A further challenge is that more and more of the faculty are part-time. Approximately 50% of budgets go toward expenses related to instruction. Faculty salaries are by far the biggest piece of that pie. The reality of cost pressures, along with other trends towards hiring of faculty who are practitioners and hiring to meet changing curricula, mean that in U.S. higher education we are in the midst of a sea change toward a growing percentage of part-time faculty. Between 1975 and 1995 the percentage of faculty on part-time contracts rose from 20% to 40% (Ortmann 1997) . The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for Fall of 2003 indicates that part-time faculty made up approximately 46% (Knapp 2005).

Are there predictions of how far this trend will continue? We have not been able to find any. But, the NCES report indicates that of the faculty hires made in Fall 2003, approximately 59% were non-tenure-track, potentially an estimate of the upper boundary of the part-time percentage, assuming today’s hiring practices continue. Some for-profit institutions have achieved expenses related to instruction as low as 40%. These for-profits have very few full-time faculty.