I have seen statistics on the “student-faculty ratio” when I research universities, anywhere from 5:1 to 25:1. But what do these numbers actually mean when it comes to class sizes? Will the colleges with lower ratios generally have smaller class sizes, or is there not really a correlation? Also, does it serve as an indicator to a college’s academics and/or a student’s experience?
In short, what does the student-faculty ratio mean?
Find the Common Data Set forms for the universities you are interested and they’ll give you a breakdown of course sizes that will enable you to calculate % of courses with fewer (or more) than X students.
Better would be to see if the school’s on-line class schedule shows class sizes.
Average class size numbers where all class sizes are weighted the same may not reflect the average class size a student may see, since more students enroll in the larger classes.
Keep in mind that most ‘101’ courses are going to have hundreds of students at the large unis - even if, by senior year, you are in seminars with only a handful. So at a large school, irrespective of what percentage of the classes are small, you are likely, as a freshman, to be in primarily large lecture classes. This is why people who don’t like large lecture classes choose LACs, where the class sizes are smaller right from the intro classes on.
Stated differently, 90% of the classes offered at a school may be tiny - but if all the prereq courses are large lecture-type classes, you won’t be in the small classes until much later.
Your best bet is to ask how many people are in the intro classes required for the major you are most interested in.
Large lectures are not necessarily bad, by the way. D says she prefers a lecture from the subject matter expert (i.e. the prof) over the sometimes not terribly relevant or insightful comments in seminar from peers who may or may not have grasped the essential points in a lesson. She also points out that when she has had to miss a class, she is able to get the lecture notes and catch up. Seminars tend to be ‘attendance and participation graded’ which to her feels more like high school.
S, on the other hand, thrives on the personal relationships and attention that he gets from faculty at his LAC, and the close personal relationships he develops in class with his peers. ’
I think it all comes down to your optimal learning style. No right or wrong here.
A lot (most?) of colleges exaggerate the student-faculty ratio to give the impression that you’ll never be in a class with more than 25 students. Even at small colleges, popular, foundational and required classes can have nearly triple that many pupils. At large public comprehensive universities, regularly there can be150 students in one class.
^ The only problem I have with this explanation is the word exaggerate. Colleges don’t exaggerate the S/F ratio. It is what it is. However some faculty have a limited teaching schedule or some classes have very few students which means others have many more. It’s true many 101 classes are over prescribed. You don’t tend to see the advantage of those S/F ratios until you get to higher level classes.
Thanks for all your help! @exacademic @ucbalumnus @“N’s Mom” @LakeWashington
@“Erin’s Dad” Whoa, you’re kind of a celebrity 'round these parts 
The reason I ask is because I’m interested in both USC and UC Berkeley - the former has a S/F ratio of 9:1, and the latter has a S/F ratio of 17:1, but I saw a statistic that both of them have a similar percentage of large classes.
Both USC and UCB have on-line schedules that show enrollment and capacity. You can use them to see what class sizes are like in the subjects you are interested in.
What I meant is that colleges often publish the following statement; ‘Our student-faculty ratio is X, i.e. low, therefore most of your classes will have x or fewer students.’ At a lot of places this is an exaggeration because several popular and/or required classes typically have way more than x students enrolled. C’mon, it’s no secret!
Actually, a large number of colleges DO exaggerate their s/f ratios by not including countable graduate students in their calculations. Some only make this exaggeration on their websites (often calling it something akin to an ‘undergraduate s/f ratio’). A decent number of others are sufficiently bold to report this number on their CDSs, as well.
One must also be very careful when evaluating class sizes as schools have significant flexibility, at least for the purposes of the CDS, in reporting what is a section versus a subsection. Take for example an introductory class consisting of a lecture with 300 students and 15 labs with 20 students each. In terms of reporting to US News, one school might report a single section with 300 students (and 15 subsections, which appear on the CDS but aren’t used by US News). One school might report the section with 300 students and 15 sections with 20. A third might report 15 sections with 20 students (and 1 subsection with 300). The experience is the same but things will look very different on paper. Now throw in the schools now capping classes at 19 and 49 for no reason other than the ‘Under 20’ and ‘Over 50’ buckets reported by US News and things get very murky very fast.
A final issue that isn’t touched on often is the impact of extremely large classes on a school’s actual average class size. The largest class size bucket on the CDS is 100+. As such, the potential exists for enormous differences in how large a school’s largest classes are and as such what percentage of student class experiences actually take place in them. I recently looked at the numbers for a small university where the average class with more than 100 students enrolled 118. I then ran the numbers for the first 100 large classes at a large, flagship public and found that average to be 276. Even at a school with only 3% of classes over 100 students, the difference between an average of 118 and 276 students in large classes would be significant, with the lower number meaning only about 12% of classroom experiences were in very large classes and the larger number meaning that 24% were. On average that’s an entire semester’s worth of classes for each student on campus despite identical reported values.
@ericatbucknell do you have some examples of colleges that have misreported the data on their CDS? That’s a big deal to me (and my DW who worked in the Office of Institutional Research at a university). The instructions are very clear on how to count both faculty and students.
http://www.commondataset.org/docs/2015-2016/CDS_2015-2016.pdf
^ sure does seem to be clearly defined.
