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Educational Consultant

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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!

Great College Advice

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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.

College Consultant

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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.

Mark Montgomery
Myth Busting College Counselor

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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

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