While the University embarks on a relentless fundraising campaign to anchor itself solidly among the nation's elite academic institutions, it has paid too little attention to improving the educational experience of undergraduates. Statistics that matter to students, such as class size, faculty availability and student-to-faculty ratios continue to lag behind other top-ranked universities. Improving these would help the University ascend U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings -- arguably the most respected comparison of national universities. More importantly, it would dramatically improve the quality of a University education.
Every year, when U.S. News publishes its list of the best colleges and universities, schools have the chance to market their prominent status or rationalize a slip in the rankings. Ranked 23rd among national universities, the University occupies a spot just below the Ivy League and great research institutions like the University of Chicago and MIT but just above other prominent state schools. Part of the reason for this is our comparatively high student-to-faculty ratio and percentage of classes of 50 or more students.
The most publicized strategies for improving the University's position have centered on increasing alumni giving and enriching the endowment. True, these are important indicators of institutional strength, but issues like class size and the need for additional faculty deserve more attention. Better yet, issues like these need solutions.
One way to do this is, obviously, to hire more teaching faculty, which would alleviate the burden on associate professors and lower the current student-to-faculty ratio of 15 to 1. Another way is to encourage tenured faculty -- who often abandon teaching to concentrate on research -- to teach more. Neither solution offers a quick and easy fix, but both would improve the undergraduate learning experience.
For one thing, if one cares about the U.S. News rankings, the magazine weighs faculty resources as 20 percent of its ranking criteria. A university's financial resources counts for only 10 percent of a school's overall "score." For another, student-to-faculty ratios are one of the best measures of how a college or university regards its responsibility to undergraduates. To put things in perspective, every school that outranks the University has a lower faculty-to-student ratio. Yale, Stanford and Columbia, for example, all have a ratio of six to one. Private institutions admittedly have it easier with deeper pockets to fulfill the demand for more teachers, but even a small number of additional faculty would help.
As the University's endowment continues to swell, a significant portion of resources should fund efforts to improve our ratio and lower class sizes. This involves much more than intellectual vanity. Whenever U.S. News releases new rankings, university spokespeople always reiterate that their respective institution doesn't make decisions based on any ranking. And they always end up sounding like those too-cool artists who claim not to read the reviews of their work. In this case, especially with regard to matters of faculty resources, the reviews matter.
Academic rankings not only provide an overemphasized arsenal for institutional snobbery, they teach us how certain critical aspects of the University compare to other schools. Rankings also teach us how the University can improve and grow, the measure of which is not always preceded by a dollar sign.
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