Who Really Teaches College Classes?

One of the things some students and their parents look for when consulting US News Best College rankings is the fulltime faculty ratio. "A higher proportion of faculty who are full time scores better in the ranking model than a lower proportion," presumably because it indicates courses are taught by professors who make teaching their fulltime job, as opposed to part-timers hired off the street or something like that.

But a report by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed calls into question the percent of fulltime faculty used by US News in its Best College rankings. Nebraska's numbers were among those that seem questionable. Say it ain't so!

Nebraska has plenty of company, including Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, Penn State, U of Iowa, U of Missouri-Columbia and Cornell.

The issue of inaccuracies in the rankings was first raised this month by the American Federation of Teachers, (AFT)....Focusing on the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the AFT asked how it could be listed as having a faculty that is 100 percent full time when data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education show it has 401 part-time faculty members (compared to 1,539 full-timers).

U.S. News divides the part-time total in three, in theory because a part-time adjunct wouldn't be teaching as much as a full-time professor. Ignoring for a minute the reality than many a part-time adjunct teaches more sections than a tenured professor at a research university, applying the formula at Nebraska would not yield a 100 percent figure.

Inside Higher Ed asked Nebraska how it could claim a 100 percent full-time faculty, and the answer was that it left out all of its adjuncts, believing that was what U.S. News wanted.

The issue I think most students would consider relevant is that "the U.S. News figures...exclude instruction by graduate students -- meaning that just about every research university in the rankings would have a lower percentage if the actual section instructors were all counted." In reality, research universities use grad students to teach nearly 1/5 of their classes.

This number only counts for 5% of the faculty resources category, which is 20% of the score, so this is not a big factor (1% if my math is good). Still, it seems some clarification is in order. If being taught by fulltime faculty is important to you, US News's report won't help you figure out where to apply.