Modeling the economic cost of inadequate teaching and mentoring

The primary activity of this project has been to develop economic models giving the universities tools needed to understand and quantify the value of faculty accomplishments in teaching, mentoring, and advising. These tools will augment their existing tools for tracking funded research thus providing a more balanced view of the values of each activity. This understanding will provide the rational for properly rewarding excellent faculty accomplishments in student interactions, hence encouraging the efforts needed to retain more students. There is great value to the school, the institution and the nation, in faculty who provide excellent student services in and out of the classroom, but it is difficult to quantify these accomplishments economically for various reasons including limited access to university budgets. This often means high achieving faculty in research funding are given much greater rewards by the school than high achieving faculty in the area of student experiences. This disparity of rewards results in a faculty culture which undervalues faculty accomplishments for undergraduate students and fails to understand the economic impact of poor retention.