PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jan Feld
AU  - Nicolás Salamanca
AU  - Ulf Zölitz
TI  - Are Professors Worth It?
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2
DP  - 2020 Jul 01
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 836--863
VI  - 55
IP  - 3
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/55/3/836.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/55/3/836.full
SO  - J Hum Resour2020 Jul 01; 55
AB  - A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions—small group instruction given parallel to lectures. 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.