of Michigan, Virginia and Wisconsin, scored on the bottom rung. At Berkeley, for example, a student can graduate without cracking open a great novel, speaking even a few words of a foreign language, understanding statistics or knowing anything that happened more than a week ago.

Unless something unexpected changes, America will be populated by college graduates who can’t handle a family budget, express themselves clearly or understand what American democracy is about. Good citizenship requires more than the ability to hold a job. It means being informed and well-rounded as a person. American universities have become big businesses turning out graduates who are neither.

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The test, called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, “provides an objective, benchmarked report card for critical thinking skills,” said David Pate, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at St. John Fisher College, a small liberal-arts school near Rochester, N.Y. “The students will be able to use it to go out and market themselves.”

The test is part of a movement to find new ways to assess the skills of graduates. Employers say grades can be misleading and that they have grown skeptical of college credentials.

“For too long, colleges and universities have said to the American public, to students and their parents, ‘Trust us, we’re professional. If we say that you’re learning and we give you a diploma it means you’re prepared,’ ” said Michael Poliakoff, vice president of policy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. “But that’s not true.”

The new voluntary test, which the nonprofit behind it calls CLA +, represents the latest threat to the fraying monopoly that traditional four-year colleges have enjoyed in defining what it means to be well educated.

Even as students spend more on tuition—and take on increasing debt to pay for it—they are earning diplomas whose value is harder to calculate. Studies show that grade-point averages, or GPAs, have been rising steadily for decades, but employers feel many new graduates aren’t prepared for the workforce.

Meanwhile, more students are taking inexpensive classes such as Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, but have no way to earn a meaningful academic credential from them.

HNTB Corp., a national architectural firm with 3,600 employees, see value in new tools such as the CLA +, said Michael Sweeney, a senior vice president. Even students with top grades from good schools may not “be able to write well or make an argument,” he said. “I think at some point everybody has been fooled by good grades or a good resume.”

The new test “has the potential to be a very powerful tool for employers,” said Ronald Gidwitz, a board member of the Council for Aid to Education, the group behind the test, and a retired chief executive of Helene Curtis, a Chicago-based hair-care company that was bought by Unilever in 1996.

Only one in four employers think that two- and four-year colleges are doing a good job preparing students for the global economy, according to a 2010 survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Meanwhile, GPAs have been on the rise. A 2012 study looking at the grades of 1.5 million students from 200 four-year U.S. colleges and universities found that the percentage of A’s given by teachers nearly tripled between 1940 and 2008. A college diploma is now more a mark “of social class than an indicator of academic accomplishment,” said Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University geophysics professor and co-author of the study.

Employers such as General Mills Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co. long have used their own job-applicant assessments. At some companies such as Google Inc., GPAs carry less weight than they once did because they have been shown to have little correlation with job success, said a Google spokeswoman.

At Teach for America, which recruits college students to teach in rural and urban school districts, the GPA is one of just dozens of things used to winnow nearly 60,000 applicants for 5,900 positions. Candidates who make it to the second step of the process are given an in-house exam that assesses higher-order thinking, said Sean Waldheim, vice president of admissions at the group. “We’ve found that our own problem-solving activities work best to measure the skills we’re looking for,” he said.

The Council for Aid to Education, the CLA + test’s creator, is a New York-based nonprofit that once was part of Rand Corp. The 90-minute exam is based on a test that has been used by 700 schools to grade themselves and improve how well their students are learning.

The CLA + will be open to anyone—whether they are graduating from a four-year university or have taken just a series of MOOCs—and students will be allowed to show their scores to prospective employees. The test costs $35, but most schools are picking up the fee. Among schools that will use CLA + are the University of Texas system, Flagler College in Florida and Marshall University in West Virginia.

The CLA + is scored on the 1600-point scale once used by the SAT “because everyone is familiar with that,” said Chris Jackson, director of partner development at the Council for Aid to Education. Instead of measuring subject-area knowledge, it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication.

Cory LaDuke, a 21-year-old senior at St. John Fisher, said he had mixed feelings about taking the CLA + but understood why employers might be skeptical of some graduates because “some people don’t work that hard and fake their way through it,” he said.

