WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. An Inside Higher Ed post reports on research forthcoming in the Journal of Higher Education.

A national analysis of graduation and program completion rates at community colleges has found that institutions with higher percentages of full-time faculty members have higher completion rates.

The story concentrates on the usual suspects.

While the use of adjuncts is widespread and growing in all sectors of higher education, it is particularly prevalent at two-year institutions. In many cases, community colleges seek out part-timers who are professionals in various fields to teach career-related courses. But community colleges also fill many sections (a majority in some subject areas on some campuses) with part timers. Administrators frequently say that given their institutions’ enrollment growth and tight budgets, they have little choice.

[The author] said that he hoped his research might prompt more reflection on this practice. “People need to realize that the performance of colleges is not indifferent to the use of part timers,” he said. “By having a lot of part timers, the college becomes less effective,” he said.

Missing from the column is any discussion of the phenomenon noted in Generation X Goes to College, in which author Peter Sacks discovers that contract renewals at his community college, somewhere in California, are contingent on getting good student evaluations, and good student evaluations are contingent on making the classes easy. (Want fries with that?) The column does suggest that treating adjuncts more like regular faculty might help.

Keith Hoeller, co-founder of the Washington State Part-Time Faculty Association, said he thought [the article's] findings were quite significant. “There is a fiction that you can cut costs with lots of adjuncts,” Hoeller said. “There’s a sense that as long as you have someone in front of the classroom in class hours, everything else is fine.”

Hoeller said that an important fact to consider is that low program completion rates are expensive — to students and their families who have paid tuition and to taxpayers who have subsidized instruction. Everyone saves money if students move through the system, Hoeller said, so the current use of part timers may not actually be saving money.

The study is also a reminder, he said, that there is a middle ground between having a full-time faculty and paying adjuncts for time leading classes. He predicted that the graduation rate gap would disappear if adjuncts were paid for time on campus generally, so they could have more office hours, more time to meet with students, and be more fully part of the campuses where they teach.

(You mean faculty do useful things when they're not in front of a chalkboard? The horror!)

But let's look at that "enrollment growth and tight budgets." I have long maintained that there is excess demand for the kind of collegiate experience the "selective" universities offer (often keeping their prices below the profit-maximizing level so as to appear more "selective.") What's generating the enrollment growth? Are community college administrators also keeping their prices below the profit-maximizing level?