How accurate are professor/student ratios? Harvard may cut econ seminars.

Parent Cafe
1

<p>Not enough professors.</p>

<p>The</a> Harvard Crimson :: News :: Econ. Dept. May Cut Seminars</p>

<p>"Junior seminars in economics—the only small undergraduate courses taught by the department’s faculty—may become yet another victim of the University-wide strain borne of the financial crisis. </p>

<p>With faculty departing and Harvard’s hiring slowdown hindering their replacement, the already stretched department does not have enough faculty members to teach the seminars, according to some department members. </p>

<p>“We have a shrinking pool of faculty to teach the same pool of students,” said Economics Professor Claudia Goldin, who taught a seminar this fall. “How can we teach as effectively when our faculty is down so many people?”</p>

2

<p>There’s a lot of posturing by academic departments right now. To hear some of them, they hardly have enough faculty left to teach any courses at all because one adjunct professor search has been stopped.</p>

3

<p>Well, they’ve lost Summers and Cutler to Obama. Still, econ profs at Harvard only teach 3 courses a year, I’m told, as opposed to 4 in the humanities and social sciences. They could go on teaching seminars if they only agreed to teach four courses every other year or something like that. I also think that econ may not be quite as popular over the next few years as it has been in the past.</p>

4

<p>Umm… I am thinking Harvard lost Summers (by choice I might add) some time ago.</p>

<p>But as I understand it, Georgetown has the same shortage.</p>

5

<p>I always found professor/student ratios pretty spot-on. my college was 15:1 and that seems about right. I had a few entry level classes with like 20-25, but i had just as many classes with 5-10 people in them.</p>

6

<p>Just keep in mind that these ratios are averages.
Large, required, entry-level lecture classes are balanced against seminars in relatively low-demand fields like Classics. So the question is not so much whether the ratio is accurate, it’s how it breaks down in deviations from the mean, especially in the courses that interest you. You’ll probably have to do a little digging to expose that kind of information (or else focus on colleges that emphasize undergraduate education and small class size.)</p>

7

<p>My son went to a school with 8:1 ratio. I have absolutely no complains about the education he got (which was top-notch), but, as far as I know, the one and only class that he had with less then 50 people in it was a freshmen seminar. And that includes many advanced and graduate level classes.</p>

8

<p>Also, while the faculty-student ratios may be totally accurate, it’s implications for full time faculty teaching undergraduates may be deceptive if faculty are able to “buy” their time through research grants. When I was in graduate school at Stanford and then working at UCLA, it was not uncommon for a faculty member to have a research grant that “paid” them not to teach one or more of the courses they would otherwise have to teach.</p>

<p>After Larry Summers left the post of Harvard President, he was still a faculty member. He had tenure, after all. Plus he’s still a brilliant economist, even if he didn’t have all the political and social skills necessary to be successful as Harvard’s President.</p>

9

<p>As it relates to the actual student academic experience, possibly the most important elements of the USNWR rankings are the class size data and the student-faculty ratio. </p>

<p>For reference for this discussion, here is how the Top 50 National Universities compare as well as the Top 25 LACs.</p>

<p>S/F Ratio , % Classes <20 , % Classes 20-50 , % Classes >50 , National University</p>