“It kind of sucks that an employer can’t trust your GPA, but that’s the way it is right now, so this also an opportunity,” said Mr. LaDuke. “It’s another way to prove yourself.”

Other groups also have been seeking ways to better judge graduates’ skills. The Lumina Foundation, which aims to boost the number of college graduates, is offering a way to standardize what students should know once they earn a degree. The MacArthur Foundation has helped fund a system of “badges” for online learning to show mastery of certain skills. Last Thursday, President Barack Obama said he wants the federal government to devise a ratings system to gauge colleges’ performance based on student outcomes.

Meanwhile, established testing companies are introducing new tools. Earlier this year, Educational Testing Service, which developed the Graduate Record Exam, announced two certificates to reward high marks on its Proficiency Profile, which assesses critical thinking, reading, writing and math.

And ACT, the nonprofit that administers the college-admission exam of the same name, has a National Career Readiness Certificate, which measures skills such as synthesizing and applying information presented graphically.

Educational Testing Service was surprised to learn through a survey last spring that more than a quarter of businesses were using the GRE to evaluate job applicants, said David Payne, an ETS vice president.

Sean Keegan, a 2011 graduate of Tufts University, has posted his GRE on his resume because he landed in the 97th percentile, even though he isn’t applying to graduate school. “I think it shows I’m relatively smart,” said Mr. Keegan, who is looking for work in finance. “So far, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from employers.”

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According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites comparable numbers, reporting that a mere 27 percent of postsecondary instructors hold fulltime, tenure-track positions. Such figures are the familiar touchstones of debates about the nature and future of academic work, undergraduate education, and academic freedom. They anchor official statements and form the basis of movements. Adjunct faculty are unionizing, and the AFT has launched a campaign to increase the proportion of undergraduate courses taught by fulltime and tenure-track professors to 75 percent.

Surrounded by statistics, activism, and commentary, the adjunct faculty member is never far from discussions about higher ed reform. “There is no subject so painful and so ubiquitous as the role of adjuncts in higher ed,” writes Louisiana State University English professor Emily Toth, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Ms Mentor.” Nor, perhaps, is there an academic subject so thoroughly stylized. The underpaid, uninsured, and underappreciated “freeway flyer” has become a tragic figure, a poster prof for the moral, economic, and ethical failings of modern-day academia. Hardly a month goes by without another scandal in which someone fires—or fails to renew—an “invisible adjunct” who has expressed controversial views. Such cases—and the anger they evoke—have become the standardized set pieces of an academia that has yet to reckon with the fact that its modes of employment have undergone a seismic shift.

The supporting casts in these set pieces are as stylized as their non-tenure-track stars. There is the bean-counting administrator, an anti-intellectual corporate drone who sees adjunct faculty as a handy way to reduce overhead. And there is the smug tenured professor who sits idly by while a corps of shamelessly exploited workers enables his light teaching load, his leisurely sabbaticals, and his inflated salary. Together, these characters facilitate two structures of blame. The first focuses on putatively deliberate actions, assuming that the rise of adjuncts is an intended consequence of a specific, crass economic plan; the second focuses on passive inaction, assuming that tenured professors have made a Faustian bargain to secure their own comfort at the expense of tenure and academic freedom for future generations.

Blame of this sort is righteous indeed, and can feel awfully fine. But it’s important to recognize its origins in oversimplification and caricature. The cost-conscious administrator is not so ruthlessly calculating as the blame game makes her out to be, nor is the tenured professor so consciously entitled. The fact is that neither administrators nor faculty can be exactly blamed for the rise of adjunct faculty. As John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg demonstrate in their meticulously documented, devastatingly dispassionate Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, this is a situation that no one set out to create and that no one actively maintains. They find that the growing numbers of non-tenure-track college teachers are, instead, the cumulative, unanticipated result of decades of disconnected, dispersed decision-making by administrators, deans, department chairs, and staff members working within a decentralized system where planning, assessment, communication, accountability, and adjustment are all exceptionally challenging endeavors.

