Student to Faculty Ratios and Educational Quality
When a client asked me the other day about the importance of student to faculty ratios, I got to thinking about other supposed indicators of educational quality.
The other oft-cited statistic when visiting an admissions office is “average class size.” As with student-to-faculty ratios, the size of the classes at a college is assumed to reflect the quality and the intimacy of the educational experience. Small classes–so the assumption goes–are interactive and provide ample opportunity for interaction between students and faculty. The pedagogy of these classes is more a facilitated discussion than a lecture.
This assumption is generally true: small classes are more interactive. Yet I could cite numerous examples of professors I have known who stand and deliver lectures from prepared notes to a class of seven students. Just because a class is small doesn’t mean it’s any good.
The use of the “average class size” can be very misleading, however, and masks some more important facts about the quality of education delivered by a college or university.
Consider how the following scenarios have an impact on how “average class size” is calculated.
- Some of the smallest classes are taught by the least effective, least popular professors. In a world of university tenure, bad professors cannot be chased out. So they end up teaching ever smaller numbers of students, while the more effective, popular instructors see their class sizes swell.• Some of the smallest classes are in obscure subjects. Some of these are new courses professors are trying out for the first time.
- They can be experimental. And few students are willing to take risks of this sort (credits are too expensive, too dear to take such risks).
Class sizes in some departments are much smaller than in other departments. Courses for popular majors such as history, economics, and biology may be large, while equally good courses in anthropology and art history may be tiny. Here quality of the individual course is not the issue–it’s the popularity of the major that may affect class size. - Professors generally do not like teaching huge courses–not because they hate lecturing–but because they hate grading so many tests and term papers. So they ask administrators to cap enrollments, insisting that “small classes are better” (when, in fact, they are simply concerned about their own work load).
- Professors and administrators cap enrollments in popular courses in order to keep the average class size small. Even the most popular courses at small, liberal arts colleges are not allowed to grow large–because those colleges are protecting the ratio. In a competitive environment that values small class sizes over large ones, institutions of higher education are loath to allow classes to grow too large. So from an administrator’s point of view, the question is not so much access to great courses or the quality of the individual course (some large lecture classes in the hands of an outstanding professor can be awesome). An administrator’s job is to keep “average class size” as low as possible.
This final point leads to some very troublesome effects on college campuses. An article a few years back from the alumni magazine of my alma mater, Dartmouth College, points out that the real, untold story is how the mania to protect the “average class size” statistic is shutting students out of popular courses. The article makes the point this way:
In [the department of] economics, with 453 students registered as majors, minors, or modified majors, students get closed out of as many of 20 percent of their course choices, a rate that far exceeds the rate of closeouts campus wide, as estimated by [Dean of the Faculty Carol] Holt.
To further elaborate the point, a “small class” in the economics department at Dartmouth is 30 students: the department would likely cancel a class with such “low” enrollment. While in the department of anthropology, a “small” class might be 5 or 6 (in my department at the University of Denver, a course with fewer than 7 students was considered “uneconomic” and therefore cancelled).
(Note to future economics majors: if you really want to small classes, go to a college where economics is NOT a popular major.)
Believe me, this is not the sort of information you will hear from an admissions counselor. They will sing out their statistics on student-to-faculty ratios (8-to-1 at Dartmouth) and “average class size” is probably around 15 or so.
Student to Faculty Ratios Can Mislead
But the statistics, beautiful though they are, do not tell you the whole story. In fact, they can be grossly misleading. And they do not necessarily bear any relationship to the quality of the education being delivered.
As an alumnus, of course, I would tell you that the quality of the education at Dartmouth is more a function of the quality of the faculty and the quality of the student body. Dartmouth can afford to be more discriminating in its offers of tenure, it offers higher salaries to faculty, and the student body is one that any high-quality faculty member would love to teach. And only teachers who love to teach undergraduates would be motivated to apply for a job at Dartmouth–for there are few graduate students.
In the same breath, however, I would criticize the quality of a Harvard undergraduate education, where the student-to-faculty ratio is an ultra-low 6-to-1, but average class sizes are generally much larger, and graduate teaching assistants perform the overwhelming majority of grading and lead almost all the class discussions. To be graduate student at Harvard is to be on top of the heap; to be an undergraduate is fun an exciting, but the teaching is just not as good.
