UF to hire 500 new faculty in major initiative

[Gator88NE]

The University of Florida will hire 500 new faculty to further enhance teaching and research and to continue to be one of the very best research universities in the nation, UF President Kent Fuchs announced today. UF’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved a resolution in support of the announcement.

Funding for the new hires and compensation increases will come from state allocations, alumni and friends, as well as university resources.
…
Funding for new hires and compensation increases will come initially from a $52 million allocation to UF that the Legislature approved earlier this year and from reallocated internal resources, Glover said. The university will also seek additional funding from a variety of sources for future years.

UF is spending that new funding (which also included the increase in Bright Futures, etc.) that the state legislature put into this year’s budget.

The hiring plan was created to address two primary university goals: reaching top-ranked status by strengthening various research disciplines, and improving the university’s student-faculty ratio, a widely recognized metric in determining an institution’s excellence and stature.

UF’s current student-faculty ratio is 20 to 1; the 500 new hires ultimately will result in a student-faculty ratio of 16 to 1. By comparison, the ratio at the University of Michigan, is 15 to 1. (Michigan, like UF, belongs to the Association of American Universities and is considered a peer institution to UF; others include the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, Berkeley.)

http://news.ufl.edu/articles/2017/06/uf-to-hire-500-new-faculty-in-major-initiative.php

[Gator88NE]

How does reducing the student-faculty ratio impacts UF’s ranking?

Here’s the link to how U.S. News Calculates the rankings. We’ll use this ranking methodology as an example.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-us-news-calculated-the-rankings

The student-faculty ratio is only 5% of the Faculty resources metric, which itshelf only makes up 20% of the rankings. That comes out to only 1% of the ranking calculation.

However, hiring additional faculity also impact’s the class size metric (40% of the Faculty Resource metric), which impacts 8% of the ranking calculation.

It also impacts the Financial resources, as this would be an increase in the amount of funds being spent per student. That’s another 10% of U.S. News ranking that’s impacted.

[SouthFloridaMom9]

Nice! I thought I heard President Fuchs emphasizing the need to improve the student-faculty ratio in one of his addresses to the Florida legislature (or somewhere).

That is great news.

[Tigershark43]

Great news!