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This report describes findings from a study of the Engaging Adjunct Faculty in the Student Success Movement project, a two-year initiative led by Achieving the Dream to develop and implement strategies to support adjunct faculty in improving student outcomes. Work in the project--guided by design principles related to classroom activities, professional development, employment policies, and the use of data--was led by teams of full- and part-time faculty and administrators at six participating community colleges. A key objective of the project was to generate information about promising, scalable, and sustainable engagement strategies that could be shared across the national network of Achieving the Dream colleges. Using survey, interview, and student transcript data, CCRC documented a range of strategies that colleges designed to support and engage their adjunct faculty, examined how the strategies were implemented, and measured the effects of a set of selected activities on faculty and students. Drawing on implementation findings presented in this report, the authors offer four recommendations for colleges seeking to provide supports for part-time faculty: (1) Ground decisions on adjunct faculty supports in local data on adjunct faculty needs; (2) Embed adjunct faculty supports into existing institutional infrastructure and initiatives; (3) Examine college policies and practices that impact the working lives of adjunct faculty; and (4) Consider intended outcomes for faculty engagement strategies and create a plan for measurement.

Based on a dataset on two- and four-year college students and instructors from an anonymous state that includes detailed instructor employment information, this paper classifies faculty into four types--tenured instructors, tenure-track instructors, long-term adjuncts, and short-term adjuncts--to examine whether adjunct faculty have different impacts on student academic outcomes than tenure-track and tenured faculty. We use two empirical strategies--a two-way fixed effects model and an instrumental variable approach--to examine how initial exposure to a field of study with different types of instructors influences both contemporaneous and subsequent course performance in both two- and four-year colleges, as well as the extent to which the estimated differences on student outcomes may be explainable by observable instructor academic and employment characteristics. Our results suggest that adjuncts have positive impacts on introductory course grades but negative impacts on subsequent course enrollment and performance. Such negative impacts are stronger among supplemental adjuncts hired temporarily than among adjuncts with long-term employment contracts with the college. The estimated differences among instructors can be largely explained by key instructor demographic and employment characteristics, including highest degree attained, whether employed full-time in the college, and whether had previous work experience in non-teaching positions.