Demography of the Faculty: A Statistical Portrait of English and Foreign Languages.

Abstract

The following report draws on US government data sources to develop a statistical portrait of the population of faculty members teaching Eng lish and foreign languages in US degree-granting colleges and univer sities. Chief among the sources is the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), a survey that at roughly five-year intervals since 1988 has canvassed a representative sample of faculty members teaching in Title IV-participating, degree-granting, public and private not-for-profit institutions. Information from the NSOPF can be developed for specific disciplinary areas because, unlike other systematic national data sources, the NSOPF asks respondents for their principal teaching field. The NSOPF data presented here come mainly from the study's 2004 admin istration, the most recent, which asked respondents about their work in the academic year 2003-04. The findings from the NSOPF are based on a sample: questionnaires were sent to 35,000 people, and the survey had a weighted response rate of 76%. The population figures developed for this report are estimates based on the weights the Department of Education assigns to raw responses.