<p>I doubt this analysis can work. It gives numbers that are hard to interpret, and provides no context. How much attention is paid to undergrads is a matter of institutional culture, and that may not track that closely with the ratio of undergrad to grad students. So the effort may be doomed from the start. As many have pointed out, one can have a huge place with a small faculty and not many grad students. Such an institution might have little focus on students-grad or undergrad- at all. To assume that, if there are relatively fewer grad students then the school must be focussed on undergrads is not reasonable.</p>
<p>To get to details. </p>
<p>Any faculty member would tell you that working with undergrads is much more time consuming than working with grad students. Undergrads are doing everything for the first time, so they need far more attention and guidance. They run up against obstacles very quickly and get stuck. They have other commitments and courses outside their majors that keep them from focusing on their scholarly work in the field. </p>
<p>So I suspect that the ratio of time would be strongly the opposite of what the OP proposes. For a faculty member who was doing research with an an equal number of undergrads and grad students, I suspect the typical time allocation might be 3 times as much with the undergrads as the grad students. For teaching courses, the difference is even greater. Teaching a grad seminar is easy, set the outline and readings, and the students teach themselves. Undergrads are a different world. Preparing a new undergrad course is extremely time consuming, and teaching it is far more work than teaching a course on the same topic to grad students-no comparison.</p>
<p>Deducting professional students from the denominator obscures the issue. Most faculty in Arts and Sciences primarily teach professional students. On the other hand, many professional schools rely on arts and sciences faculty to teach some core courses to their students- statistics is a common example. Many faculty in Business schools have lots of undergrads (ever heard of Wharton people?) The masters degree is often a professional degree while the PhD is a scholarly degree. Thus, at a business school, one would subtract the MBA candidates, but not the PhD candidates. There are similar distinctions in law, education, social work, nursing and engineering schools.</p>
<p>The proportion of undergrad enrollment in schools of engineering varies widely across universities. Many medical school faculty either teach undergrad courses, or have undergrads enrolled in their graduate courses. </p>
<p>Other than class time-which is the least important aspect of college teaching- graduate, professional, and undergraduate students all share libraries, labs, gyms, and other resources.
Just because they are professional students does not mean they disappear.</p>
<p>Finally, a note on the numbers. If I understand correctly, the first list gave percent of undergrad degrees calculated over all degrees conferred and the second list was undergrad over degrees less professional degrees. The numerator should have remained the same, while denominator was reduced by the number of professional degrees. So the proportion should have stayed the same or increased in every case. However, some of the schools, the proportion of undergrad degrees was higher when considering all degrees than when excluding professional degrees (Harvard, Hopkins). How is that possible?</p>