Jul 18th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Student-Faculty Ratio
It seems that student-to-faculty ratios among undergraduate programs vary drastically from discipline to discipline. Political science and economics, in particular, are oversubscribed. Definitely one of the things I liked about being a philosophy major in college was that it was a relatively small department with a low student-faculty ratio. That preserved a nice island of intimacy around my coursework even amidst a fairly large and impersonal overall university.
Part of what you see with these ratios, I guess, is that colleges are relatively unresponsive to demand-side factors among students.
34 Responses to “Student-Faculty Ratio”
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July 18th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
This is why TA unionization is a good thing for workers and students – they have a built-in incentive to keep student-to-faculty ratios low, because that usually translates into student-to-ta ratios.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
My impression is that the distribution of faculty at the elite universities is determined more by an attempt to cover the standard curriculum and recognized specialties rather than by the number of students.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Don’t you think that’s because the demand is fairly inelastic? I.e., kids don’t transfer from one school to another because the Econ dept. is overcrowded…so the school can maximize profit per professor by not paying that many of them to teach Econ.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Part of what you see with these ratios, I guess, is that colleges are relatively unresponsive to demand-side factors among students.
Universities are unresponsive to students period. And it has nothing to do with the professors being a bunch of librul, commie, peacenik pot smokers.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Some of the best classes I’ve had have been giant lectures. “Intimacy” is what TAs are for.
One reason big lecture teachers tend to be better is because having to teach a large lecture class forces one to streamline one’s teaching to get the most out of every minute, because bad teaching in a big lecture wastes a lot more student-hours than bad teaching in a small class. It’s like the difference in pilot quality between big commercial airliners and smaller planes. Only the cream of the crop get to fly/teach the big ones, since so many more lives/grades are at stake.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
In my experience students often “demand” big lectures with high quality professors.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I’m a little suspicious of reports like this that rely on number of majors as a measure for course demand, if only because many people take courses out of their major.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
My experience at Boise State University was that student to faculty ratios just told you nothing about the quality of instruction and often a higher number of students was a good sign. By far the biggest factor in whether a class would be great was whether Micron needed employees with that skill. If you want to be an CMOS designer or you want ot work on semiconductors its really good, but otherwise its somewhat below average.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
@ #5–Yeah, the lecture/conference model (like at Reed College, for example, big lecture with someone like David Griffiths, then breakout conferences with 10-15 students and a professor) works pretty well.
As a chemistry major, I had a few large classes (intro chem, o-chem), but when I got to be a senior, things thinned out so much that we had 7 thesis-writing seniors and 7 professors in the department. I guess when you have basic classes that have massive cross requirements from pre-meds, bio, etc., you have to have a large department to handle those classes. Then the specialists get the advantage of those numbers at the end.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Although my grad school department was quite small, undergrad econ courses (at a small school) still typically ran from 30 to 80 students per class (better than the 200+ students in my undergrad intro courses). Professors had no intention at all of even contemplating looking at the work of so many undergrads and it fell to us TA’s. I realized that I had been the TA/grader for one student for every single one of his first year econ courses, totaling half his first year GPA. It was strange to think that all his Major grades and half of his total grades for the year came exclusively from my pen, from the mind of an overworked, rushed, and exhausted grad student that only marginally paid attention to the course materials for the classes I TA’d.
I always thought about his parents shelling out $45 k a year so that he could major in a subject where the only person who ever even paid attention to any of his work was a sole grad student surviving off 4 hours of sleep a night who had many other priorities that trumped whether or not their child was actually learning anything.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Re: quality of education, small vs. big.
This varies enormously by department and by discipline.
In many humanities/social science courses, small courses mean more of a conversation/back and forth between professors and students, getting to know your students/professors, being able to read more interesting material, and telling a more complex story than what you can boil down into a huge intro-course style lecture.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I should add that the mega lectures basically didn’t exist at BSU’s enginnering department. The problem with giant lectures is that if you miss any tiny peice of the basic foundation you end up completely lost when you get to more advanced topics. This is probably less true with history or even economics, but with math, engineering it is definitly true.
July 18th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
There’s also the matter that certain subjects — Mathematics, Languages, etc. — have many students taking classes in them but relatively few students actually majoring in them. You could probably say the same thing about economics, though, and yet the ratio there is pretty bad.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
When I was an undergrad I preferred classes small enough to where I could ask the professor something occasionally, but large enough to discourage student discussion. I knew early-on that none of us had any clue what the hell we were talking about as undergrads–at least not until senior year, and then only a few of us had a clue.
Now, as a college teacher myself, I see that most of the class checks out if you don’t badger them with questions all the time. It’s always tough to get the right balance between the many and the few very capable in undergrad classes.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Schools respond to demand from the economy, not students. After all schools prepare students to serve the economy.
