USNews Peer Assessment

mackinaw
Sun, 21 Aug 2005 20:13:55 +0000

I would include a faculty/student ratio using only tenured faculty who teach at least two undergraduate courses per semester.

While I would look carefully at the reported faculty-student ratios, I think this approach would be too extreme. There are faculty are some major universities who do not teach two courses of any kind per semester. Their teaching loads are lower than that. I also wouldn’t penalize a school if it has highly research productive faculty. But I agree with the sentiment that it’s very misleading to use faculty-teaching ratios if a fair number of faculty mainly or (in some cases) exclusively teach graduate students.