Major disparity
In certain departments, students drastically out-number faculty

Justin Veiga | executive editor

St. Michael’s College has always prided itself on the tremendous institutional selling points it promotes.  At a glance, the current semester’s statistics are no different. 

For the fall 2007 term, St. Michael’s boasts an average class size of 19.2, according to Director of Institutional Research John Kulhowvick.  Of the 473 courses offered this fall, only 59, or 12.2 percent, enroll more than 30 students. 

Equally attractive is the fact that since 2000, the undergraduate student-faculty ratio has remained in the range of 12.4 to 13.5 students for every one faculty member. 

The current ratio sits at an even 13:1.

But chip through the alluring outer-coating of this number and a complex core is exposed, one that should be cause for concern amongst St. Michael’s academic administration due to its unfavorable dimension within certain departments.

Each term, the student-faculty ratio is calculated using a formula known as FTE, or full-time equivalency.  The goal of this concept, which Kulhowvick says is standard practice at most colleges and universities, is to factor non-tenured faculty and part-time students into the equation.

“Three different adjuncts each teaching two courses per year would add up to one full-time equivalent faculty member, since a full-time faculty member typically teaches six courses per year,” Dean of the College Jeffrey Trumbower wrote in a recent e-mail.  “Similarly, two part-time students, each taking eight credits per semester, would add up to one full-time equivalent student.”

In other words, student-faculty ratios are established by using a common denominator, credits, so that a constant can be reached between both parties. 

The faculty FTE calculation depends on the number of credits a full-time faculty member is expected to teach with further adjustments made for non-tenure track and part-time faculty.  As such, actual faculty credit hours taught are divided by each associated standard, according to Kulhowvick.

To ascertain the student element, take the total number of students' credits earned in a term, factoring in both full-time and part-time students, and divide by the average credit load per term, which is 15.5 as eight semesters of 15.5 credits equals the total required to graduate.

Kulhowvick says this system produces the most accurate results.  He freely admits, however, that the process of determining student-faculty ratios using FTE, especially within each department, is quite intricate.

“There are many layers to this thing and that’s important to remember,” he says.  “Like anything in life, there are exceptions.”

And as each layer of the 13:1 ratio is removed, those exceptions emerge.  As if the equation is not complicated enough, some faculty members’ credits must be separated into multiple departments because they instruct courses in more than one field of study.  On top of that, the change in the number of faculty from semester to semester is, as Kulhowvick describes it, like a moving target.

He says it's primarily for these reasons that the school does not calculate student-faculty ratios for each department.

This begs the question: If the equation is so complicated and involves so many stipulations that it deters a consistent statistical analysis within each department, how is the school efficiently and accurately determining the distribution of its available resources between the departments?

St. Michael’s does produce a half-inch thick, blue-cover text titled, “St. Michael’s College Facts,” which Kulhowvick says is prepared for the Board of Trustees and other school officials, but is off limits to students.

“Most of the information in there is publicly available, but not all of it,” he says.

On the contrary, all student and faculty numbers within each department are easily available to students.  And they speak for themselves.

To date, the top five majors at St. Michael’s are business administration, psychology, biology, education and journalism.  The business department, which also includes accounting majors, administers approximately 25 percent of all undergraduate majors.

With 14 current full-time faculty members and 10 fall 2007 sections taught by adjuncts, interim department chair Robert Kenny says that his department could use some help.

“It would be nice to have another faculty member or two to be able to reduce the size of some of our classes,” he says.

The journalism and mass communication department, as of Nov. 21, handles 152 majors, according to Kimberly Sultze, department chair.  Those 152 students, plus 32 minors, are educated by several adjuncts, but only five full-time faculty members.  Two of those five will be on sabbatical in the spring.

Adjuncts are invaluable in the classroom, but are rarely available outside of that time and therefore cannot provide the same level of service to students. This fact is not accounted for in the FTE calculations.

Other, less popular departments, have decent faculty numbers but far fewer majors than the business and journalism departments — though less popular certainly is not equivalent to less important.

“There are certain subjects that a liberal arts college has to cover,” Trumbower says.

Those subjects, and the professors who teach them, account for the education of the entire student population given the liberal studies requirements.  Also, many departments assist each other, notably within the hard sciences.  Each department does many things beyond serving its majors, Trumbower says.

Yet the fact remains that certain departments, like business and journalism, are under constant strain due to excessive student interest and limited faculty availability.

For this reason, Trumbower says that the college considered cutting a few departments about 10 years ago.  Both classics and physics were on this list, but were retained due to their value in the realm of overall liberal studies academia, Trumbower says.

“There are factors other than sheer numbers that go into these kinds of decisions,” he says.

In many ways, this is true, especially at a small liberal arts institution.  But regardless of outside conditions, numbers, like the 13:1 ratio, speak loudest.

And right now, from the depths of a complex equation and the surface of basic department needs, they’re screaming disparity.