N. Judge King, Jr. Nassau Community College Garden Citv. New York. 11530 John E. ~lirnann Hofstra University Hempstead. New York 11550
I
I
Non-Faculty Supporl Services in Departments of Chemistry
The present survey concerns itself with the distribution of non-teaching assist&ce and staff support in chemistry departments and its relationship to the size of department and nature of the institution. Post-secondary education is finding its financial constraints highly burdensome. On the one hand are pressures for cutting back funds; on the other, requirements are often increasing, or rise in resoonse to new missions of the d e ~ a r t m e n t sconcerned. There is, therefore, abundant need for comparative information across a broad snectrum of institutions in which the resources utilized are identified and related to the performance of the department. T h e survey questionnaire of this study was sent to 91 institutional chemistry departments in the State of New York and 55 of these institutions responded, representing a 60.4% return. The size of these departments varied from one teaching member a t North Co;ntry Community College to 37 teaching members a t Brooklyn College. They include private and public institutions, community colleges, four-year colleges, and some graduate schools. T h e sample is based in p a r t i n the attendance a t the articulation conference a t Nassau Community College in 1970 which led to the shortlived New York State Association of Schools and Industry. More than half the schools in this study participated in the conference. All of the data are presented in Table 1and are a compilation of information derived from the questionnaire form. Table 2 is a listing of the institutions in this study and is keyed by school number in Table 1.It should be noted that the data for North Country and Schenectady County Community Colleges were insufficient and. therefore. deleted for the purpose of the regression model. A statistical treatment of selected parts of the data does show some significant relationships. The regression model is based on the hypothesis that the amount of secretarial assistance, student clerical assistance, student laboratory assistants, and teaching assistants is related to the size of the department, to whether the institution is a four-year or more institution as distinguished from a communitv college and to whether it is a priv&e or public institution. TO test the hypothesis we proposed a multiple regression model of the form
nificance ufOO?. Ir was nuteuurthy, howrver, that 61 = -0.12: per ie.. there i3adrelinein the amuunt oi~rcrcrar~al;~s~iitanrr faculty membrr as the department increased in i r e This srrms to indicate the presence of a measure of economy of scale. 2) No statistically significant relationships could be discerned in student clerical work hours. 3) For student laboratoryassistants there appeared to be a somewhat larger proportion in private institutions, with an F value of 5.30 and significance 0.025. 4) For teaching assistants our finding was again of a significant relationship with the size of the department with F = 9.89 and significance0.004. Here, however, b , = 0.36; i.e., the proportion of teaching assistants increases with the size of the department. We also considered the total of secretarial work hours per faculty and student clerical work hours for faculty as a dependent variable; i.e., we set Y5 = Y , Y2 The result was virtually identical with that for Y1by itself; i.e., i t resulted in a value of F = 5.94, with statistical significance 0.02. This suggests rather clearly that student clerical work hours are
+
Secretary per Facuity Member
O
-
Yi= o + b,X,
8
10
I2
21
24 38
43
4 4 50
55
5
Student lab aid per Faculty Membel .40 .30
Technical Assistant per Faculty Member
+ bzXz + baXa
where Y I =secretarial hours per faculty member (based on a 35-hour week) Y 2 = students' clerical work hours per faculty member Yp = student laboratory assistants' work hours per faculty member Y n = tenchin:: asristants per faculty mrmber X I = numlrer of teaching faculty i n urpmmrnt X 2 = dummy \,nriahle:0 = c
