Faculty Workload in PA Education: Building a Model Your Dean Will Accept

Every PA program director eventually has a version of the same meeting. An administrator has read the standards, noticed that nothing in them specifies a different teaching load for PA education, and concluded that the university's credit-hour expectations should apply to your faculty like everyone else's. The frustrating part is that on the literal point, they are usually right. This article is about how to answer that argument with a model instead of an appeal. It is part of our Building, Growing & Leading a PA Program pillar.

Last reviewed August 2026. Standards references reflect the ARC-PA Standards, Sixth Edition.

Why doesn't a standard credit-hour model work for PA education?

Because it cannot see most of the work.

Here is the conversation, reconstructed from more of my own career than I would like to admit. A dean, entirely reasonably from where he sits: all programs must apply workload equally. I see no reason your faculty cannot teach twelve credit hours per semester. Your clinical coordinator does not have any teaching credits. All she does is coordinate rotations and do site visits. That does not meet the college's teaching guidelines. And besides, I read your ARC-PA standards, and nowhere does it say the workload has to be different for PA education.

He is not being unfair. He is applying an instrument that was built for a different kind of teaching to a program whose work does not fit inside it. PA education runs collaborative and guest lecturing rather than one instructor per course. It runs lab sections at roughly eight students to one faculty member. It runs clinical education that requires site visitation and preceptor evaluation across a wide geography. It carries an accreditation project that does not appear anywhere in a course catalog. A model that counts only classroom credit hours registers none of that as work.

PA programs also sit in different divisions and colleges depending on the institution, which means the comparison group is often arbitrary. The result is a familiar feeling of being a square peg in a round hole. The way out is not to argue that PA education is special. It is to translate PA-specific work into the currency the institution already uses.

What does an hour-equivalent workload model look like?

These are guidelines I developed over years as a program director to make PA workload legible to administrators. They are my methodology rather than ARC-PA requirements, and they are meant to be adapted to your program rather than adopted verbatim.

The coordination line is the one that most often needs explaining. A three-credit clinical medicine course taught by a rotating faculty team still requires one person to build the syllabus, sequence the content, construct and review the exams, manage the guest lecturers, and answer for the course when something goes wrong. At 0.5 hour-equivalent per credit, that coordinator earns 1.5 equivalents for work an administrator would otherwise see as zero.

The experiential line does similar work for clinical education. Site visitation and preceptor evaluation are the quality-control mechanism for the entire clinical year. Pricing them at 2 hour-equivalents per 6 FTE student weeks turns "all she does is coordinate rotations" into a number.

What else should earn workload credit?

Work that recurs but sits outside any course. These additions matter because they are where accreditation and program-development labor actually lives.

• New course development: 3 hour-equivalents per course
• Substantial revision of an existing course: 2 hour-equivalents per course
• Experiential education fieldwork: 1 hour-equivalent per 10 site visits
• Major service, committee, and accreditation work: up to 6 hour-equivalents, with each committee earning 1 hour-equivalent per semester
• Special projects related to accreditation: up to 3 hour-equivalents per semester
• Grant project director or investigator: release time per institutional policy
• First-year start-up time for new faculty: 8 hour-equivalents

That last one deserves emphasis. A clinician moving into a faculty role in their first year is building every course preparation from scratch while learning an institution, and treating that year as a normal teaching year is how programs lose good new faculty before their second.

How should administrative roles be weighted?

Compressing administrative load into annual equivalents is often the most persuasive part of the conversation, because it gives an administrator a single number per role rather than an argument about hours.

The program director figure is the one worth defending hardest. A director carrying a full faculty teaching load on top of program administration is not a scheduling inconvenience. It is a compliance risk, because the administrative responsibilities the standards assign to that role do not shrink to fit the time left over.

How does a workload model become accreditation evidence?

Under the Sixth Edition, faculty and staff sufficiency is the subject of Standard C1.02, which asks a program to demonstrate that it has enough principal faculty and enough administrative staff to operate and meet its obligations. A defensible answer to that question reads capacity and workload underneath the FTE count rather than resting on student-to-faculty ratios, and a program that already maintains a workload model has most of that analysis in hand.

