Colleges bracing for shortage of professors.

Byline: V. Dion Haynes

LOS ANGELES _ Faced with a large enrollment surge from the children of Baby Boomers and a flurry of expected retirements, colleges and universities across the nation are bracing for a shortage of tens of thousands of professors.

Education experts are predicting that overall college enrollment will rise by 2 million to a total of 16 million students over the next decade.

No one has an exact figure on the number of faculty positions that will open over the next decade. But with an average 20-1 faculty-student ratio, the figure could reach an estimated 100,000 positions.

The college faculty crunch comes at a time when elementary and secondary schools are encountering their own teacher shortages and when all schools are facing intense public pressure to raise the quality of education.

Experts say the competition for faculty could create a sellers market by driving up salaries, exacerbate universities' current practice of hiring more part-time and non-tenured professors and force institutions to introduce more independent study courses to reach more students with fewer instructors.

In the 1960s and 1970s, enrollment also surged when…