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February 15, 2005
14:1. Bad betting odds or better class-size ratio?
You may remember hearing, as a prospective student, the admissions staff and Hamline students bragging about the student ratio as you visited campus. Chances are those numbers went right over your head, though Hamline’s student-to-faculty ratio is one of its most attractive features.
But the current ratio, 14:1, may not immediately make sense; after all, you most likely have č or have had č classes with 30 or more students.
The student-to-faculty ratio (or faculty-to-student ratio) shows how many students there are per faculty member. Essentially, this ratio represents how many students each faculty member has to work with. This ratio, though, can be a difficult one to come up with. How exactly is it calculated?
“I have to compute the ratio in different ways for all sorts of different entities,” said Mary Heather Smith, Hamline’s institutional assessment director.
One of the more straightforward ways of calculating the ratio is to simply divide the number of faculty by the number of students. Some institutions ask for this number, explained Smith, but the Princeton Review requires schools to use a more accurate and complex method of determining the ratio.
The Princeton Review system is responsible for generating Hamline’s most current student-to-faculty ratio. But, as Smith said, “This number is constantly shifting.”
To calculate the faculty-to-student ratio for the Review, full-time faculty members (professors who have a full class load) count as one faculty member in the ratio. Part-time faculty members, such as coaches, who may teach one or two courses, and visiting professors, who also have limited class loads, count as only 1/3 of a faculty member. This diminished status as 1/3 of a full member reflects their limited ability to spend time with students because of their part-time status. All the full-time and part-time professors are added together, and this number comprises the faculty part of the ratio.
The student population is another tricky number to establish. Usually the number is taken from census day, which is the first day that students are no longer able to add or drop classes. One thing that must be kept in mind regarding this number is that not all students at Hamline are full-time undergrads; some are high-school students who take a class or two, and there are numerous other different types of nontraditional students. So, in reality, even this adjusted number cannot accurately represent a faculty member’s ability to interact with their students.
Smith pointed out, however, that Hamline remains on the low end of the scale as far as class sizes go when compared with other schools that make similar reports. This semester, the smallest class at Hamline had two students and the largest had 92 students. Smith also said that there are more classes at Hamline with fewer than 30 students than there are classes with more than 30 students.
Posted by msveum at February 15, 2005 12:45 PM