<p>Alexandre,</p>
<p>I, too, have noticed the rampant cheating on s/f ratios at some private universities. The instructions on the common data set are very clear: universities are to exclude graduate/professional students and faculty in “stand-alone” graduate-level programs, which typically would include law, business, and medicine. But by implication, they should count faculty who teach both undergrads and grad students in their faculty totals for purposes of calculating s/f ratios, and they should also include the grad students in those fields in their student total for that same purpose. Typically this would include sciences, social sciences, humanities, and engineering, as well as business at schools that have both undergrad and graduate (MBA) programs, unless the graduate-level faculty is entirely separate from the undergrad business faculty. Penn is one of the most egregious offenders here: last time I looked, they calculated their s/f ratio by counting only undergrads as “students,” and by counting every last faculty member, even law and medical professors, as “faculty.” An honest accounting would have pushed their s/f ratio up into the teens, instead of 8:1 or whatever they claimed. It’s as if they were claiming every last graduate student was in a “stand-alone” program, and every last faculty member was not in a “stand-alone” program.</p>
<p>As long as some schools are engaged in this kind of manipulation, s/f ratios just aren’t comparing apples to apples. I thought about opening up a CC thread on this, but I just didn’t have time to crunch the numbers for a bunch of schools.</p>