Values, Policies, and Practices Affecting the Hiring Process for Full-Time Arts and Sciences Faculty in Community Colleges

Community colleges employ over 100,000 full-time faculty members, or one fifth of all faculty members in U.S. post-secondary education (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2001; Huber, 1998). These faculty members provide instruction in a wide range of programs for approximately 37% of all postsecondary students in the U.S., including over half of all Hispanic and American Indian students and approximately 40% of African American and Asian students (Chronicle, 2002; NCES, 2001). Thus, community colleges and their faculties play an extremely important function in U.S. higher education. The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe institutional values, policies, and practices that affect hiring of full-time community college arts and sciences faculty. Specifically, this study sought to answer the following research questions: (a) What values, policies and practices affect the faculty search and selection process? (b) How do these values, policies, and practices affect where and how community colleges recruit and select arts and sciences faculty? Several subsidiary questions suggested by the literature are also explored: Do community colleges seek to hire individuals with Ph.D.s if the market allows? Do they hire individuals who could not get jobs in other sectors, as job queuing theory suggests? How important is status of the degree-granting institution to community colleges? Although data are collected about searches for faculty positions in both transfer and occupational programs, this paper focuses only on the former. (Contains 3 notes.)