<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>