I take your question to be: which schools have the lowest percentage of adjunct professors and teaching assistants. Is that correct?
You can google and and find websites that break this down for you.
In general you’re right that LACs tend to have very few TAs–mainly they don’t have grad students to draw from to be TAs. Adjuncts as a rule aren’t necessarily bad, because properly used they can bring real-world experience to the classroom. For example if you bring in a designer from Braodway to co-teach your costume-design class, the students can learn things from that person than, say, from someone who specializes in primarily teaching costume design. Both are valuable, but the one from Broadway may have an update on practices in use currently. An overreliance on adjuncts however means that a college may be shortchanging the students by not providing full-time professors and all that implies, such as the ability to mentor the student after class time, the professor having his/her own research that the student can participate in, the professor providing funding opportunities through grants won or donations coaxed from alumni, networking opportunities from the tendrils of care that he/she still extends to his/her former students, etc.
As far as quality of professors, it may be helpful to know that getting an academic position currently is so competitive that people from top schools go to teach at “lesser named” schools all of the time. Meaning a lesser named school may have top teaching talent, because there are so few jobs out there. You can check the background of professors in a given department by pulling up their profiles/ CVs. Remember: College Confidential parents tend to overly concern themselves with the “top” schools as defined by USN&WR. From inside academia, colleagues look at each other as being in the small club of the same discipline–or not. Someone at Princeton might look at whether his colleague from undergrad, Joe who’s at Indiana U, is still doing work on horney toads, or whatever interests them. They know that Prof. X is at Utah Direction U and does amazing work on plant proteins, that no one else does. Do you think that because Prof. X is not at MIT that his excellent research on plant proteins will be ignored? Not by the plant protein community, that’s for sure. They could give two flips about the name of his school as long as his research is solid. Whereas there is some correlation of Top Name School with Top Professors, because of the glut of talent compared with the small number of open positions, it’s not a perfect correlation in the least. Many top Unis also have senior faculty who have seen better days, and have floated to the top as dead wood, they are not producing anything any more. Because they are famous, schools may opt to keep them around anyway. That doesn’t mean your child will benefit directly from that person, unless 80-yr-old Prof. Y actually runs research and can teach still. Many top schools, like Yale, do not or rarely give tenure. This means that someone with a gig at Yale knows they will not get tenure in all likelihood, and after their contract ends, may go to teach at CUNY or at your local directional U. Any full-time professor position is challenging to land, much less one that offers tenure. If you’re curious, google the percentage of tenured profs at places liek MIT etc. It might be interesting . . …