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If there is any goal that the University of Florida has pursued as fervently as a national football championship for the Gators, it is a place among the nation's highest-ranked public universities.
"We need a top-1o universiy so our kids can get the same education they would get at Harvard or Yale," said J. Bernard Machen, the university president.
To upgrade the university, Dr. Machen is seeking a $1,000 tuition surcharge that would be used mostly to hire more professors and lower the student-faculty ratio, not coincidentally one of the factors in the much-watched college rankings published annually by USN&WR. This year, that list ranked Florida 13th among public universities in the US.
<p>I thought he was at Utah. I gotta read the Chronicle more often.</p>
<p>How much would the student-faculty ratio move the ranking? I find myself skeptical that lowering the ratio is his aim (although it sounds good to prospective students and parents).</p>
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Still, the students at the sprawling Gainesville campus with its historic buildings, lawns, and lush vegetation, are so affluent that those who must work to help support themselves are sometimes put off by the fancy cars, the stylish clothes and what they see as a sense of entitlement around them...
Dr. Machen said that when he became president of the university in 2004, he was troubled to discover that the average student's family income was about $100,000.
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Ever since, he said, he has struggled to balance the quest for higher rankings with the push to serve minority and low income students....
... It turns out that using "first generation in the famly to go to college" is a pretty good surrogate for diversity" Dr. Machem said...
...The university is cutting back on merit aid....
<p>If UF wants to move towards the top 10, it will take more than the $1000/student increase in tuition. The student:faculty ratio at UF is 23:1. That is more than twice the ratio at most top schools. If each of the 23 students needs to pay higher tuition to hire an additional faculty member, each student is going to need to kick in about $4000. That increase would more than double the current UF tuition and fees. It is likely that, if the student:faculty ratio is that bad, there are a lot of other corners that have been cut and a lot more expenditure that is needed.</p>
<p>I do think this is a step in the right direction. I think this would also be a good idea for NYS SUNY schools. Tuition should be increased by several thousand dollars. Tuition in the $3-4k range is out of keeping with reality. It certainly does not make sense to have tuition that is less than half of the cost of room and board.</p>
<p>You have to recall that as the numbers are scaled up, the relationship is a lot looser. It's not like if UF got rid of 23 students, its ratio would improve, or if 23 more enrolled, it would drop. It takes a lot of change in either faculty or students to move those ratios. </p>
<p>I don't know how big UF is, but we can do some crude math here. Let's say they have 30,000 UG students. If the student to faculty ratio is 23:1, then that means they have 1300 faculty. If 30,000 students pay $1,000 more and all of that revenue goes to hire faculty, the college could hire another 250 faculty (assuming the cost for pay and benefits averages about $125K per faculty member). That would bring the student:faculty ratio down to 19:1.</p>
<p>If you charged four times that, $4000, then you could hire another 1000 faculty and have the ratio down to 13:1, which would be a little too amibitious IMHO.</p>
<p>And yes, I know the student:faculty ratio isn't calculated this directly... and it's unlikely they'd really net that much revenue because some students get aid and the aid budget would have to be increased to make up for the increased tuition.... but for the sake of illustration and a quick-and-dirty look at numbers, there ya have it.</p>
<p>Hrmm.....how about wait until hiring the faculty for about 4 years...then hire me into the geology department! <em>taps her fingers together in an evilish way</em> ;)</p>
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From the article, UF hopes to hire about 200 more faculty
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<p>And, I would be willing to bet that most of those 200 will be hired based on their potential to generate research contracting revenues, not on their contribution to undergraduate teaching.</p>
<p>The path to raise the USNews rankings seems overly tortuous for Mr. Machem!</p>
<p>Would it be cynical to recommend that he visit the USNews' offices with a group of sharp analytical minds and ask to hear the presentation the University of Chicago heard last year? Maybe Mr. Machem's assistants will get a better grip on how to report the same data ... for better results. </p>
<p>Is it REALLY that important to make sure to categorize correctly the faculty, and is it possible to count a good teacher who has not seen the inside of a class in years ... or may not have been on campus for months? </p>
<p>If that does not work well enough, Mr. Machem could book a plane ticket to a small school in Vermont for a course in creative SAT scores' reporting.</p>
<p>Usually state schools have to report similar data to the state and would be in trouble if the fudged the facts. Perjury is a nasty word but most state government reports are done under that potential penalty.</p>
<p>xiggi, it's a pretty set formula that every school uses. You don't just cook them up. If you're going to fudge numbers, it's going to look awkward when those numbers are compared against numbers reported elsewhere.</p>
<p>Bernie Machen (it's Machen, not Machem) has served in high leadership roles at Michigan and Utah. He's not naive.</p>
<p>And I agree with interesteddad--if he's going for more faculty, he'd probably better serve the long-term interests of UF to nab those with a high research funding potential and prestigious reputations.</p>
<p>The other issue you have to deal with in a state school is that as tuition rises, there has to be a subsequent rise in financial aid in order for lower income students to be able to attend. After all, state schools are in the business of educating students in the state so that the state will have an educated workforce. If the schools price themselves out of reach for the average income family, they will find less and less willingness from the state taxpayers to want to contribute to the support of the university. Simply raising the tuition is not the answer to creating a high quality state university.</p>
<p>Actually no. I or you can look up every permanent UW faculty member, their salary, title and everything else. All the numbers have to foot. They break it out by men, women, minority, tenure, etc. Adjuncts are more lumped together but they report total numbers. I think it is FAR easier for privates to fudge many numbers.</p>
<p>Hoedown, from where does the pretty set formula originate? The US News? The CDS organization? The Department of Education? Does the formula establish clear rules for the length of permitted absences for research or ... other reasons. Do the rules establish a minimum number of hours in a teaching role? </p>
<p>Please refer to the explanation Chicago gave for the changes in its USNews statistics: a prior misunderstanding of the methodology. Are schools really worried about reporting "ackward" results? Heck, Middlebury found no real problem reporting an entirely impossible SAT score of 645. It must have looked good .. that day. What will it be next year? Whatever maximizes the USNEws final number! </p>
<p>And, for what it is worth, regardless of the methodology used, I stand by my conviction that large state and large research universities are GROSSLY over-reporting the size of their teaching force. Fudging numbers or following an extremely loose method, the result is the same.</p>
<p>Go to the UW Data Digest and look under faculty. It breaks down to two decimal points who teaches what level classes, headcounts, FTE counts, etc. Footnotes explain key definitions.</p>
<p>The research universities don't even have to fudge. The common data set has the fudge factor already built in. Here is the definition of "full-time faculty":</p>
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Full-time instructional faculty: faculty employed on a full-time basis for instruction (including those with released time for research)
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<p>Note that a "teaching" professor could be released full-time for research and still be counted.</p>
<p>In addition, graduate school professors and grad students are counted in the student/faculty ratio unless it is a totally standalone professional school (med school, law school, etc.)</p>
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probably better serve the long-term interests of UF to nab those with a high research funding potential and prestigious reputations.
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<p>Better serve the interests of the university as a non-profit contract research corporation, not necessarily the interests of the university as a teaching center.</p>