Are Professors Worth it? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
52 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2019 Last revised: 19 Aug 2019
Date Written: July 2019
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.
JEL Classification: I21, I24, J24
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Nicolas Salamanca
Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research, the University of Melbourne ( email )
Level 5, FBE Building, 111 Barry Street
Parkville, Victoria 3010
Australia
