The student to faculty ratio is a statistic that seems, on its face, to be a helpful one in choosing a college. Students and parents consider this statistic to be a measure of the intimacy of the academic experience: the lower the ratio, the more intimate the classroom learning will be.
Similarly, the rankings organizations use these student to faculty ratios in how they rate different schools against one another. The lower the ratio, the higher the rank.
However, student-to-teacher ratios are misleading statistics. They really don’t tell you much about the quality of teaching going on at an American college or university. It turns out that the research agrees with me.
Which teachers are included in student to teacher ratios?
In a report by the American Federation of Teachers, entitled, “American Academic: The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997-2007,” We learn that adjunct instructors and graduate students are teaching a very high percentage of undergraduate courses in the United States. The AFT updated its research in 2020, only to find that higher education is delivered by an “army of temps” that make low wages–sometimes at or below the poverty line.
The fact is that these ratios do not really reflect how higher education is being delivered and by whom. These ratios are not a great guide to understanding what is really happening in today’s college and university classrooms.
What is the actual student to faculty ratio? 10%? 25%? 50%?
In thinking about the student to faculty ratio, we tend to assume that the faculty are full-time teachers–most with tenured positions–whose life-calling is to advance human knowledge and impart it to young people in their classrooms.
The facts belie our assumptions.
A 2023 report by the American Association of University Professors using data compiled by the US Department of Education found the following:
At community colleges, it’s worse: four out of every five people teaching a course are non-tenure-track faculty.
At publicly-funded research universities (you know, those “flagship” campuses like UC Berkeley, CU-Boulder, Michigan, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). A whopping 41% of the instructional staff members are graduate assistants, 15.8% are part-time faculty, and 14.4% are full-time, non tenure track faculty. So at our “flagship” research universities. On average, only 28.9% of the instructional staff are full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
On average, private universities fare no better, with only about 29% of instructional faculty at both research and comprehensive universities either tenured or on the tenure track. But within this group, it’s important to recognize that different universities have very different mixes of instructional faculty. And as usual, those universities with bigger budgets and bigger endowments will generally have more full-time, tenure-track faculty. Also, many smaller, liberal arts teaching colleges are likely to have a higher proportion of tenure-track faculty. Even though the proportion of these professors has been declining in the past decade, too.
The one major difference of private, comprehensive colleges and universities (i.e., not the doctoral granting research universities) is that you will find very few graduate assistants teaching courses: only 2% of instructional faculty at these institutions are graduate students.
Why is this stuff important? Because when you hear statistics like “student-to-faculty ratios.” These ratios usually include ALL INSTRUCTIONAL STAFF, including adjuncts and graduate students. Hidden behind this statistical ratio is the dirty, little secret that full-time. Tenured professors of yore are NOT the norm in most larger universities, whether public or private.
So when the admissions office or the leader of your student tour trumpets a low student-to-faculty ratio. Ask in the admissions office some more probing questions. Take a copy of the AFT report with you to the admissions office. Ask what percentage of undergraduate courses are taught by full-time, tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and where they come from. Ask about the proportion of courses taught by grad students.
And as you ask these questions, watch the face of the admissions officer. It’s going to turn white. After a moment of panic, the officer stumbles off to find the director of admission or the VP for enrollment management. Then these marketing and sales bosses will try to reassure you that “faculty are very qualified” and “incredibly accessible” and “they are required to hold office hours.” They will downplay the importance of these statistics in the AFT report. And they’ll probably fudge the answers (which are publicly available online and reported annually to the US government).
But I assure you, these statistics from AFT are going to give you a better idea of what the undergraduate educational experience will be like.
If you’re interested in more on my take on student-to-faculty ratios, you can get a general explanation of what these statistics mean and don’t mean. How a low student-to-faculty ratio can actually have a negative impact on class sizes, and you can watch a short video in which I ask some students on one college campus what this statistic means to them. And in the meantime, when college representatives tell you that the student-to-faculty ratio on this or that campus is really low, just smile knowingly and ignore them.
