Table 3:
Reasons offered for seriously considering leaving current SFES position in response to the following question: “What are the primary reasons you are seriously considering leaving?” (n = 20)
| Category | Sample quotes | % |
|---|---|---|
| Science education is not supported, valued, or understood by department and/or university | • Lack of any real support from the college or university for science education. • Lack of understanding about what science education is and its value among the non-SFES faculty in my department. • Lack of understanding of SFES research and how to evaluate it. | 35 |
| Overworked, burned out, and unappreciated | • I feel burned out. • I’m underpaid and overworked. • I see new faculty who are only rewarded for traditional research and who care very little about educating students. • Anyone who does not fit this very traditional research mold is a second-class citizen. • There is a lack of acknowledgment for hard work. • I struggle coping with the stress. | 25 |
| Professional values are not aligned with department and/or university | • My professional activities are not valued by my colleagues. • I am not sure that my department and the CSU have the values that I thought I saw when I started this job. • In networking with other SFES faculty, I realize that there are more problems in this field than I would have as a scientist so the choices are to leave the field or the CSU system since what I do is not valued on any level. | 25 |
| I am not doing what I want to be doing | • I am not spending my time how I want to spend it. • I am unhappy with the quantity of work I am expected to do and the nature of much of this work. • When I was hired, it was made explicit that I would be able to choose research areas, including scholarship of teaching. This was a lie. | 20 |
| Salary is too low | • Salary is too low and cost of living here is too high. • Poor salary, high housing costs. • The financial support provided through the CSU system as an Associate Professor combined with the high cost of living in urban southern California led me to consider alternate positions. | 20 |
| Teaching load is too high | • How can you have scholarly activity with a 12-unit teaching load? The CSU has outrageous teaching loads as compared with University of California and private institutions. • The teaching expectations at my university are too high (24 units/year.) | 20 |
| Lack of resources to support scholarly activities in science education | • I have no problem mixing service with scholarly activity, but without a graduate level program that I can connect with, there is not much that is available in the way of scholarly activity grants available. • They take a “bean counting” approach to evaluate your research program, plus personnel committee usually does not have the background to evaluate education research. | 15 |
| Service load is too high | • This position is all service, which is not what I wanted, nor signed up for. • Although I am somehow juggling both, I do not feel that it is appropriate to expect me to be heavily involved in the teacher preparation activities—for which I have had zero training—and to build from the ground up an education research program. • Because I have somewhat more breadth in my training than a classical scientist, I am over-burdened with service expectations re: teacher prep, student care and recruitment, evaluation, etc. | 15 |
| Other | • I am on an administrative track and, if I decide to move up, I will likely have to move on. • Quality of life issues in my geographic area. • I’m retiring. | 35 |