Monetary incentives could encourage performance

It’s a tried and true tenet of the business world: Give employees a share in the benefits, and they will work harder. Ah, the magic of incentives. Despite its success in the private sector, such a system of rewards has made education bigwigs wary – that is until recently.

Kent State University recently announced that – in effort to improve its status, retention rate and number of alumni donations – it will start paying cash bonuses to faculty members who help the university exceed its goals. The plan is simple: Give educators a share in the spoils that their efforts bring to campus.

Most students and administrators agree that professors play a huge role in how connected a student feels to campus. Often those feelings inform students’ decisions to stay at school after the first year and, later, their decision to donate to their alma mater. Despite this prominent role they play in bringing in funds for the university professors – unlike presidents and administrators – currently see little, if any, of the financial fruits of their labor.

We think rewarding teachers for the contributions they make on campus is an excellent idea. In a profession with little room to move up, we think financial compensation is a great way to motivate faculty members and to reward outstanding performance. However, there is something about corporate-modeled education that doesn’t sit well with us.

Paying instructors for meeting certain quotas smacks of hyper-consumerism, and it seems to objectify the process of learning. Still, we believe in the power of incentives to bring about change, and we are interested to see how Kent State’s experiment pans out. As for striking a balance between economic models and good, old-fashioned learning, we’ll have to wait and see if the marginal benefit of the results exceeds the marginal cost.