Student-faculty ratio is the number of full-time-equivalent students divided by the number of full-time-equivalent instructional staff.
How it is measured
Student-faculty ratio = FTE students ÷ FTE instructional faculty.
Only faculty whose primary responsibility is instruction are included; administrators and research-only staff are excluded. Graduate assistants may or may not be included depending on the exact definition used by the reporting system.
Example: an institution has 6,000 FTE students and 300 FTE instructional faculty. The student-faculty ratio is 20:1. An online program within the same institution may have a different effective ratio if it uses a separate faculty pool, but the published institutional ratio remains the single aggregate figure.
How it differs
Average class size is the mean number of students enrolled in course sections. Faculty workload measures credits or contact hours taught per instructor. The student-faculty ratio is an institution-wide FTE comparison, not a measure of section size or of interaction quality in any single course.
Common errors
Interpreting a low ratio as a guarantee of small online class sizes. Including non-instructional staff in the faculty denominator. Comparing ratios across institutions that convert part-time faculty differently.
References
- 1. IPEDS student-to-faculty ratioFTE students to FTE instructional staff
- 2. Common Data Set definitionCalculation method
Student-faculty ratio is the number of full-time-equivalent students divided by the number of full-time-equivalent instructional staff.