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

Jan Feld, Nicolas Salamanca and Ulf Zölitz

Journal of Human Resources, 2020, vol. 55, issue 3, 836-863

Abstract: A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. 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.

JEL-codes: I21 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
Note: DOI: 10.3368/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

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Related works:
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)
Working Paper: Are professors worth it? The value-added and costs of tutorial instructors (2018)
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