<p>I pulled the following from the ASEE 2012 data: School Name, Number of UG ME students, ME teaching faculty (FT and PT FTEs) and then did the calculation Students per faculty member.</p>
<p>I came up with the following, reported as school, # of UG ME students, S/F ratio.</p>
<p>Is there any way to pull from this how the support for undergraduates compare or is there just too much data missing based on the fact that all but Poly have PhD programs? For instance, Stanford has a far “better” student to faculty ratio than Cal Poly, yet Cal Poly has a much better reputation for undergraduate teaching by professors than Stanford who use a large number of graduates. Are the reputations wrong? The data wrong? Data incomplete? What, if anything can be drawn about the UG experience?</p>
<p>UG experience is based on many factors. Simply a “better” student to faculty ratio really means nothing in the grand scheme of things. For instance, if there were 2 students per faculty, but the faculty is terrible… That would not make anybody happy.</p>
<p>Where’s an objective assessment of the quality of engineering faculty? Even more difficult, since teaching is far more important to UGs, but reputations are built on research, where’s an objective assessment of UG engineering teaching?</p>
<p>I’m not trying to be snarky. I’m trying to glean meaningful information from available data. I do believe the “methodology” is simple, but does it say anything at all? If not, where can better data be found? I certainly trust what I can get from ASEE more than I do USNWR or Forbes.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that faculty assessment data is available to the public. The only thing I can think of, and it’s far from objective, is ratemyprofessor . com. Reputations are hardly objective as well. I’ve also found that my tenured professors have not been my best professors, so just considering full time professors is not the best way either. </p>
<p>If you like 1 on 1 attention during lectures or class, student to faculty ratios may help you. I’m fine with large classes, so student to faculty ratios don’t matter to me much or affect my college experience at all. All of the “top 20” or so should be comparable really as far as “support” goes though I think. But support is very vague, you should probably define what specific characteristics you are “testing” for. </p>
<p>If class sizes are a concern, try looking at each school’s web site to see if their on-line class schedules list the number of students enrolled in each class.</p>
<p>Those schools are all on the list for a reason. They all, some earlier and better than others, embrace experiential, “hands on” teaching of UG engineering. Beyond that though, there are lots of intangibles and pretty broad ranging COAs. </p>
<p>Just looking for other ways to sort them out.</p>
<p>Some schools have staff that do little beyond teaching while others teach as well as do research. Experience and knowledge are not factored into your stats. So, I would say it is impossible to draw any real conclusions from such a limited point of view.</p>
<p>Student to faculty ratio can also be skewed by the inclusion of adjuncts, which, it has been shown, generally provide poorer quality education than their full-time, tenure-track brethren. This is what @HPuck35 is alluding to, I believe. This isn’t quite as huge a deal in engineering as it is for other disciplines, but it is still something to keep in mind.</p>
<p>Ultimately it is difficult to say with great certainty what the best way to rate the undergraduate programs at different schools. The way I always suggest is to look at the list of companies that recruit at that school’s engineering career fair. That should be a pretty good indicator (in most cases) of what the people doing the hiring think of those schools’ graduates. It probably isn’t a bad idea to look at what sort of graduate schools the students are attending afterward as well, though this information is often harder to find, especially since recruiters are usually published publicly.</p>
<p>Those numbers do include TT, non-TT and part time. The ratio is similar at all of them with the TT comprising the bulk with a handful of non-TT. The part timers are not counted as individuals, but rather FTEs.</p>
<p>I think the take home message is that it is a piece of information, that on its own, is difficult to make much of.</p>
<p>It’s a good discussion point, but it is hard to draw crisp conclusion. </p>
<p>When you look at class size stats, be aware that often it is an average. One big lecture may be broken into 10 or more recitations (small group classes, for homework review etc)… That can skew the average. If possible, it’s great for prospective students to sit in on sample classes. </p>
<p>Another point - even schools with huge underclassman lectures often have smaller classes for the more specialized upperclassmen electives. </p>
<p>None of these are BAD schools and each has strengths and weaknesses. How you stack those up, depends on your prospective. One may say it’s RPI or nothing else, while another might refuse to live in Troy, no matter how good the program is. </p>
<p>Cal Poly is still, I believe, his top choice, with WPI on its heels. He got good merit at Case and RPI though which will make both substantially less than WPI, where his merit was surprisingly lower, even though it’s less selective. Confounding things even more, he could attend either OSU or Utah for less than either’s rack rate in state COA.</p>
<p>To make it an interesting life lesson, we offered to split the savings should he choose a less expensive school, with the caveat that it still needed to be a school he’d be very happy with.</p>
<p>I was hoping to add some objective information to help him narrow the field. Alas, no.</p>
<p>I’m sending him to the career center web pages.</p>