PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Feld, Jan
AU  - Salamanca, Nicolás
AU  - Zölitz, Ulf
TI  - Are Professors Worth It? The Value-added and Costs of Tutorial Instructors
AID  - 10.3368/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2
DP  - 2018 Dec 06
TA  - Journal of Human Resources
PG  - 0417-8752r2
4099  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2018/12/05/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2.short
4100  - http://jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/2018/12/05/jhr.55.3.0417-8752R2.full
AB  - A substantial share of university instruction happens in tutorial sessions— small group instruction given parallel to lectures. In this paper, 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.