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My bigger concern then Adjunct profs, when taking a class at a CC (or even a state school), was whether or not they they speak English well. You can get a instructor once in a while that isn't and has a very heavy or thick accent or they barely speak English. They could be the best teacher in the world in their native tongue, but if you can't understand a word they are saying, yeah, that's a problem. Its compounded by the fact that I am hard of hearing as well.
Adjunct professors can be excellent. I had one that turned out to be one of my favorite classes ever in college. TA's on the other hand can be pretty bad, but that may be due more to other problems with having TA's to begin with. Most have little or no teaching experience (duh), and are getting no useful help from the full professor or the college. The college I went to didn't have them thankfully, but when I have taken classes in other places I avoid them.
Another problem with many TA's is the pressure they are under to complete their PhD. For some TA's, teaching an undergraduate class is just a distraction.
One of the big differences that I've seen is that which exists between land grant universities and non land grants. I attended both and from my limited experience, the land grants put much more emphasis on teaching, primarily because that is their basic mandate. They were established as public institutions which would receive greater resources from the state than did the non land grants, but in return, they had to be of direct service to the taxpayers who picked up the tab. That's one of the reasons that you see the Extension services of public universities invariably coming from the land grants.
I went to school in Oregon and the difference between the flagship and OSU, specifically in regards to physics teaching, was very substantial. U of O was almost all research and the teaching was, imo, horrific. They were basically just as any other "research" uni in that undergrads paid the freight but were poorly served. Oregon State U's physics department redid their curriculum about 10 years ago when they realized that they were graduating students who didn't know much physics. Both unis were research based, as is any university, but in the case of the land grant OSU, they did what their mandate demanded they do, make sure that they were teaching the next generation of physicists, not just if they got their proposals funded. Granted that is my limited experience. Nevertheless when I saw that OSU had altered their programs to fulfill their mandate, whereas U of O allowed their students to flounder, it made me aware of the differences....
Many land-grant universities are also the flagship univerisities in their state's system, e.g. University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Cal Berkeley, etc. See list:
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