A devastating correlative fact is that no one actually knows what the facts about adjunct labor in academe actually are. Take the statistics propagated by the AAUP, the AFT, and others—the ones that underwrite the academic labor movement and that fuel debate about what the rise in adjunct faculty means for the quality of undergraduate education, for academic freedom, for tenure, and for a host of related issues. These, Cross and Goldenberg note, are often drawn from statistics published by the U.S. Department of Education, which collects them from colleges and universities. But—and this is the appalling discovery at the heart of the book—colleges and universities do not themselves track this information. When called upon to report figures, they throw something together. But they don’t actually know what’s happening on their campuses. The “data” they report is largely guesswork done to produce what the authors call “fictitious precision.”

When Cross and Goldenberg visited the ten elite public and private schools around which their study is based, they encountered deans, provosts, and presidents who were not aware of the extent or nature of non-tenure-track teaching on their campus. They encountered department chairs and unit-level staff who were aware of their own local, ad hoc patterns of appointing non-tenure-track faculty, but were ignorant of the broader context or aggregate impact of those decisions. They even found that the language used to describe non-tenure-track personnel—whose titles and job descriptions vary from position to position, department to department, and school to school—conspired, on campus after campus, to blur important distinctions among instructors, researchers, post-docs, graduate students, assistant professors, visiting professors, and even staff. In other words, they found that across the board, non-tenure-track faculty are retained “without meaningful administrative oversight.”

What created the problem? The sources are many and varied. Ill-conceived budgets and measures aimed at cost effectiveness play a predictable role, as do the expense and inflexibility of tenure-track positions. Non-tenure-track-teachers typically do most of the remedial education on campus, and they are vital stopgaps when enrollments spike. Then there is the ever-escalating competition for higher rankings, greater visibility, and more prestige. The authors find that the modern university competes with its peers on almost every conceivable front—the success of varsity sports teams; the size and luxuriousness of dormitories, cafeterias, recreational centers, and other amenities; the success of fundraising campaigns and endowment investment strategies; even the number of iPods among the student body.

Because academic rankings are at the forefront of institutional prestige—the authors met with one department chair whose very first words were “We’re number one!”—schools and departments compete vigorously for the most distinguished faculty in their fields. Aggressive recruiting pushes up salaries, draining budgets even as it reduces the number and size of classes that tenured faculty actually teach (light teaching loads and the promise of small, specialized classes have become crucial bargaining chips in the recruitment game). The tenure-track teaching load has halved over the past forty years, the authors find, while the number of tenure-track faculty has remained relatively constant. Meanwhile, the undergraduate population has exploded. Today tenure-track faculty teach less than half of the lower division arts and science credit hours offered at elite universities. So who does teach them? Enter the adjunct.

No one decided to create this perfect storm of pressures—but resolving the unwieldy and complex situation that those pressures created is not easy. As Cross and Goldenberg note, universities occasionally attempt to boost their prestige by shifting en masse from non-tenure-track to tenure-track faculty. But such a move requires millions and might only happen once in a generation. To cite a couple of salient examples: the University of Virginia plans to hire three hundred tenure-track faculty at an estimated cost of $130,000 each in annual salary and benefits; Michigan plans to hire one hundred tenure-track junior faculty at an annual cost of $100,000 each, plus a one time start-up cost of $20 million. For schools without such resources, redistributing salaries and teaching loads would reduce their ability to compete for prestige-enhancing academic superstars. Rankings hang in the balance.

The authors are blunt about what this means in practice: when it comes to non-tenure-track teachers, they write, “we necessarily confront the question of who is minding the store.” Most of the time, they conclude, the answer is “No one.” Universities usually only address the issue when they must—when adjunct faculty mobilize to form a union, for example, or when scandal erupts. Along the way, the reactive, “damage control” model of adjunct management has ensured that there is little meaningful, constructive study or discussion—within or across universities—of what the rise in adjunct faculty actually means for educational quality, academic freedom, or governance.

For example, some say adjuncts are better teachers than research-oriented tenure-track professors; others say they are forced to secure their popularity—and thus their job security—by pleasing students with artificially inflated grades. But lack of information renders the debate largely speculative. The same sort of impasse arises with academic freedom. Is it possible to ensure academic freedom without tenure? If not, what will become of free inquiry in the age of the adjunct? If so, what will become of tenure? There are impassioned opinions on all sides. But the discussion is mired in misinformation and the selective argumentation of advocacy-driven campaigns.