Is this a good thing? Good enough to create some brilliant bankers, oh yeah!
All sorts of things, of course, influence what the economy demands. We may not be as free as we think 0_0
July 18th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I see this as more variance in the number of students, rather than profs. While I don’t mind putting some more profs in high demand departments, any sort of large scale redistribution would certainly screw departments that can’t and will never be able to attract lots of majors. Physics is never going to be a big major, its really hard…but that is the only reason why the ratio here is so small, not because universities just love physics so much. On the other hand, this is great for the people who pick these majors, because they’ll rarely have to be in a large class, as should be the case if you’re taking a hard subject.
-Physics Major
July 18th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
My impression is that the distribution of faculty at the elite universities is determined more by an attempt to cover the standard curriculum and recognized specialties rather than by the number of students.
It’s my experience that the standard curriculum that all undergrads are required to take depends heavily on which departments have more clout — if department X is recognized as one of the strongest departments in the university and the university is committed to supporting X’s grad students, then undergrads are likely to be required to take a course in X and there will be lots of large-lecture X courses that need TAs. Though within departments people will usually try to find some way to cover most of the specialties in that field.
July 18th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
Part of the reason why universities are so eager to open law schools is because of the traditionally high student-faculty ratios in that field. Law schools therefore can be big moneymakers.
July 18th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
What a stupid chart. Who the hell gets BA’s in physics, math, or chemistry? They should have listed the relevant BS stats.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Adam @15 has it somewhat right. Faculty lines are never determined by headcount in intro classes. This might up the lecturer lines in a dept like math where it is required of every student (and the university has an obligtion to ensure it is offered regularly enough). However, true faculty lines are almost determined by research specialty.
The dirty little secret that everyone needs to accept is that tuition is actually too low to pay the bills. SLACs live off their endowments and R1s live off grants.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Matt, it could be that the universities are carrying too many unfireable tenured faculty in “useless” majors rather than that there are too few econ professors.
I’m sure these hedge funds masquerading as schools would love to have the econ ratio be the norm.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Of course part of the issue is that in some subjects you really need small class sizes. Like math or writing. A lot of schools have policies about class-size limits, based on the subject and whether it’s 100-level, 200-, etc. In other disciplines the ratios show a salutary tendency of schools to keep important programs, like classics and German, even though the students are becoming less interested in them. I have some familiarly with econ and politics departments, and despite their reputation for being wise in the arts of competition and conquest, they frequently lose out to English and fine arts when it comes to getting new hires.
“It’s like the difference in pilot quality between big commercial airliners and smaller planes. Only the cream of the crop get to fly/teach the big ones, since so many more lives/grades are at stake.”
I wish. Yes, you’re more exposed as a bad teacher in a huge auditorium. But by the time you’re there, you can’t exactly get kicked out until tenure review. You don’t get “demoted” to smaller classes. You are either retained or no, and at big universities, not only because of your teaching. When I was in grad school I was a TA for some pretty weak teachers in large classes. The smaller classes (usually 300- and 400- level) were taught by everyone, including the best teachers.
Besides, at 2d and 3d tier public universities, they sometimes have have *adjuncts* teaching many of the huge classes. Those adjuncts may be fine teachers, but that’s not why they’re there.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Are most of these econ students kids at schools without a business school? What percentage of the poli sci majors are going to law school?
July 18th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
@Colatina: There usually are periodic reviews before the tenure review during which people are weeded out. Though I think that most go, if they go, at tenure.
Re: Being exposed as a bad teacher in a large auditorium. Maybe. Lecturing effectively to a large room requires different skills than teaching a good (undergraduate, especially) seminar; teaching “Socratically” is very different than simply talking to a bunch of students.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
I went to Engineering school, so those numbers look bizarre to me. The smallest class I ever had was 15 people, and that was Complex Analysis, and it was summer session. If you weren’t a physics or math major, you weren’t in that class. And if you don’t know what complex analysis is, trust me, you don’t want to know. The smallest regular session class I had was 22 people, and that was Statistical Thermodynamics. Even physics majors don’t want to take that class, but they have to. My largest class was freshman Chemistry, at 1400 students. That was the class that made people decide they didn’t want to go into science or engineering, and still had time to get out. But in science and engineering, I really don’t think class size makes a difference. You either get the material or you don’t, and the professor won’t help you much. He probably can barely speak in prose. And if you don’t get it, there’s always an Economics major to bail out on.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
How may philosophy faculty would you get if you cut the philosophy faculty down to get the university-wide student-faculty ratio? And how many students would choose to be philosophy majors with so few professors? Wich then means further faculty cuts, and so on. Small departments simply would cease to be viable under a ‘all departments have the same faculty-student ratio’ standard, since small faculty numbers feed back to lower numbers of majors. You still get the effect that some faculty simply stop teaching undergrad courses, since there are so few students you can simply talk to them in person.
