When colleges advertise their “average class size,” they are obscuring a fact. Many of the classes you will take as an undergraduate will be large lecture courses like this one. Just because a university like Harvard or Yale offers a lot of small classes does NOT mean that the average size of the classes an individual student ordinarily would take would be small. Or even that the majority of the classes will be small.

This noise about average class size is a way that colleges and universities inundate you with statistics. To give you the impression that you will have a very personal, very intimate educational experience. At most places, this is malarkey. Most classes an average student will take at a medium-sized (like the University of Rochester). Or large university will be much larger than the average class size at their high school.

And if they continue to insist upon it, ask them to prove it. Ask to see the class schedules for a randomly selected group of students in freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. And let’s really see what proportion of the average student’s classes are large and what proportion are small (say under 25 students). Not every college fibs, but many stretch the truth.

Why do they fib (or stretch, as the case may be)? Because this statistic is a proxy for intimacy and personalization and it is a vital statistic used by US News to determine its rankings.

If you want to read more about average class size, you might want to take a look at these links:

Student to Faculty Ratios: A Bogus Statistic You Should Ignore
Adjunct Faculty and Student to Faculty Ratios
Student to Faculty Ratios: Unintended (Negative) Consequences
 
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

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The post In China, Williams College Ranks Above Harvard? first appeared on Great College Advice.

These ranking bug me.  As an educational consultant, I am constantly having to explain that these rankings are at best imperfect measures of institutional quality and at worst amount to a completely misleading popularity contest.  Just today I am having to respond to a client’s whining that the universities I am suggesting are “too far down the league tables” (to which I might respond:  “so how come you didn’t think of that when you were preparing for your algebra final”).  My client doesn’t want to listen to any reasoned argument that the quality of education that an individual student received in the classroom has little or no bearing on the the league tables presented in US News.  Needless to say, it’s going to be an interesting day.

What has me looking up, however, is the fact that a former institutional researcher at Clemson gave a presentation at the Association of Institutional Research that revealed in great detail the strategies that Clemson administrators were using to lift Clemson in the US News rankings.  And the participants–other institutional researchers from other universities who also report data to US News–where shocked.  Shocked, I say.

You can read the article yourself:  Doug Lederer is a great writer and the article is balanced.

The funny thing (okay, well, it’s really not so hilarious–it’s more funny-peculiar) is that colleges and universities bash the ratings when they’re  down, and then post them on their websites anytime their name is mentioned favorably in those same rankings.

Everyone wants “proof” that the quality of their educational product is somehow good–better than their peers–more worthy of your consumer dollar.  Yet colleges and universities know that the measures developed by US News are flawed.  They know that they measure institutional inputs and not educational outcomes.  They know that statistics like student-to-faculty ratios are misleading.

Still, the college administrators slavishly report their data to the magazine editors–with or without manipulation or “influencing” the data.  They know it’s a stupid game, but they play it anyway.  And clearly Clemson has the rules down pat.

As Marcellus uttered in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, something is rotten–not in Denmark–but in American higher education.

I do understand this quest for some sort of evaluation system that will help us compare one college against the next so that we can make better decisions about which college is best for which kids.  But we don’t need US News & World Reports.  We need Consumer Reports.

Educational Consultant

The post US News Rankings: Nothing & Everything first appeared on Great College Advice.

Hi, Mark. I’ve been reading college profiles, and nearly all of them cite student-to-faculty ratios, all of which fall in to a relatively narrow range of perhaps 12:1 to 20:1. How important is this statistic in choosing a college?

My short answer: not very

The student-to-faculty ratio is supposed to reflect the intimacy of the educational experience. One would assume that the lower the ratio, the more contact a student will have with faculty members. One might also assume that institutions with lower ratios would have smaller class sizes, on average, than one with a higher ratio.

Let’s look first at the view from 30,000 feet. What is the national student-to-faculty ratio? According to the National Center for Educational Statistics’ Digest of Educational Statistics for 2007. There were 18 million college students and 1.3 million college faculty. A quick calculation tells us that nationwide, there are 13.8 students for every faculty member in America.

However, there are only about 700,000 full-time faculty members in higher education, and about 600,000 part-time faculty, or adjuncts. So if we recalculate the ratio, there are 25.7 students per full-time faculty member.
So how do universities report their student-t0-faculty ratios? Because a low ratio is associated with higher quality education. A college administrator has an incentive to keep this ratio as low as possible.

Every major publication and ranking system (e.g., US News, the Princeton Review, the Fiske Guide) slavishly reports these figures and uses them to compare one college against another.

So look behind the ratios!

• Does this figure include part-time faculty who may be brought in to teach a single course? If so, keep in mind that students have much less access to adjunct faculty (who rarely have their own office or even a place to hang their coats).
• Does this figure include faculty who teach only graduate courses–or may teach predominantly graduate students? If so, the ratio exaggerates students’ access to some of the most senior faculty–many of whom simply do not like teaching undergraduates.
• Does this figure include research faculty, who generally do not teach undergraduate courses at all, but may simply guide doctoral candidates or teach in a graduate professional school? If so, the ratio may be inflated.

When I was a college administrator, my colleagues and I always agonized about how to report our student-to-faculty ratios. The recipient of this information usually colored our responses. If we were reporting to the Office of institutional research (which is required to report information to the federal government in standardized formats). We were fairly careful in giving a more nuanced, detailed accounting.

But if the admissions office was asking for figures. We’d drum up every faculty member we could in order to report a low student-to-faculty ratio. So take these ratios with a grain of salt. As my prospective client noticed, the range of ratios does not vary all that much from one institution to another. And the ratio may not tell you all that much about the classroom experience.

You will want to ask other questions that may tell you more about the intimacy of the educational experience.

For more on whether student-to-faculty ratios tell us much about the quality of a college, click here.

Mark Montgomery
Independent College Counselor

The post Student-to-Faculty Ratios Explained first appeared on Great College Advice.