When it comes to governance, things are no better. At the department level, there is confusion and inconsistency about whether adjunct faculty should participate in shared governance. At the institutional level, things have not even progressed to the point of confusion: presidents, provosts, and trustees have, for the most part, failed to ensure that this growing corps of college teachers is properly understood and properly managed.

Cross and Goldenberg stress that non-tenure-track faculty are here to stay. This segment of the professoriate is no longer “adjunct” or “contingent” to the tenure-track standing faculty, despite the language commonly used to describe it. Consequently, they argue, academia should address the complex constellation of issues non-tenure-track teachers raise—from employment conditions to academic freedom to educational quality to governance to the costs of competing for status and rank—in a systematic, institutionally coherent manner. Presidents, provosts, and trustees must make sure that their institutions are actually gathering the data they need to make informed, wise decisions about whether, when, and how to employ adjunct faculty.

Such self-study, Cross and Goldenberg observe, might reveal some surprising things. Among them: the numbers of non-tenure-track teachers may in fact be even higher than those currently reported. And yet, the authors suggest, it’s also possible that the pervasive image of the impoverished, exploited freeway flyer might require some updating. Cross and Goldenberg find that, contrary to prevailing mythology, many adjuncts do have benefits, offices, and a reasonable degree of job security, at least at elite schools. At Duke, dedicated non-tenure-track teachers may be appointed as professors of practice (POP). POPs begin with a three-year contract at the assistant level and advance to associate and full professors of practice, with contracts extending up to ten years. Full-time POPs receive full faculty benefits, may serve on the academic council, and may compete for paid leave. At Northwestern, non-tenure-track faculty may climb a similar ladder, from lecturer to senior lecturer to college lecturer. At Washington University, lecturers become senior lecturers after five years, at which time they receive tuition benefits for their children.

Readers may wonder what all this means for less prestigious, less wealthy schools. One suspects that at many colleges, public universities, and community colleges, the rise in adjunct teachers is a lot less tied to the rankings game and a lot more tied to economic bottom lines. In such settings, the solutions developed by Duke, Washington, and others may be fiscally impossible—particularly at a time when even billion-dollar systems such as the University of California are proposing substantial pay cuts for standing faculty.

Still, Off-Track Profs presents a refreshingly sober, evenhanded examination of a volatile, increasingly pressing subject. Focused on the careful gathering of facts and the comprehensive analysis of causes, it models how administrators across the country might begin to study what non-tenure-track teachers are doing on their campuses—and to formulate policy grounded in a knowledgeable understanding of the role such teachers play in their particular institutional culture. Cutting through the stereotypes and the confrontational stances that tend to dominate discussions of non-tenure-track teachers, Off-Track Profs charts a way forward that stresses institutional accountability and procedural clarity. As such, the book may actually be laying the groundwork for win-win solutions that benefit faculty (tenured and not), students, and administrators alike.

Maurice Black and Erin O’Connor are research fellows at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

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Measuring Up: The Problem of Grade Inflation and What Trustees Can Do was sent to the boards of more than 500 universities that are responsible for the education of nearly six million students. Harvard professor Harvey C. Mansfield, who has for many years protested grade inflation at his university, endorsed the report in a letter to trustees.

The guide brings together and assesses various strategies that universities across the country have adopted to address grade inflation. It concludes that the first step is to initiate a vigorous campus-wide conversation on the subject, as the University of Colorado recently did with success.

“Grade inflation hurts students by discouraging hard work, it hurts universities by lowering academic standards and it hurts employers by rendering transcripts worthless,” said ACTA president Anne D. Neal. “It’s time for trustees to act.”

In 2003, ACTA published the report Degraded Currency: The Problem of Grade Inflation, which concluded that grade inflation had reached epidemic proportions. It found that aside from a few exceptions, average GPAs have drastically increased over the past decades.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is an independent non-profit dedicated to academic freedom, academic quality and accountability. Since its founding in 1995, ACTA has counseled boards, educated the public and published reports about such issues as good governance, historical literacy, core curricula, the free exchange of ideas and accreditation in higher education.

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