The number of full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty has declined gradually over the past decade as comprehensive four-year universities and two-year colleges have hired more part-time and temporary faculty, the U.S. Department of Education reports. Still, full-time faculty were responsible for teaching most of the undergraduate credit hours at the nation's 3,400 degree-granting postsecondary institutions. Overall, full-timers teach 71 percent; part-timers teach 27 percent; and other instructional staff, such as teaching assistants, teach 2 percent of the undergraduate credits. The overall picture looks quite different, however, when you adjust your focus. For example, part-timers account for 65 percent of the faculty at two-year colleges.

These are among the early findings of the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:99), which the National Center for Education Statistics is releasing this spring. The data provide a composite of the professoriate in the 1997-98 school year. It is the third such survey done by the NCES, with the earlier ones released in 1988 and 1993.

The government goes to great lengths to achieve high and accurate returns on the survey, just as it did on the U.S. Census, says Linda Zimbler, the survey's project officer. It seeks information from institutions and from faculty themselves, and if the data do not jibe with reports from earlier years, it asks the institution to explain why. For this survey, the Education Department requested more information than before on the use of temporary faculty. Here are some of the findings:

• The number of faculty and instructional staff teaching in higher education is more than 1.1 million, up from 904,935 in 1992.
• In fall 1998, some 48 percent of all faculty had tenure at their institutions. This is a statistic that has changed significantly in the past decade. In 1987, the figure was 58 percent, and it was 54 percent in 1992.
• For 44 percent of institutions, the size of the faculty did not change from 1993 to 1998. Another 44 percent experienced an average 20 percent growth, and 12 percent showed a decrease.
• Eight percent of all full-time faculty were new hires, and 7.7 percent of faculty left their institutions in 1997-98. Only 29 percent of those who left retired; the rest left for other reasons.
• Between 1993 and 1998, 40 percent of all institutions enacted policies to reduce the size of their full-time faculty. Twenty-two percent replaced the full-timers with part-timers.

The Education Department plans to release more studies based on NSOPF:99 that will cover technology and Internet use, distance education, remedial and continuing education, changes in the racial/ethnic and gender composition of the faculty, part-time faculty and more. The studies can be found at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/nsopf as they are issued.

For the seventh straight year, the salary increases of college administrators outpaced inflation, going up 4.8 percent in the 2000-01 academic year; the Consumer Price Index shows the inflation rate to be 3.4 percent for this past year. Administrative salaries went up 5 percent the preceding year (almost double the 2.7 rate of inflation), which was the largest increase in 10 years, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, which annually collects median salary data. This year, the CUPAHR results are based on the responses to a survey of 1,466 public and private colleges and universities.

In contrast, faculty salaries rose 3.7 percent from 1998-99 to 1999-2000, according to the American Association of University Professors annual salary report. It will release data for the current year later this spring.

The salaries for administrative posts varied by type of institution, according to the CUPAHR study. The average salary of the president or chief executive of a single institution was $147,920 (and $206,195 for a system CEO). Two-year college presidents earned, on average, $115,268. The average salary for chief academic officers was $104,193; for chief business officers, it was $101,000.

The survey included results for 167 positions in the academic, administrative, external affairs and student services areas. CUPAHR, a Washington, D.C.-based association, is selling copies of the report for $330, but the March 16, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education includes a comprehensive listing.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology continues to lead an effort to address the poor representation of women in the sciences. In January, MIT president Charles Vest hosted a meeting of nine leaders of major research institutions; the group acknowledged that women face greater obstacles to advancement and agreed to collect data in order to better understand the problem.

Represented at the meeting were presidents or chancellors from the universities of California-Berkeley, Michigan and Pennsylvania; the California Institute of Technology; and Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Stanford. Twenty-five women professors also attended the session, which was co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The meeting grew out of an unprecedented 1999 finding by MIT that women scientists there had been the victims of subtle discrimination. This was evidenced by the small number of women scientists on the faculty. They had received less lab space, less institutional recognition and fewer opportunities to exercise leadership than their male counterparts. Although MIT conceded at the time that the complaints of women scientists there were justified, many in the research community criticized the institute for caving in too easily. Now, two years later, research institution leaders are beginning to acknowledge that they haven't collected the necessary salary statistics and other data to analyze the problem adequately. The leaders agreed to meet in a year and discuss policies to expand opportunities for women, including ensuring that faculty with family responsibilities were not penalized.