In his rebuttal letter to a negative evaluation by the UH president, Manoa Chancellor Tom Apple touted his own attempts to control the budget. His responses to the president spent a lot of time explaining how he was prevented from reducing the flow of campus cash to the medical school and cancer center.
But Apple’s rebuttal also contained this short, orphaned paragraph which appears to contradict his other arguments by blaming the financial mess on the cost of faculty salaries.
In addition to these measures, I pointed out that our student/faculty ratio was unsustainable. This was the reason for my recent request for a hiring freeze. [emphasis added]
Elsewhere, Apple commented that UH is “a faculty-rich environment” with a 1 to 11 faculty-student ratio.
But a cautious approach is appropriate here.
Most campuses push for a lower ratio, since those who rank universities regard this as a plus. US News and World Reports uses these data every year to rank universities, with lower ratios getting higher rankings.
Places like Harvard (1:7), Stanford (1:5), and even Whitman–where Meda and I graduated– at (1:9), make much of these low ratios as evidence of teaching quality.
The UHM website reports a faculty-student ratio of 1:14, while the Johnsrud “study” had us at 1:12. Other public research universities are University of Washington at 1:12 and University of Michigan 1:16.
There are no doubt public universities, especially in the budget-decimated California system, that currently may well have higher ratios.
We really need to examine the data behind Apple’s “faculty-rich” description, as these numbers could reflect lots of hidden factors.
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While we’re at it, let’s also look closely at the “administration-rich” environment that prevails at UH and see what can be done to raise the ratios there.
He imposed a hiring freeze across the board because he didn’t like the AVERAGE ratio? This guy is cutting with an axe. How about programs having ratios of 1:25 or 1:30 that were not allowed to hire as they lost faculty?
There is also the question of what goes into the numerator, since R faculty do very little teaching. When you look at a ratio like 12:1 you imagine classes of 12 students, but in fact many of our students are in classes limited in size only by the fact that we don’t have many large classrooms on campus.
This is nothing new. In the 70s Math 100 was taught in the Varsity Theater.
Also UH is almost unique amongst American universities in counting folks like student advisors and senior technicians as faculty. And as dr points out how you count researchers also shift things.
In terms of admin, there are also faculty who serve as demi deans but are not counted as admin. That makes it hard to see how admin rich we are.
The UH is such a lost cause that those faculty who can leave will and those who can’t won’t. Having witnessed academic politics at various times in my life, it is simply hard to be sympathetic to a group of people who in many cases have achieved a level of job security which renders them impervious to accountability.
Student to faculty ratio numbers are the kind of data that is convoluted and can easily be spun to suit whatever purpose is needed for the moment. So it’s hard to draw anything conclusive from all this. What might be interesting is to compare ratios across the different campuses. How does Manoa compare to West Oahu and Hilo? Any significant difference here? If the flagship campus has a noticeably larger ratio, is that an indication of too many non-teaching researchers and specialists lurking in Manoa?
Allen N: UH Manoa is a research university and thus by definition it will have more researchers than other campuses in the system; comparing apples to oranges is meaningless.
Student-faculty ratios comparisons are meaningless, now? Okay, if you say so. Doesn’t change the fact that college rankings surveys use it as a criteria, which no doubt influences prospective students who are shopping around.
Or does attracting prospective students (esp. those looking what institution offers a greater value of teaching interaction/student services) irrelevant also?
These ratios ARE meaningless. Every institution counts it in a different way. A statistic more useful would be median undergraduate classroom size.
Another valuable data point would be “gateway prerequisite” throttling. Apologies if there’s a real term for this; what I’m trying to get at is when a university chooses to restrict enrollment size in class #2 of a 2- or 3-part sequence … and worse yet when a student must complete the sequence to be eligible for a chance to enroll in several higher-level courses required for a degree. I watched this happen a couple of years ago to a relative and her classmates at a research school with a seemingly faculty-rich ratio.
dr brings up the interesting point that we don’ t have many large classrooms on campus. I taught a 200+ student class previously. When there are that many students in a class, it doesn’t matter much whether it’s 200, 500, or 1000. Of course, smaller class sizes are best for learning. But if you just want to be cheap, you might as well pack them in like sardines.