You would think that the “average class size” would mean that you will find plenty of classes with about 18 students in them. But counts can, indeed, be skewed. So talk about things like “what percentage of classes have more than 50 students?” and “what percentage of classes have fewer than 10?”. Statistics are slippery numbers games. You need to get as close to the raw data as you can in order to see what is behind those averages.

Hope that’s helpful.

So are these counts skewed by considering part time vs tenure track, or might a school manipulate counts to make a low avg class size appear when in fact the majority of class sizes is 30 or greater? Thanks in advance.

I agree that “quality teaching” is not a function of the instructor’s degree or contract status. You are absolutely right that many adjuncts and teaching assistants are excellent instructors–and sometimes better than tenure-track faculty.

What bothers me is that colleges and and universities (and US News and World Report) use student-to-faculty ratios as a proxy for teaching quality. We both agree that they are not. And my emphasis in this particular post was on the contract status of the instructors. If you really want to get me going, I could happily make the argument that tenure is a medieval institution that ought to be abolished. But that’s for another post at another time.

Despite the fact that adjuncts, contract faculty, and grad students may be good instructors, students choosing universities and colleges should be aware that many of these folks do not have offices on campus. They often travel long distances to teach, and then disappear. They generally are poorly paid and receive no benefits. Their status on campus often means that they are much less available to students than the tenured faculty–even when they want to be.

The student-to-faculty ratio is not, we agree, a measure of the quality of the educational experience at a college or university. It’s a ratio that’s easy to calculate, but is virtually meaningless.

How, then, should we measure teaching quality? How can we know, as consumers, whether the faculty at this university is better (or worse) than the faculty at this other university? THAT is a huge can of worms, and we enter a realm that is fraught with controversy. However, I will point to efforts within the K-12 education community to define what good teaching is, and to measure it. Higher education will resist these efforts. But isn’t this the more useful exercise, despite the controversy?

Whatever the fate of efforts to measure educational quality in higher education, one thing is sure: student-to-faculty ratios mislead. We need to look elsewhere if we want to to measure teaching quality and learning outcomes.

Again, thanks for fueling the conversation!

I would take issue with the assertion that “quality teaching” always (or even often) comes from the tweedy academics, regardless of how beloved they are – most tenured university professors have training only in their subject matter, and not in education. I would also suggest that part-time faculty and grad students, who often have a lot more to prove and are less likely to be burnt out, can make for an excellent teaching staff.