Three connections are worth making explicitly.

Capacity is individual. The ARC-PA Compliance Manual describes capacity as the amount of work a person can perform at their level of effort, which means it is not uniform across a faculty. A new faculty member does not have the capacity of a ten-year veteran. Dropping inexperienced faculty into a heavy teaching load without mentoring or resources produces burnout and then attrition, and a sufficiency analysis is supposed to surface that rather than smooth over it.

A workload policy is part of the case. Many institutions do not have a realistic one, and its absence is itself something a program may have to explain. If your pedagogical model relies on small-group or case-based teaching that splits a course into multiple sections, and your workload policy credits only the course, the policy is understating your faculty's actual load by design.

Sustained overload is a finding waiting to happen. Faculty running at 120 to 130 percent of a reasonable load for years is exactly the condition ARC-PA will ask a program to account for, and the correlation with attrition is not subtle. Documenting workload prospectively is how a program gets to explain the situation on its own terms rather than in response to a citation.

There is a related benefit that has nothing to do with compliance. A program that has distributed administrative responsibility across assistant director roles has both a stronger sufficiency case and a working succession plan, because delegated responsibility and leadership development are the same act viewed from two angles.

How do you actually present this to a dean or provost?

Bring the model, not the grievance. A few things make the conversation go better.

Lead with the institution's own framework. You are not asking for an exception; you are proposing a conversion table so that PA-specific work can be counted in the units the institution already uses. That reframing does most of the work.

Bring data alongside the model. Faculty and staff attrition, teaching load history, section counts, clinical site visit volume, and comparative program information all help establish that the model describes reality rather than preference. Programs can use several data sources to validate workload responsibilities, and an evidence-based case is much harder to dismiss than a description of how busy everyone is.

Be specific about the ask. "Our faculty are overloaded" invites sympathy and no action. "Our clinical education coordinator carries 14 hour-equivalents of unrecognized administrative load annually, here is the derivation, and here is what recognizing it would require" invites a decision.

And expect the conversation to take more than one meeting. Institutional workload policy is slow to move, which is a reason to open the discussion before you need the outcome rather than during a review cycle.

If your program is heading into a sufficiency analysis, or into a workload conversation you would rather not have unarmed, talk to our team.

Frequently asked questions

How should PA programs calculate faculty workload?
By converting all faculty activity into a common hour-equivalent unit rather than counting classroom credit hours alone. That means assigning value to lab instruction, course coordination for team-taught courses, clinical site visitation, new course development, committee and accreditation work, and administrative roles, then expressing the total in the units the institution already uses.

Does ARC-PA specify a faculty workload limit for PA programs?
No. The standards do not set a teaching load. What the Sixth Edition does require, under Standard C1.02, is that a program demonstrate sufficient principal faculty and administrative staff, and a workload analysis is the practical evidence behind that claim. Any specific hour-equivalent figures a program uses are its own methodology.

Why do PA faculty carry more workload than a credit-hour model shows?
Because PA education relies on team-taught courses that require coordination, low-ratio laboratory instruction, clinical site visitation and preceptor evaluation, and ongoing accreditation work, none of which register as teaching credits. A model designed for one-instructor lecture courses simply has no field for them.

What is capacity under the ARC-PA standards?
The ARC-PA Compliance Manual describes capacity as the amount of work a person can perform at their level of effort. It is individual rather than uniform, which is why a sufficiency analysis has to account for faculty experience and not just headcount or FTE.

Should a PA program director carry a full teaching load?
Generally no. Program directors hold administrative responsibilities the standards assign to the role, and those responsibilities do not compress to fit whatever time remains after a full teaching schedule. Release time in the range of 12 to 16 hour-equivalents annually is a reasonable starting point for that conversation.

The sufficiency case this model supports is covered in full in The Two Questions of C1.02.