When students are looking for colleges they might apply to, one consideration can be the student-to-faculty ratio. Lower numbers would seem to indicate that students will have more access to professors and not get lost in great masses of students.
The problem is that schools often manipulate the data to make their ratios look better. So argues Robert Thornett in today’s Martin Center article.
He writes:
Like average class size, student-faculty ratio also has the appearance of a rough gauge of personal attention. But it can be even more misleading than average class size, for several reasons. First, the most obvious problem with student-faculty ratio is that the process of reporting it is based on an honor system. While there is a standard formula provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which schools are supposed to use, colleges do not have to report any of the specific details of their calculations, only the outcome. Given that, numerous times over the past decade, U.S. News & World Report has removed schools from its annual “Best Colleges” ranking for misreporting data, and that, this past March, the dean of Temple’s business school was sentenced to 14 months in prison for sending false information to the magazine, there is reason to doubt whether the honor system produces trustworthy results.
There are a number of ways for schools to fudge the numbers and they often do. Moreover, it’s usually the more prestigious institutions that manipulate the data so as to look better.
So, what should students do? Here is Thornett’s advice: “If statistics like student-faculty ratio and average class size are not reliable indicators of personal attention and access to professors, what is? The truth is that a large part of the answer to this question lies within students. Few students take full advantage of office hours, the opportunity to engage one-on-one with professors outside of class.”
That’s absolutely correct.