Why would I say that?
Two reasons. First, my experience while a graduate teaching fellow. I was an assistant for two different courses over a few semesters. These were 200-level courses in the economics and political science departments (international political economy and political theory, respectively). While I enjoyed my experience, I found the lectures by the professors to be relatively boring, and I also found it weird that I was leading discussions on the readings despite my relative lack of expertise in either subject. I also was in charge of grading all papers and exams, some of which were awesome, and other were complete pieces of crap. But the professors allowed us to give nothing less than a “B” grade to anything, no matter how horrible or off the mark the work was.
The second is that a friend of mine wrote me a note about his experience in choosing and attending Harvard. While he enjoyed his time at Harvard overall, his classroom environment not all that memorable. Here is what he wrote:
I didn’t think very critically about which college was the right “fit”. All I knew about college was gleaned from family trips to University of Notre Dame for football games. I knew I wanted to go away to college, and I had been to Washington DC so I applied to Georgetown. I applied to University of Michigan Ann Arbor as my “safety” school. And at the last minute, my Dad told me he had spoken with a friend whose daughter had gone to Harvard and enjoyed it. So I applied to Harvard.
When I got into Harvard, I was so overwhelmed with people’s responses to that fact that it seemed to me the right thing to do to go there. I had never been to Boston and had no idea what Harvard looked like and no real appreciation for its history. In fact I almost cried when I rode into Harvard Square because it didn’t look at all like “college” to me!
It turned out to be a wonderful experience for me, not because of the undergraduate academic offerings (three or four truly exceptional courses) or the career guidance (zero) but because of the terrific students and graduate students I met and became friends with. It is a part of my life I treasure. Looking back, I’m not at all sure that I couldn’t have gotten an equally wonderful (though of course different) experience at any number of other colleges. I will say though that the Harvard name has opened many doors for me, many of which I am probably not even aware.
So how can you uncover the truth behind the statistics?
Here’s a short video I did a while back expressing gratitude for the clarity with which Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, calculated its student to faculty ratio.
The Truth Behind Student to Faculty Ratios
How can we compare and contrast the educational services offered by different institutions? How can we get beyond these simplistic numbers?
You must ask more substantive questions about how courses are taught, and not to focus solely upon the size of the class.
But there are other questions that prospective students and their parents might ask in order to understand and predict what their experience might be like if they matriculated to a particular college or university.
- What is the “course load” for faculty members? How many undergraduate courses is each faculty member expected to teach every year? Is this number the same for all departments, or does it vary by discipline?
- What percentage of courses is taught by adjunct or part-time faculty? Is this percentage the same across departments, or do some departments rely on part-timers more than others?
- What percentage of courses has a waiting list? How does the college (or the individual department) determine who gets off the waiting list and when?
- How many campus lecture halls seat 100 students? 50 students? 500 students? How many seminar rooms are there? What is the ratio of lecture halls to seminar rooms?
- How small must a class be before it is canceled by the administration?
- What is the most popular course on campus (or in your department)? Is enrollment in this course capped? Who gets in, and who doesn’t?
As you ask these questions, you should not permit admissions people to give vague answers. They will hem and haw. They will will be imprecise.
But these figures do exist on campus, and they exist in the office of institutional research. The administrators in this office crunch the numbers. They have the facts. If you really want to know this information, you need to ask to be put in touch with someone in the office institutional research who can provide this information to you.
Still, you must not focus solely on the statistics. Every educational institution has administrative problems like the ones at Dartmouth described above You will never be able to guarantee that your son or daughter will not be shut out of a class. You will not be able to ensure that every course he or she takes is a gem.
But if you dig deeply enough, you may be able to figure out how forthcoming and honest the faculty and administration is about the difficulty of measuring educational quality, and you will learn how they are working to deliver the quality you expect–and will be paying for.
Need to understand the data and how it applies to you?
The college admissions counselors at Great College Advice have access to the latest higher education data to help students and families make the right decisions about their educational paths. We can guide you toward the information you need to choose the right colleges and ensure that you get the educational opportunities you most desire. Give us a call for a free consultation or fill out our contact form. We’d be delighted to get acquainted and explain how we help families make the admissions process less stressful and more successful.
Mark Montgomery
Great College Advice from an
Independent College Counselor
