2008 Woodie Awards
Questions raised after Library Institutional Research Center provides student-teacher ratio
Jeff Sullivan
Issue date: 2/1/08 Section: Campus
2/1/08 - One might think that determining the fraction of the number of students by the number of faculty would be easy, but unfortunately it is no simple task.
The University of Rhode Island's Institutional Research Web site includes a comprehensive standard for computing this data, which has worked out the ratio to 18 students for every individual faculty member.
"Faculty-student ratios are calculated in all sorts of different ways," said Gary Boden, senior information technologist at the Library Institutional Research Center. "We follow the current standards in the common data set (CDS). The CDS is a collaborative effort by hundreds of institutions of higher education to put together a set of data to respond to all kinds of external sources."
The CDS takes the total number of full-time students plus a third of the part time students and divides that number by the total number of full-time instructional faculty plus a third of the part time faculty. The numbers work out to be 13,790 students divided by 713 faculty members. Yet some believe that this can be vague, because of the CDS' definition of instructional faculty.
"It's pretty much up to every individual institution to determine the exact definitions and calculate those numbers accordingly," Boden said. "So you get some fuzziness in the numbers."
The CDS on the URI Institutional Research Web site includes professors who instruct and research, teachers on paid leave or sabbatical, and part-time replacement faculty for those on leave or sabbatical. This adds faculty to the ratio who are not even on campus, let alone instructing students.
"It does not seem to make much sense," said Frank Annunziato, executive director for the URI chapter of the American Association of University Professors. "That [ratio], in terms of how [institutional research] keeps their records, does not seem helpful in actually finding the actual teacher -student ratio."
Also, per-course instructors, which are professors paid by each course they teach and without faculty benefits, are not included.
"There are always these types of details [in calculating the ratio] that every university has to deal with," said James Miller, chairman of the URI Faculty Senate. "For example, instructors on sabbatical are doing vital research, which is a critical part of a faculty's job. Just because they're on sabbatical and not teaching that semester does not mean they don't work for the university."
The University of Rhode Island's Institutional Research Web site includes a comprehensive standard for computing this data, which has worked out the ratio to 18 students for every individual faculty member.
"Faculty-student ratios are calculated in all sorts of different ways," said Gary Boden, senior information technologist at the Library Institutional Research Center. "We follow the current standards in the common data set (CDS). The CDS is a collaborative effort by hundreds of institutions of higher education to put together a set of data to respond to all kinds of external sources."
The CDS takes the total number of full-time students plus a third of the part time students and divides that number by the total number of full-time instructional faculty plus a third of the part time faculty. The numbers work out to be 13,790 students divided by 713 faculty members. Yet some believe that this can be vague, because of the CDS' definition of instructional faculty.
"It's pretty much up to every individual institution to determine the exact definitions and calculate those numbers accordingly," Boden said. "So you get some fuzziness in the numbers."
The CDS on the URI Institutional Research Web site includes professors who instruct and research, teachers on paid leave or sabbatical, and part-time replacement faculty for those on leave or sabbatical. This adds faculty to the ratio who are not even on campus, let alone instructing students.
"It does not seem to make much sense," said Frank Annunziato, executive director for the URI chapter of the American Association of University Professors. "That [ratio], in terms of how [institutional research] keeps their records, does not seem helpful in actually finding the actual teacher -student ratio."
Also, per-course instructors, which are professors paid by each course they teach and without faculty benefits, are not included.
"There are always these types of details [in calculating the ratio] that every university has to deal with," said James Miller, chairman of the URI Faculty Senate. "For example, instructors on sabbatical are doing vital research, which is a critical part of a faculty's job. Just because they're on sabbatical and not teaching that semester does not mean they don't work for the university."