Workload in Utah’s Institutions Of
Higher Education
For purposes of this paper we will define Workload according to the definition of the Utah System of Higher Education in Faculty Workload Guidelines, R485 (attached.) The basis of workload is the “credit hour equivalent,” which, in turn, is based on the credit hours a student receives toward graduation for a given course. A credit hour may not be the ideal standard to use because of its variability in content and effort, but to paraphrase Winston Church, it may be bad, but it is better than all other options available. As long as the credit is used to determine graduation standards for students and for articulation of courses between institutions, it will be the gold standard. For the faculty a credit hour equivalent is the time required for a faculty to teach a credit hour of course work including preparation, teaching, and related college service. A credit hour equivalent may also be applied to scholarly work and research. A contact hour is the number of hours a faculty member is in direct contact with students. The contact hour will, in general, be essentially the same as a credit hour.
Another definition we need to make is “the state.” The state will be the state legislature, the Board of Regence and the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE) combined. The relationship between the entities can be found in the state code 53B-6-101 which is under revision to reflect actions of the 2018 state legislative session and is currently not available.
First a little informal history. We will start with the Utah Technical College when it had about 3000 students, later to become Utah Valley Community College. About this time many questionable private universities were beginning to come on the scene and BYU was becoming an international University which could no longer be responsible for educating Utah Valley’s youth. The valley needed its own university. The demographics and valley growth indicated that the valley could soon support a university with a student body in excess of 40,000 students. But as one state Senator stated, “Utah cannot afford another research institution.” What to do with UVU? There was also pressure in the southern part of the state to upgrade the mission of Dixie State University and of course, the state in general was undergoing a large increase in the number of youth needing of higher education. What to do with higher education in general?
Of course, ever increasing tuition is one way to find needed funding, but it just isn’t enough. Privatization is also an ongoing topic but is outside the purview of this discussion. Another option would be to increase “teaching efficiency,” i.e. to increase the teaching requirements in the faculty workload. To accomplish the improved efficiency, the state decided to configure USHE in terms of institutional missions and guidelines (see USHE R312, attached.) The state developed, with the aid of the Carnegie Foundation (hhtp://www.carnegie foundation.org.) a system of classifications. The classifications have gone through several iterations, but the most recent classification is:
-
Research universities (U of U and USU.)
-
Regional universities (WSU, SUU, UVU and DSU.)
-
Community colleges (Snow College and SLCC.)
So far so good. Now came the time to create more “efficient” workloads. The Regents under the authority of the state legislature, capped the number of research institutions to two and set basic workloads for other institutional categories, leaving the details of the various workloads to the individual institutions of higher education (See R485, attached.) Herein lies the problem with workload. Workload hours were defined in terms of the institutional configurations as follows:
1. Research universities- Nine credit hour equivalents per semester with an average of ten contact hours in credit bearing teaching activities.
2. Regional universities – Twelve credit hour equivalents per semester with an average of thirteen contact hours in credit bearing teaching activities.
3. Community colleges– Fifteen credit hour equivalents per semester teaching with an average of sixteen to nineteen contact hours in credit bearing teaching activities.
To put workloads in perspective to real life, we can use the report “Workload Issues and Measures of Faculty Productivity” found in The NEA Higher Education Journal, Fall 2007. In this report, it was found that the average instructor in an institutional classification similar to our Regional universities, worked 53.2 hours/week to complete an average workload of approximately 10.5 credit hours per week. Extrapolating to twelve equivalent credit hours, as required for our regional universities, would mean that an instructor would spend 61 hours to accomplish the twelve credit hour task. This is in line with the comments we have received from faculty and staff indicating that many are working 60+ hours per week trying to meet employment obligations. DSU appears to have a slightly higher workload than the other Metropolitan universities at 13.5 hours per semester, which would extrapolate to about 68 hours work per week. The honor of the most serious workload belongs to UVU. The institution has gone beyond the required twelve credit hour equivalents per semester and introduced three additional hours of credit hour equivalents. UVU’s 15-hour per semester workload extrapolates to about 76 hours per week based on the NEA report.
Herein lies the fallacy of Utah’s efforts to define workload. The attempt to improve “teaching efficiency” has been to simply increase the teaching hours for all institutions relative to research universities. This might have been workable if the legislature had also increased the number of hours in the day or the number of days in the week, but unfortunately, they did not. The length of the week is the same for all faculty independent of the institution and the length of their work week should be the same also. It is the distribution of teaching workload
compared to scholarly effort that might change according to mission of the college or university, not the hours in the work week.
To summarize, since the work week should be the same for all institutions, the basic workload in terms of credit hour equivalents should be the same for all institutions. It is the ratio of teaching to scholarly effort that should change according to the institution’s mission. We therefore suggest the following. The workload for all for of Utah’s institutions for higher education should be twelve credit hours equivalents per semester. Research institutions could then average, say, six teaching credit hour equivalents with six credit hour equivalents for scholarly and research activities. Regional universities would have a ratio of nine teaching credit hour equivalents to three scholarly credit hour equivalents, while community colleges would have twelve teaching credit hour equivalents. Community colleges should be either released from scholarly requirements or they should be included in the Regional university classification if scholarly efforts are continued. Details of the workloads for each institution should then be worked out through faculty senates or associations and institutional administrations. The numbers in this example are meant as an example only and could be changed to meet conditions of an optimum workload.