RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Are Professors Worth It?
JF Journal of Human Resources
JO J Hum Resour
FD University of Wisconsin Press
SP 836
OP 863
DO 10.3368/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2
VO 55
IS 3
A1 Jan Feld
A1 Nicolás Salamanca
A1 Ulf Zölitz
YR 2020
UL http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/55/3/836.abstract
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.