Support for Adjunct Faculty Scholarship in Online Graduate Programs: Fostering Knowledge, Motivation, and Engagement

Reliance On Adjunct Faculty In Online Graduate Programs

Higher education enrollments in the United States are decreasing; in fact, enrollment has decreased every year for the past seven years by approximately 1% per year (Fain, 2018). Despite this trend, online enrollment continues to grow and has increased the past four years by 1–2% per year (Seaman, Allen, & Seaman, 2018). As of 2016, nearly 32% of all higher education students in the United States took at least one online course. The continued growth of distance education enrollment places increasing pressure on hiring and maintaining faculty to teach the growing online course offerings, while changes in national faculty characteristics compound this pressure.

Full-time tenured faculty members were the predominant teaching workforce in the United States during most of the 20th Century, but toward the end of the century a shift in faculty hiring practices in higher education occurred that significantly changed the professoriate. In the late 1960s, full-time tenured and nontenure-track faculty members in the United States made up more than 75% of the professoriate (Burns, Smith, & Starcher, 2015). Now, nearly half of all faculty members teaching in higher education in the United States can be classified as adjunct faculty members (Yakoboski, 2018). This shift toward adjunct faculty marks a transition that has tremendous implications for students, administrators, and faculty developers. Additionally, a growing workforce of online adjunct instructors further complicates this shift in faculty characteristics.