In looking at my kid’s LAC, the ratio is 7.6 -1 and class breakdown is:
Undergraduate Class Size
Number of Class Sections with Undergraduates Enrolled
2-9/10-19/20-29/30-39/40-49/50-99/100+
150/183/88/26/15/9/0
Class Sections: A class section is an organized course offered for credit, identified by discipline and number,
meeting at a stated time or times in a classroom or similar setting, and not a subsection such as a laboratory or
discussion session.
Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Penn, Princeton… Illinois… the list is quite long.
Note that while all of these schools are incorrectly reporting student counts, faculty count reporting is all over the map.
I just asked my D about one of her classes and the lecture has over 100, though her school reports having no classes over 100. Her lab and discussion sections are much smaller. That’s exactly what is supposed to be reported but in her school’s case, isn’t.
@OHMomof2 What LAC does your daughter go to?
@ericatbucknell Sorry, I’m a bit confused about what you were saying regarding sections and subsections. Do you mind explaining that to me as if I was 8?
F/S ratio means very little. Class size distribution is more informative. Talking to current students in your intended major is probably irreplaceable.
For actual class sizes, why look at indirect measures before checking the on-line schedule of the school in question to see if class sizes are listed there? If present, you can see the class sizes for those subjects you are most interested in.
I disagree about the ratio meaning nothing. But the ratio has to reflect true numbers for it to be meaningful. Most of the ratio’s listed in the rankings are bogus in the sense that schools are allowed to interpret the word “faculty member” or “instructor” any way they want.
If you want the actual ratio of faculty members who teach (did you think the other ranking lists referred to that, they don’t) to students look at the Time’s World’s University Rankings. They include only teaching faculty. They exclude research faculty and retired faculty. Schools that I know to be busting at their seams (because they boast being cheap and refuse to provide resources that could help) are shown on that ranking system to have absurd ratios (> 20 students per teaching faculty) whereas they look more reasonable on US News rankings where they are allowed to obscure the truth.
This is what you get when the ratio of students exceeds 20 for each faculty member. You get few resources. Bare bones resources. You get long stints on hold when you try to contact people. Since the faculty ratio reflects willingness of the school to allocate appropriate resources, you have shortages across the board. You have insufficient secretarial staff; insufficient access to things as simple as copying; you have long waits to access advising; you have absurd bureaucracy because each office is looking for ways to prevent you from contacting them; You have staff who have to justify every dime they spend on resources which leads to bad moods; you have faculty who compete with each other for simple resources. You usually have an over-fed over-paid unavailable tuned-out higher administration. It can be an ungodly place to be. Cheap and efficient is not a euphemism for outstanding or even adequate.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings
Also, no class size is not a better measure. It isn’t just about size of classes. It is about availability of the resources you expect to have at a decent university-one of which is access to instructors outside class.
“…do you have some examples of colleges that have misreported the data on their CDS?”
Erin’s Dad, most private universities misreport their S:F ratios. Caltech is quite possibly the worse culprit. They include their 900 undergraduate students but completely omit over 2,000 graduate students…, most, if not all, of which share the same faculty. Just look at section I2.
http://finance.caltech.edu/documents/394-cds2015_final.pdf
As it is, Caltech claims a 3:1 ratio. If they include their graduate students, it jumps to 10:1!
Harvard (reports only 6,600 undergrads and omits thousands of graduate students), Penn (reports 9,500 undergraduate students but omits thousands of graduate students), Duke (reports 6,600 undergrads but omits thousands of graduate students), Stanford (reports 7,000 undergrads but omits thousands of graduate students), Northwestern (reports 8,300 undergrads but omits thousands of graduate students) etc…all misreport their S:F ratios.
http://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2013-14.pdf?m=1420474747
http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/2014#faculty
http://ir.provost.duke.edu/facts/cds/Duke%20CDS_2013-2014.pdf
http://enrollment.northwestern.edu/pdf/common-data/2014-15.pdf
http://www.upenn.edu/ir/Common%20Data%20Set/UPenn%20Common%20Data%20Set%202014-15.pdf
The only two notable private universities that I can think of that do not omit graduate students from their S:F ratio calculations are Brown and MIT.
Hanna, while I agree that S:F ratios are not telling, they are nevertheless a significant variable in the US News rankings. If all universities reported ratios of 10:1 - 15:1, which is where the majority of universities fall, the concept of S:F ratio would indeed not matter. Furthermore, class size is also not telling without a common frame of reference; they should be broken down by subject, class type and level etc…
S:F ratio counts for 5% of the “faculty resources” criterion in the USNWR ranking of national universities and national LACs. “Faculty resources”, in turn, counts for 20% of the overall ranking. In other words, S:F ratio counts for 1% of the overall total.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights
Class size distributions get higher weights than the S:F ratio.
Many colleges post detailed information about class sizes for every term in their online course schedules. So, as post #16 suggests, you can look up enrollments for the classes that most interest you.
I think it would be helpful to be able to compare average class sizes just for sets of high-interest courses such as standard pre-med courses.