<p>7/1 , 75% , 17% , 9% , Harvard
5/1 , 73% , 17% , 10% , Princeton
6/1 , 75% , 17% , 8% , Yale
6/1 , 64% , 23% , 12% , MIT
6/1 , 74% , 16% , 11% , Stanford
3/1 , 69% , 23% , 8% , Caltech
6/1 , 74% , 19% , 7% , U Penn
6/1 , 76% , 16% , 8% , Columbia
8/1 , 70% , 25% , 5% , Duke
6/1 , 72% , 24% , 4% , U Chicago
8/1 , 64% , 27% , 9% , Dartmouth
7/1 , 75% , 17% , 7% , Northwestern
7/1 , 72% , 18% , 9% , Wash U
10/1 , 60% , 23% , 17% , Cornell
11/1/ , 65% , 24% , 11% , Johns Hopkins
8/1 , 70% , 20% , 9% , Brown
5/1 , 68% , 25% , 7% , Rice
7/1 , 68% , 25% , 6% , Emory
9/1 , 67% , 27% , 6% , Vanderbilt
12/1 , 56% , 34% , 10% , Notre Dame
15/1 , 62% , 24% , 14% , UC Berkeley
11/1 , 65% , 26% , 9% , Carnegie Mellon
15/1 , 49% , 37% , 14% , U Virginia
11/1 , 58% , 34% , 7% , Georgetown
16/1 , 53% , 26% , 20% , UCLA
15/1 , 44% , 38% , 18% , U Michigan
9/1 , 64% , 24% , 12% , USC
8/1 , 74% , 21% , 4% , Tufts
10/1 , 57% , 41% , 2% , Wake Forest
14/1 , 44% , 44% , 12% , U North Carolina
8/1 , 66% , 27% , 6% , Brandeis
11/1 , 49% , 45% , 7% , W&M
12/1 , 58% , 30% , 12% , NYU
13/1 , 48% , 45% , 7% , Boston Coll
14/1 , 40% , 38% , 22% , Georgia Tech
9/1 , 47% , 43% , 10% , Lehigh
19/1 , 44% , 26% , 30% , UCSD
9/1 , 62% , 26% , 12% , U Rochester
13/1 , 44% , 39% , 18% , U Wisconsin
17/1 , 38% , 43% , 19% , U Illinois
9/1 , 62% , 28% , 10% , Case Western
14/1 , 53% , 37% , 10% , Rensselaer
11/1 , 35% , 49% , 17% , U Washington
19/1 , 35% , 38% , 28% , UC Davis
19/1 , 49% , 34% , 16% , UC Irvine
17/1 , 50% , 33% , 17% , UC Santa Barbara
17/1 , 33% , 50% , 17% , Penn State
18/1 , 35% , 42% , 23% , U Texas
22/1 , 41% , 39% , 20% , U Florida
9/1 , 69% , 30% , 1% , Yeshiva
9/1 , 62% , 30% , 8% , Tulane</p>

<p>S/F Ratio , % Classes <20 , % Classes 20-50 , % Classes >50 , LAC</p>

<p>8/1 , 75% , 22% , 3% , Amherst
7/1 , 73% , 23% , 4% , Williams
8/1 , 74% , 25% , 2% , Swarthmore
9/1 , 67% , 32% , 1% , Wellesley
9/1 , 71% , 25% , 4% , Middlebury
10/1 , 69% , 29% , 2% , Bowdoin
8/1 , 72% , 27% , 1% , Pomona
9/1 , 63% , 36% , 1% , Carleton
10/1 , 71% , 29% , 0% , Davidson
8/1 , 76% , 23% , 1% , Haverford
9/1 , 86% , 14% , 0% , Claremont McK
8/1 , 68% , 31% , 0% , Vassar
9/1 , 63% , 31% , 6% , Wesleyan
9/1 , 60% , 40% , 0% , Grinnell
8/1 , 64% , 32% , 4% , Harvey Mudd
na , 96% , na , 0% , US Military Acad
9/1 , 68% , 32% , 0% , W&L
10/1 , 63% , 36% , 2% , Colgate
9/1 , 68% , 28% , 4% , Smith
10/1 , 74% , 26% , 0% , Hamilton
9/1 , 70% , 27% , 2% , Oberlin
9/1 , 61% , 39% , 0% , US Naval Acad
8/1 , 71% , 27% , 2% , Bryn Mawr
10/1 , 61% , 35% , 4% , Colby
10/1 , 64% , 31% , 5% , Bates
11/1 , 68% , 30% , 2% , Macalester</p>

10

<p>I do college info sessions for my alma mater (one of those near the top listed above). I find the student to prof ratio to be somewhat misleading in terms of actual student face time with instructors. Here’s why: even if a school was 1:1 ratio, it still wouldn’t matter if the student was a wallflower and never engages his/her instructors. What is the student like in High School?</p>

<p>To argue that material differences in a school with a 6:1 ratio versus one with an 8:1 ratio is pointless IMHO. It 95% depends on the confidence and initiative of the student.</p>

11

<p>It really can depend on your major, mine had lots of small classes. Most of my professors knew me by name. I was also lucky that one prof who taught architectural history - all lectures - still made a point to discuss paper topics with every student in his course. He knew me by name after the first class I took with him, and he ended up as one of my thesis advisers. I have to say though that some of my favorite classes were with brilliant lecturers who I never said a word to. I’m much braver now - I was at a 30th reunion event with dh and an old prof of mine was there to inspire us. I finally got to tell him how much I’d enjoyed his class.</p>

