Figure

Full-Time Faculty as a Percentage of All Postsecondary Faculty, by Primary Teaching Field, 1988–2004

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), National Study of Postsecondary Faculty; data accessed and analyzed via NCES’s online Data Analysis System at http://nces.ed.gov/das/.
See the [noteOnLink linkId='335']Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines[/noteOnLink]. The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) was last administered in 2004. The NSOPF—the source of the data for Indicators III-10 to III-15, all of which deal with the characteristics of the nation’s humanities professoriate—has been suspended indefinitely by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). The only remaining source of nationally representative data on the postsecondary humanities faculty is the American Academy of Art and Sciences–sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS). The HDS provides a variety of data on humanities faculty members and their teaching loads (as well as different aspects of the student experience; data from the HDS will be incorporated into the Humanities Indicators in the near future), but it does not supply the sort of information on faculty earnings, racial composition, institutional distribution, or job satisfaction that was available from the NSOPF.
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