Grantee Research
The Impact of Instructor Rank on Required First-Year Law Course Outcomes
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Date
2017
Keywords
law school faculty
Abstract
A striking development in the U.S. higher education system in the last several decades is the changing composition course instructors, highlighted by a reduced reliance on tenure-track or tenured faculty and increased use of “teaching faculty” who generally have higher teaching loads, lower pay and research expectations, less job security, and no clear route to tenure. An open question in legal education is whether faculty of different rank are equally effective in the classroom. We provide novel insights into the relative effectiveness of instructors of different rank in a top-100 law school. Specifically, we compare the impacts of tenured, tenure-track, and “teaching” faculty on student-by-course outcomes in required first-year courses. Our empirical analysis employs student-by-course level administrative data from a top law school. We obtain credibly causal estimates by exploiting conditionally random variation in first-year classroom assignments complemented by a student-fixed effects research design. Students are about 4 percentage points (12%) more likely to receive good grades (As) from tenure-track faculty than from instructors of other ranks. Interestingly, this phenomenon is driven almost exclusively by the course grades of male students, particularly white male students. And while non-tenure line and tenured faculty exhibit similar grading patterns, non-tenure line faculty seem to inspire more interest in the subject matter, as their students are more likely to take future courses in the subject area and less likely to drop the course than are students taught by tenured and tenure-line faculty. While these results are likely causal in the sense that they are not due to sorting of students into courses, it is not clear whether these effects are driven by variation in teaching quality, implicit or other biases on the part of instructors than affect student engagement, or general differences in grading practices.
