Are Professors Worth it? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Working Paper No. 293
47 Pages Posted: 26 Jul 2018
There are 3 versions of this paper
Are Professors Worth it? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
Are Professors Worth it? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
Are Professors Worth it? The Value-Added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
Date Written: July 2
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: Teacher value-added, teaching effectiveness, higher education
JEL Classification: I21, I24, J24
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation