SOUTHEAST OFFICIALS: CONGRESSIOONAL STUDY DOESN'T APPLY HERE

A congressional committee says college students are paying more and getting less in return. But Southeast Missouri State University officials maintain the findings don't apply to their school.

Colleges are charging higher tuition and fees, while offering fewer courses and relying more on teaching assistants to instruct undergraduates, the study by the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families found. The findings were announced recently.

"They tend to do the study on the big research campuses and apply it to higher education in general, and it just doesn't make sense," said Sheila Caskey, Southeast's interim provost.

Southeast, for example, has few graduate teaching assistants.

"I think everybody gets painted with the same brush unless the media are very careful about how they report it," said Art Wallhausen, assistant to the president at Southeast.

Generally, he said, the teaching load is higher at community colleges than four-year regional institutions such as Southeast, and higher at the regional institutions than at the doctoral, research schools.

The congressional study of about 100 institutions found:

Tuition and fees rose by 141 percent at public, four-year colleges and universities from 1980 to 1990, and by 12 percent for the 1991-92 school year.

The teaching load of professors has dropped from the traditional 15 hours per semester to as low as six hours to allow more time for research. More than half of all professors, however, devote fewer than five hours a week to research, while up to a third say they do none at all.

Lecture classes are becoming larger. For example, the University of Colorado has a marketing class with 618 students, and the University of Illinois has a political science class of 1,156.

Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., who headed the congressional committee, said it's becoming increasingly the norm for undergraduates to be taught by teaching assistants in large classes.

"A telling example of just how far out of control this situation has gotten occurred during a two-day walkout of teaching assistants on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in spring 1989. This walkout caused the cancellation of nearly 75 percent of all classes," said Schroeder.

She said the investigation, conducted last year, found that financial aid counselors, coaches and other academic support staff grew by more than 60 percent between 1975 and 1985, executive and administrative employees by 18 percent, and full-time faculty by 6 percent.

"When it comes to college education, American families are paying more and getting less," said Schroeder.

But Wallhausen disagreed with that assessment, particularly as it applies to Southeast.

"They aren't getting less, but they are getting it differently," he said. "There is more than one way to provide the services of higher education. Because of budget constraints, universities have had to adopt different methods to provide a quality education."

In the future, he predicted higher education will resort to new ways to deliver courses to students. "I think there will be all sorts of imaginative new ways to deliver courses; I think you will see all sorts of televised courses," he said.

At Southeast, the number of full-time, non-faculty positions increased from 401 in 1981-82 to 536 in 1991-92, while the number of full-time faculty declined by two, from 409 to 407.

"There are more demands in the area of service," said Wallhausen. "Financial aid is much more complex; it takes more people to administer than it used to." Computer service is an area that was just getting started at Southeast 10 or 15 years ago, he said.

"As to graduate assistants, Caskey said few of them at Southeast teach classes.

"We have 95 graduate assistants. Less than a third are teaching," said Caskey. "Some of them are helping with labs and those kinds of things."

"Some of them are truly teaching assistants in the real broad sense of the word, but they are not totally responsible for the class," she said.

A few of the graduate students serve as administrative assistants, Caskey said.

She estimated that Southeast has never had more than 30 graduate students teaching undergraduate classes.

The majority of the teaching assistants are in the English department, although there are some in other areas such as history and math, said Caskey.

Teaching assistants, she said, basically teach only two classes a semester.

"We have a teaching assistant training program, which does not exist at most universities," said Caskey. "We don't just hand them a syllabus and point them to a classroom."

In the English department, teaching assistants are required to take a special course before starting their teaching assignments. They are also required to take a yearlong graduate-assistant course.

Teaching assistants in other departments are required to take a semester-long seminar on college teaching.

"We are pretty serious about making sure that teaching assistants are appropriately educated and mentored," said Caskey.

Wallhausen and Caskey said Southeast relies on part-time faculty to handle some of the teaching load.

There are 54 part-time faculty members at Southeast.

Full-time faculty members are those who carry a 12- to 15-hour load. Part-time faculty members, on the other hand, generally teach only one or two classes and are hired on a semester by semester basis.

The use of part-time faculty allows the university flexibility in meeting changing enrollment demands, Caskey said.

As to the study's findings about large class sizes, both Wallhausen and Caskey said that doesn't apply to Southeast.

"If we get 80 to 100 (students) in a lecture section, that is really big," said Caskey. "Our average still remains below 35."

She said there are some large lecture classes for chemistry and other science classes, although classes are divided into smaller groups of students for lab work.

For example, the largest class at Southeast is the lecture session for the anatomy and physiology class, which has 184 students. But the class is divided up into 23 different groups when it comes to the lab work, said Caskey.

Budget cuts prompted some course reductions for the summer sessions, Wallhausen said.

But Scott Giles, Southeast's student regent, said he doesn't believe that students, for the most part, have had difficulty enrolling in the classes they want and need.

"I, myself, have never had any problems with getting into a course," said Giles.

As to class size, Giles said Southeast's relatively small classes attracted him to the institution.

"I went to a high school of about 2,500 students," said Giles, who is from Jefferson City. He said his classes at Southeast are of comparable size to his former high school classes. "I think probably my biggest class is 35 people."

As at other schools, student fees have gone up at Southeast. Full-time students are paying more than $5,000 to live on campus and attend Southeast this academic year.

But while students don't like paying higher fees, Giles said he and other students are getting their money's worth.

Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press.