The Significance of Declining Full-Time Faculty Status for Community College Student Retention and Graduation: A Correlational Study with a Keynesian Perspective
Leah P. Hollis

Abstract
In response to fluctuating budgets and enrollments, higher education has come to depend less on a full-time faculty and to rely increasingly on less expensive part-time faculty. Further,the House Committee (2014) reports that adjuncts are the majority of faculty across all sectors of higher education. Specifically, only 31.3% of public 2-year faculty members are full-time (Kezar & Maxey, 2013).Concurrently, the Obama administration recommended that 60% of Americans hold a degree by 2020; in turn, with less institutional commitment to fulltime faculty, adjuncts are the central teaching resource in the midst of achieving this national standard. Within this context, this study’s central question is “What is the significance of full-time faculty for community college student retention/graduation?” Individual bivariate correlation tests revealed a weak relationship yet no statistical significance between the percentage of full-time faculty and community college student retention and graduation.

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