Is Higher Education Quality Affected by Staff-Student Ratio?

For academic scheduling, the number of higher education faculties per student is a standard benchmark of some of the best universities in the world.

Resource planning can be quite an issue for higher education institutions, especially regarding human management. Deans and higher education faculties struggle assigning tenured, part-time and visiting professors per course, section, academic scheduling, availability etc.  At the same time, we have to make sure that the number of teachers per student is optimal for a given program. 

The best universities of the world ranked by institutions such as QS World University Rankings or Times Higher Education (THE) must submit teacher assignment ratios as a quality assurance indicator. It is called the staff : student ratio (or SSR) or teacher-student ratio.

What is a Staff : student ratio?

According to QS, the indicator “assesses the number of full-time academic staff members employed relative to full-time student enrollment numbers”. For Times Higher Education, it is “the ratio of full-time equivalent students to the number of academic staff – those involved in teaching or research.”

The QS World University Rankings accounts the ratio for 10% of its ranking, while 4.5% of the Times Higher Education evaluation uses it. 

According to QS, this ratio gives “an idea of each higher education institution’s “commitment to teaching and student support, in lieu of any reliable method of assessing teaching quality.” Times Higher Education, on the other hand, considers that “universities with more staff per student have a good chance of creating an engaged and interactive teaching environment.”

To Tom Mendelson, The Independent's online student editor, this is an important indicator: “while there's no guarantee that additional staff will be any better at teaching, generally speaking, the more academics that a university employs, the closer students will be watched and the more value they'll get out of their degree.”

Does the number of students per teacher really measure the quality of education?

This measure is part of the quality assurance system, it can be used as a predictor of student success, as well as a resource planning tool and as a benchmarking reference. However, as with the University Rankings, many people contest its use. 

The Guardian, who publishes a yearly university guide for the United Kingdom, provides an important caveat: the indicator “only includes staff who are contracted to spend a significant portion of their time teaching”, excluding those classed as “research only” but including researchers who also teach, even though at research-intensive universities research can take up a significant proportion of their time.

The newspaper admits that “the simple ratio of the number of staff to students does not accurately reflect teaching intensity and also does not reveal who is performing the teaching. Is it the world-renowned professor or a graduate teaching assistant?”

Stephen Court, Senior Research Officer from the University and College Union in London, claims that the ratio, although it is traditionally a key measure of the adequacy of managing resources such as teachers available, may be a “misleading” indicator.

He contends that ratios are not directly correlated with quality or contact time, and it can significantly depend on subject type and level of study.

“They assume that all the time of the typical academic - who is normally engaged in teaching, research, and other activities – is spent on teaching (...) However, they will naturally vary between disciplines, between institutions, and also between subjects in different stages of their life cycle’.  

In the absence of alternative data, Professor Court admits that “it has to serve as a rough and ready measure of the adequacy of staff and of the attention which university teachers can give to their research and to their students.”

For Professor Gael McDonald, Life Fellow of Australian & New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM), higher education institutions face pressure to improve productivity through raised student: staff ratios, as they are “largely seen as a proxy for quality”. She considers them a “slippery construct” as they do not necessarily correlate with negative outcomes for students and staff.

In addition, she raises concerns. For instance:

• - Universities need more accurate internal data to measure student staff load numbers and the different definitions of the ratio.
• - Integrated Planning: higher education institutions need to have aligned planning and budgeting, as "it is not clear from year to year that a base allocation will cover all existing staffing and operating costs.”
• - Academic to general staff ratios don't add up: general staff workloads can become excessive in some areas, and universities start relying on casual staff and "delegated workloads."
• - There is more pressure on infrastructure, as institutions are unable to accommodate new staff.
• - A complex mix of on and off-campus students: it is a complex cohort for higher education institutions.

Professor McDonald recommends, for instance:

1. Determining an appropriate definition of what a good staff : student ratio is. A “large class” can depend on several factors, "such as the nature of the class (lecture, tutorial, laboratory work, work placement); pedagogy and perceptions and expectations of individual students."
2. Institutions should commit themselves to reducing the numbers, liberating staff’s time to provide access for students, quality assessment, feedback, research productivity and improved working environments.
3. Be more accurate with the data, as SSRs can be calculated in different ways depending on which categories of staff and students are included.
4. Refine the ratios according to discipline. "There is often not a single number target; it depends on the different disciplines imparted in campuses."
5. Linking processes and databases. For McDonald, as it is hard to separate the funding, enrollments and the staffing from one another.

 What do you think about the staff : student ratio? Does it reflect the quality of your institution?