I had the impression a while back that the Yale philosophy department had pretty much ceased to exist. Not sure if this has been remedied or not.
Also, ever try getting a call to increase tenure track econ faculty size on the grounds of teaching needs past a faculty committee with small department faculty on it?
July 19th, 2009 at 6:09 am
This thread also seems pretty alien to me, a Geology major at Caltech. Much of the “normal” college experience, I only know through hearsay. Physics is one of the most popular majors there. You can actually major in History or Literature, although by and large those are done as double majors; only a handful (like, as in, maybe 1 or 2 a year) actually graduate with that as their sole major (and yes, they receive Bachelor of Science degrees). And yet students are required to take a humanities or social science class each quarter.
Every student is required to take a suite of core classes; it’s been changed since I was a student, but at the time that meant 2 full years of Physics, 2 full years of Math, a year of Chemistry, a term of Chem Lab, and several optional classes. Yes, even if you were a Lit major.
The Geology department is fairly unpopular, at least for undergrads. My biggest class had maybe 20 students and the smallest had only 2 and met in the professor’s office.
I really don’t know what method the Institute used to pick which professors taught which classes, but I’m pretty sure that 98% of why they were hired in the first place was due to their research, not their teaching ability. Undergrad classes had a tendency to be taught like grad school classes, flying through difficult subjects at breakneck speed and the tacit assumption that you were fairly familiar with the material in the first place.
Tests were take-home. At most schools, tests tend to be there to see if you remember the material covered in class. At Caltech, tests would frequently introduce new concepts, ask you to prove something new, etc.
Some students, the real studs who were super-geniuses and/or were much more diligent students than I was, thrived in that environment. It was a lot tougher for me: my GPA in high school had been an unadjusted 3.9 or so; at Caltech it was a 2.3, and then several years later when I went to grad school to get a Master’s in an unrelated field, I earned a 3.93.
July 19th, 2009 at 7:46 am
Another factor to think about is the attractiveness of the discipline to non-majors.
I am a grad student in philosophy at a very large university. We get a lot of students who are eager to dip their toes in philosophy, but due mostly to career-related concerns, do not want to major in it. Also, it is much easier to take a higher level philosophy class with little experience than it is to take a higher level physics class, say. We have lots of non-majors in junior-level classes.
So even though we have about 1 faculty members for every major, that does not reflect how crowded our courses are and the resources we need. Freshman level classes are 200+, sophomore level hover around 100, and for the thinned-out junior or senior classes (where at my undergrad we had about 5-10 students), at my grad school we have 25-30. The grad students here actually lead large lecture courses with other grad students as TAs. Discussions have 25 students per section, and TAs have a student load of 75 (which, I understand, is quite high).
So, in short, looking at number of majors gives an inadequate view of faculty demand.
July 19th, 2009 at 7:49 am
Sorry, that’s 1 faculty member for 10 majors that we have.
July 19th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Harvard must have a higher proportion of political science students who really want to be there. Most students at other universities take it because it’s required for some arbitrary graduation requirement.
July 19th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Exactly. If Econ majors don’t really care about economics except as a means of credentialing themselves for a banking career, and the poli sci students don’t care about the study of poli sci so much as networking themselves into politics (or their athletic pursuits, because poli sci is such a jock-friendly subject), then there’s no real demand for lower class sizes and universities are maximizing their efficiency by not responding to student preferences.
When I was in school, about 50% of Econ majors were indifferent to the academic content. They would have rolled around in dung for 5 hours a week if at the end it got them the interview with Goldman.
July 19th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I work at a major university. I would guess that the primary reason for the disparity is that every university wide committee must have equal faculty representation from the 3 divisions (sciences, social sciences and humanities) despite the fact that about 60% of the students major in the social sciences (and the numbers don’t change much if you look at regsitration instead of major counts). Growth rates in the social sciences have outpaced those in the other divisions for a number of years, but it is politically impossible within the university to shift the resources necessary to equalize the faculty student ratios.
July 19th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Remember, too, that schools must be sensitive to the market for faculty services. Offering a major program may be critical to recruiting qualified faculty, even if most of the department’s load is service courses.
July 19th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Apples and oranges. As Adam @ 13 and others elsewhere have pointed out, majors and disciplines are not the same as students. In some disciplines, faculty teach lots of students (e.g. in required general education courses like composition) but comparatively few majors. If the number of (say) chemistry majors suddenly went to zero, you’d still need to staff the gen-ed Chem 101 classes.
For this and many other reasons, the chart by itself tells us zilch about colleges’ “responsive[ness] to demand-side factors among students.”