More Advice to Entering Freshmen

Earlier this month the NY Times published short articles of advice to college freshmen written by professors.  I was not surprised how many of them emphasized the importance of learning how to write well and the importance of reading, everything from the classics to an everyday newspaper.  However, my favorite article was “Don’t Alienate Your Professor” by Carol Berkin.  This article covers the importance of classroom etiquette and shows how your demeanor as a student can have a huge affect on your relationship with your professor.  One piece of advice I would add to her list:  Don’t fall asleep in class!
Katherine Price
Former First Year Student Advisor

Budget Woes and Blows to the University of California System

The University of California system is taking a beating due to the sagging economy and the state’s budgetary woes (the state really needs a new constitution or a major overhaul of the map of its legislative districts–which is a textbook case of the evils of gerrymandering).

Most commentaries have focused on the access to the University of California, including the budgetary implications on on financial aid and tuition increases.

But what parents and students need to keep in mind is that access is not the only issue here: as budgets shrink, educational quality will start to shrivel up, too. While you may still have access to UCLA or UC Irvine, the quality of the education offered there will decline unless the healthy budgets return.

An article in today’s Inside Higher Ed leads with the fact that the UC schools are having a hard time recruiting top quality faculty, because they can no longer compete by offering competitive salaries. They are losing bidding wars with private colleges around the country–whose budgets are not dependent on taxpayer dollars and whose endowments may allow them to attract top-flight faculty.

Many other public universities are feeling the same pinch:  as budgets are trimmed, so are student services.  Class sizes will increase.  Depth and breadth of course offerings will diminish.

So today’s consumers of higher education services need to think carefully about the relationship between cost and quality.

If your family needs help finding the right balance between cost and quality, don’t hesitate to give me a shout.  Remember, the first conversation is free!

Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant

Technorati Tags: educational consultant, educational consulting, admission, college, University of California, UCLA, Berkeley, Colorado Del.icio.us Tags: educational consultant, educational consulting, admission, college, University of California, UCLA, Berkeley, Colorado

Adjunct Faculty and Student-to-Faculty Ratios: What Universities Don't Know

I recently wrote a post blasting the idea of student-to-faculty ratios as a bogus measure of educational quality.  It turns out that  universities themselves don’t have a solid measure of what the ratios really are, or even keep track of the percentage of students taught by tenure-track professors–as opposed to adjunct, part-timers, or graduate students.

Yesterday Inside Higher Ed‘s Scott Jaschik reviewed a new book entitled Off-Track Profs:  Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, which documents what we know and don’t know about the impact of adjuncts in higher education.  The authors also explore the reasons for the growth of adjunct faculty at some of the country’s research institutions.

I won’t spend the time to repeat Jaschik’s review…give it a read.  I plan to read the book.

Suffice it to say, however, that college administrators and boards of trustees have little idea about how much teaching is performed by non-tenure track faculty.  Their policies–and enforcement of whatever policies may exist–are fuzzy at best, and these trends do have an impact on the educational experience of undergraduates.

[And if senior university administrators don’t have any idea about the impact of adjuncts at their own institution,  you can jolly well bet that admissions counselors won’t know! If you ask, you’ll just get the party line based on goofy statistics that don’t mean a thing.]

One finding at the University of Michigan bears out what one of my readers commented about with regard to student-to-faculty ratios:  often the non-tenure track faculty have much better teaching evaluations than the tenured faculty.  Adjuncts are often better teachers. This fact does beg the question whether tenure is really a useful institution in the 21st century university.

We  may also inquire as to whether the accepted wisdom that “good research informs teaching” holds any grain of truth.  Research faculty obviously believe in this link.  But to read undergraduate teaching evaluations, it appears that most students do not believe it–or at least to not experience the benefits of that research in the classroom.

What does all this mean for you as you seek the best college for you?  First, treat student-to-faculty ratios with skepticism, and second, make sure you seek out the best teachers you can find once you are on campus–regardless of their job title.

Mark Montgomery
College Consultant



Technorati Tags: student-to-faculty ratio, adjunct, professor, faculty, tenure, tenure track, college admission, university Del.icio.us Tags: student-to-faculty ratio, adjunct, professor, faculty, tenure, tenure track, college admission, university

Student-to-Faculty Ratios: What Do These Statistics Mean?

teacher and students in a classroom

The other day I received this question from a client:

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