12

<p>It really does depend on major. I had 2, Bio and Classics. My smallest Biology class was 25 people and my smallest Classics class was 2. Most of my language classes were under 10 people. Not surprisingly, I was closest with my Classics profs as I had multiple classes with them. The disadvantage is you really CANNOT miss class as they most definitely notice.</p>

13

<p>The student-faculty ratios are not precise. The way they are calculated can lead to inconsistencies across campuses. Differences in ratios between similarly-sized campuses may not reflect significant differences in student experiences vis-a-vis class size.</p>

14

<p>I guess inaccurate information is better than no information. :)</p>

15

<p>Of what use is knowing the faculty/student ratio when:
(a) Some Profs teach no classes at all?
(b) Some Profs teach as little as one class per year?
(c) Some classes are taught by TAs?
(d) Some portion of the student population is part-time?
I’d recommend speaking with current students. JMHO.</p>

16

<p>I don’t think colleges and universities calculate student/faculty ratios the same way, so inter-school comparisons can be highly misleading. Take the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin, both large and very good public institutions. Their faculties are almost identical in size: Michigan 2,367 full-time, Wisconsin 2,393 full-time, and Michigan 604 part-time, Wisconsin 481 part-time. About as close as you can get.</p>

<p>Yet Wisconsin has 17.4% more undergraduate students, 26,083 at Michigan to 30,618 at Wisconsin. </p>

<p>So with equal sized faculties and more students at Wisconsin, you’d expect Wisconsin to have a higher student-faculty ratio, right? Not according to US News which lists Wisconsin’s student/faculty ratio at 13:1 and Michigan’s at 15:1. Wisconsin’s 13:1 is what you’d get by dividing its student body by its full-time faculty. Applying that same method to Michigan would give you 11:1, not 15:1. So I think they must somehow be counting differently. </p>

<p>Rumor has it there are great discrepancies as to how schools count faculty on leave, for example. The might also be differences based on how they structure grad student teaching. For example, are TAs confined to part-time teaching, e.g., handling one or two discussion sections of larger lecture classes taught by a professor, in which case the TAs would probably be listed as “part time” (if at all)? Or does the school hire significant numbers of its advanced grad students into nominally full-time but clearly non-tenure track “instructor” positions with more extensive teaching duties, in which case they may be listed as “full-time” and help bring down the student faculty ratio? One might think in general undergrads would be better served by limiting the amount of teaching done by grad students, but depending on how the program is structured the school that’s more heavily reliant on teaching by grad students might actually appear to have a better student/faculty ratio. (I’m not saying this is what accounts for the discrepancy between Wisconsin and Michigan because I really don’t know all the details in those cases). </p>

<p>Reported class sizes can also be misleading. I’ve heard reports of schools eliminating some classes in favor of one-on-one “tutorials,” each of which they count as a “class under 20” in order to pad their numbers for US News.</p>

17

<p>I have had some huge classes at Hopkins, as well as some tiny ones. The more advanced the class, generally the smaller the class size. Also my large classes have been complemented by smaller sessions with TAs, most absolutely wonderful. Because of all the variables, it is difficult to assess not only the accuracy of the percentages, but also the overall effect they have on teaching. This is why this number is not particularly critical or valuable when assessing a student’s academic experience, especially when the percentages are so close among the top schools, and often vary somewhat from year to year. For me, the quality of the professor and his ability to teach, is what is most important in the classroom.</p>

18

<p>the usnews-reported s/f ratios for research universities are mostly incorrect, a result of a SIGNIFICANT number of schools NOT including graduate students in their s/f calculations despite clear directions on the common data set telling them to do otherwise. this difference in counting ‘method’ significantly outweighs any issues in the faculty calculations, which were, when i looked into this a while ago, pretty much spot on. (the question, of course, is which top schools are misreporting intentionally and which have lazy institutional research officers.)</p>

<p>of course, the other significant piece in the class size puzzle is the number of undergraduate classes a professor teaches per year. this can vary quite significantly.</p>

19

<p>

</p>

<p>Agreed. And getting a professor who is extremely busy with teaching assignments and feeling overburdened with her teaching load is not a good thing from the student’s point of view, although it may reflect favorably on the school’s stats for US News purposes.</p>

20

<p>i agree with the post #15. these statistics can be skewed and it’s best to ask around… like i said, i found my college to be very accurate… however my school didn’t have any ta’s, and most prof’s taught a full course load every semester… so it was fairly constant.</p>