Are Professors Worth It? The Value-added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors

Jan Feld, Nicolas Salamanca and Ulf Zölitz

No 11975, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, we study whether instructors with a higher academic rank teach tutorials more effectively in a setting where students are randomly assigned to tutorial groups. We find this to be largely not the case. Academic rank is unrelated to students' current and future performance and only weakly positively related to students' course evaluations. Building on these results, we discuss different staffing scenarios that show that universities can substantially reduce costs by increasingly relying on lower-ranked instructors for tutorial teaching.

Keywords: higher education; teacher value-added; instructor rank (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-sog
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published - published in: Journal of Human Resources, 2020, 55 (3), 836-863

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https://docs.iza.org/dp11975.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Are Professors Worth It? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors (2020)
Working Paper: Are Professors Worth It? The Value-added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors (2019)
Working Paper: Are Professors Worth It? The Value-added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors (2018)
Working Paper: Are professors worth it? The value-added and costs of tutorial instructors (2018)
Working Paper: Are professors worth it? The value-added and costs of tutorial instructors (2018)
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