estargrl88

I just wanted to call a bit of attention to the faculty student ratio, a number that you see time and time again when looking at college information, but I'm guessing is often passed over. When I was applying to college, it didn't matter much to me, though I generally saw a lower ratio as something good.
However, when you stop and think about it, the student faculty ratio is important in that it can give you a better idea of how your classes will be in college. Small classes are really the best in my opinion; smaller classes tend to include more discussion and that is when you are really challenged because you are forced to interact with what you're learning and you also have the chance to hear what your peers say (which in my experience is most usually something very intelligent). In small classes, you will get to know your professor and I think it is easier to ask questions.
Anyway, this was just something that I happened to think about, and thought I'd share it with prospective students!

IBclass06

A good student-faculty ratio does not necessarily correspond to small courses.


Personally, I think it's far more useful looking through the online catalogue and seeing how big the courses in your areas of interest are.

Ellie7

Hm...I think its overemphasized, actually. I've read that a lot of schools are randomly hiring faculty to boost up the number - advisors and such - yet it doesn't correspond to class sizes all that much

gthopeful

This is true, especially at research universities where professors don't even teach every semester. "Buying out" of teaching time is pretty common for professors with a lot of research funding, and so the school has to hire more faculty just to teach the classes, which lowers the student/faculty ratio.

ericatbucknell

...and it doesnt help that many--perhaps most--research universities misreport s/f ratios on their common data sets, either.

bclintonk

S/F ratios are highly manipulable, and frequently manipulated. Here's how US News defines student/faculty ratio:

And here's how they define "full-time equivalent faculty":

Now if you think about this for a moment, there are a number of obvious discrepancies and/or areas ripe for manipulation. First, "faculty" excludes "faculty . . . of law, medical, business, and other stand-alone graduate or professional programs in which faculty teach virtually only graduate-level students." So a university with a business school that offers only the MBA shouldn't be able to count any of its business faculty; seems reasonable enough. But a school that has both graduate and undergrad business programs will be able to count ALL its business faculty (or at least those who teach an occasional undergrad course), even if collectively they devote 80% of their time to graduate-level instruction. Of course, the MBA-only school could counter by securing joint appointments for some of its business school faculty in economics or applied economics or some other department, and having them all teach one undergrad course or seminar a year---in which case each of those faculty members suddenly becomes "full-time" for purposes of calculating the undergrad S/F ratio.

Another increasingly widely used trick is to hire two full-time non-tenure track adjuncts for the price of a single tenured professor. They may not be at the top of their profession, they may not even be very good teachers, but US News doesn't care about any of that; for them it's a sheer numbers game, and the two full-time, possibly marginally qualified adjuncts count for twice as much as the single academic star.

Or, instead of hiring two half-time adjuncts (each of whom will count as only 1/3 of a full-time equivalent even if teaching half-time), hire six part-timers, each of whom is counted as 1/3 of a full-timer even if teaching, say, just one course per year. In the first place, you won't need to pay benefits, but more importantly the six one-course instructors will collectively give you two FTEs for the price of two half-timers who together count as only 0.67 FTE, even if exactly the same courses are taught.

If you have graduate teaching assistants or teaching fellows, don't call them that, because TAs and TFs don't count at all toward FTEs. Concentrate the teaching load on a smaller number of grad students whom you hire as (nominally) full-time "Instructors," because then you can count them toward your FTEs and improve your S/F ratio without really lifting a finger.

Don't give your faculty unpaid leaves, because then you can't count them; pay them while they're on leave, because then you can treat them as full-time faculty even though they're not teaching. And never, ever hire someone as a "replacement" for faculty on leave. Instead, build in enough redundancy with a steady stream of visitors whom you can plausibly claim are not "replacements" but instead "look-see" visitors (possible candidates for permanent hire) or "enrichment" visitors (people you want around just to add to the intellectual vibrancy of the school), even though you know this steady stream of visitors allows you to grant generous leaves to your regular faculty; because as long as they're not "replacements," you can count all those visiting faculty toward your faculty total, even while also counting those of your regular faculty who are on paid leave.

With this much room for manipulation, the S/F ratio you see in US News is anything but an "objective" number. Some schools are more creative and aggressive in manipulating these statistics than others. Be skeptical.

ericatbucknell

but bclintonk, you missed the easiest solution of all! i mean, who needs to worry about faculty manipulation when you can simply exclude graduate students from your calculations? those geniuses at caltech managed to utilize this advanced tactic reduce their s/f ratio from 6.4/1 to 2.8/1! it only took 15 seconds! and it was free!

Erin's Dad

I think the more useful info was the % of classes over 50 and % of classes under 20.

barrons

ED, which is "better" a school with 1500 classes under 20 (30%) and 300 over 50 (6%) or one with 100 under 20 (60%) and 5 over 50? (3%)

rogracer

Depends completely on the individual student how important this metric is. I actually found that some of the larger lectures at MIT were the best. As long as profs are accessible outside of class, that was all that was important to me. Sometimes in small classes, you run into a few butt-kissing students that spend the entire class trying to impress the prof...and that does no one any good. Also, in larger lectures, the student questions tend to be better than some of the stupid things you hear in a small class.

bclintonk

^^ You make a very compelling point, barrons. Any major research university will have hundreds of small classes, more than enough for anyone who prefers small classes to fill their schedule many times over. As a student, you don't really need to worry about the classes you DON'T take; your concern is the classes you DO take, and the range of choices available to you. That intimate LAC with a high percentage of small classes is likely not even to offer Elementary Hindi (the world's fourth or fifth most widely spoken language, depending on which estimates you believe) or the upper-level Linguistics seminar in Semantics or Morphology.

bluebayou

That depends a lot on the subject. I'd much rather listen to a professor lecture on chemistry (or econ) than a bunch of 18 year olds discuss what they think they know. (But if they really "knew" it, they wouldn't have a need to attend the course, would they?) And that ignores the grade-grubbers who raise their hand every minute in class so they can maximize their points or just like to listen to themselves talk.

OTOH, lit-type courses do require discussions bcos by definition, they are all about personal interpretation.

kvilledeac

Average class size or median class size is a better indicator, but the point is still good. I've found that caring about class size is the major point of contention between how people value LACs vs private universities vs public universities.

estargrl88

I was interested to read all the feedback...I guess I misunderstood what the faculty/student ratio really was and hadn't realized that these numbers were so often manipulated! In that case, I suppose the best way to look at it would be looking at class sizes, which was what I meant to express. And yes, it does depend on the subject, as well. I think that the sciences tend to traditionally have larger lectures, a format which works for that subject, but even so, I think that having 50 students to a class compared with 100 would also still make a difference.

Keilexandra

OTOH, what percentage of the students are taking Elementary Hindi? What percentage are taking General Chem? Or even, say, intermediate-level English lit? At one highly selective LAC, General Chem is ~90 students and the professor hosts several small discussion sections of ~15 students at different times in the week. And the prof still knows every student by name. To me, that is preferable to TA-led discussion sections, especially in the humanities.

An LAC with many small classes offers the trade-off of fewer obscure specialized classes for a greater chance of having small classes in the non-obscure subjects that most students will study. It's a choice that each student has to make for him/herself.