unwelcoming out of state public university info session/tour

[bclintonk]

@northwesty

BC – I just checked UVA.

Looks to me like they divide undergrads by all faculty (excluding professional schools). So are you saying my alma mater can’t read directions just like those dopes at Harvard? I’m fine with being in that club. : )

No, that’s incorrect. On UVA’s 2014-15 Common Data Set, line B.1, they show a total of 16,482 undergraduates and 7,249 graduate students, for a “grand total all students” of 23,732. On line I.2, Student to Faculty Ratio, they calculate a s/f ratio of 15.2 to 1, based on 18,363.3 students and 1,211.7 faculty. So clearly they’re using a student figure that’s larger than just the number of undergraduates (16,482). Their s/f ratio includes some (nearly 2,000) graduate students. The other 5,000+ graduate students are presumably in “stand-alone” graduate/professional programs like the Law School, Medical School, Darden School of Business (graduate-level only), or what have you.

Actually, the directions don’t appear to me to say whether grad students should or should not be included. It just says students, and in many other parts of the CDS “students” means undergrads. But as a Hoo, you know I can’t read directions.

It’s a shame they didn’t teach you to read better, because clearly they can read and follow directions. You’re correct that the directions don’t expressly state that grad students should be included, but it’s clearly there by implication. It says:

In the ratio calculations, exclude both faculty and students in stand-alone graduate or professional programs such as medicine, law . . . (etc.) . . . in which faculty teach virtually only graduate-level students.

It would be nonsensical for them to expressly and singularly instruct you to exclude students in stand-alone graduate or professional programs, if the assumption was that all graduate students were to be excluded. That particular instruction would then be perfectly redundant and meaningless. So by implication, graduate students are to be included UNLESS they are in stand-alone programs. I don’t think there’s any other way to fairly read this, and it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure this out. My law professor friends tell me there’s a name for this interpretive principle: “expressio unius,” short for “expressio unius est exclusio alterius,” Latin for “to include one is to exclude the other.” In this case, expressly stating that graduate students in stand-alone programs shouldn’t be counted clearly implies that other graduate students aren’t subject to that same exemption, i.e., they should be counted; otherwise it would make no sense to expressly identify graduate students in stand-alone programs for singular treatment. But again, you don’t need to be a lawyer; this is just the only common-sense reading of that instruction that works.