Are Tenure Track Professors Better Teachers?
David N. Figlio, Morton O. Schapiro, Kevin B. Soter
This study makes use of detailed student-level data from eight cohorts
of first-year students at Northwestern University to investigate the
relative effects of tenure track/tenured versus non-tenure line faculty
on student learning. We focus on classes taken during a student’s first
term at Northwestern, and employ a unique identification strategy in
which we control for both student-level fixed effects and
next-class-taken fixed effects to measure the degree to which non-tenure
line faculty contribute more or less to lasting student learning than
do other faculty. We find consistent evidence that students learn
relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory
courses. These differences are present across a wide variety of subject
areas, and are particularly pronounced for Northwestern’s average
students and less-qualified students.
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