A UNIVERSITY’S excellence depends directly on its faculty. Understanding this basic truth, we at The City University of New York have been working hard to expand and fortify our teaching staff. While we appreciate

and depend on the contributions our part-time instructors provide, we have made special efforts to increase the proportion of talented scholars hired in full-time teaching positions, especially in the “STEM” disciplines of science,

technology, engineering and mathematics. In the last eight years, we have added 1,000 such teachers and expanded the instructional pool by 18 percent.

We’ve made this investment because full-time tenure-track faculty members bring even more to the academic table than their scholarship and experience.

Full-time faculty are indeed fully committed to the life of the university. Their service transcends the classroom. It includes advising and mentoring students; participating in curriculum planning and institutional governance;

and qualities perhaps best summarized as “good citizenship.” Since our fundamental business is educating

our students, we must remain keenly sensitive to study findings suggesting that the quality of instruction, advising and mentoring – as well as graduation rates – decrease as the proportion of full-time faculty also grows lower.

Prestigious private colleges and universities that maintain endowments of a size to make small nations envious need not worry about their abilities to recruit the best full-time faculty to their campuses. But for the rest of us – public

institutions with far less forgiving purse strings – a crisis is coming. It’s a crisis of demography, with two

converging features: an aging professoriate nearing retirement, and a growing student population.

Data from the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) show that the share of U.S. faculty age 55 and older has grown from 24 percent in 1987 to 34 percent in 2003. Among faculty who responded to the NCES’ most recent National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, 30 percent said they intended to retire within the next decade. With some 632,000 fulltime faculty employed at U.S. degree-granting institutions, we can thus face an imminent wave of nearly

190,000 faculty retirements nationwide.

Traditionally, colleges and universities draw new full-time, tenure-track faculty members from a pool of recent doctoral-degree recipients. The good news here is that we anticipate an increase in the supply of newly minted Ph.D.s in the coming years.

The not-so-good news, especially for public universities, is manifold.

Recruiting the best talent to our campuses – and providing them with the resources they require to progress in their own research and scholarship while teaching our students – is an expensive endeavor, especially in the critical STEM disciplines. And for too many public universities, the investment simply is not there.

This scenario becomes even gloomier when we consider a more general disinvestment in this country in the physical sciences, engineering and mathematics. Too few of our students are studying these disciplines; too few are acquiring the advanced knowledge required to keep our nation strong and competitive. The graduate students forming the next generation of postsecondary instructors come increasingly from foreign lands.

This has two serious adverse consequences for our students. First, once trained, many of these accomplished

individuals leave the United States to pursue opportunities in their home countries. And among those who may remain, many have significant difficulties speaking English.

Even as we face these challenges in replacing faculty, we expect the trend of increased student enrollment

to continue. The NCES projects total enrollment in American higher education to expand by 12.6 percent in the next nine years, from 17.6 million students in fall 2006 to 19.9 million in 2015.

(The number of graduating high-school students will remain relatively constant. Other factors, including

the increasing value of a college degree as a credential for succeeding in a global workforce, are the chief causes.)

Faculty hiring in any field can prove to be a lengthy and complicated proces, so now is the time to face and deal with these realities. A crisis looms, but with adequate support and resources, American public higher education can confront it and go beyond mere survival. It can thrive.

Matthew Goldstein is chancellor of The City University of New York.