We recently started a new component of the FACE campaign called Just Ask! which calls on parents and students to start asking about academic staffing when deciding on which college or university to attend.  As part of that campaign, AFT is running an advertisement in the U.S. News and World Report "America's Best Colleges" issue.  We hope U.S. News readers will take up the challenge laid out by Just Ask! and we really hope they start by taking a close look at the institutions listed in the issue as "America's Best" since we found the information reported there to be, well, curious.

As part of the rankings, U.S. News asks institutions of higher education to report what percentage of their faculty are full time.  Any reader of FACE Talk would expect those numbers to be fairly low given the recent national data that has been reported on this issue.  But surprisingly the lowest percentage that any of the top ranked national universities report is 68 percent reported by George Washington University which is the only top-ranked university to report that less than 70 percent of its faculty full time. 

The majority of top colleges report well over 80 percent of their faculty are full-time and a large number report that well over 90 percent of their faculty are full-time.   University of Nebraska-Lincoln even reports that 100 percent of its faculty are full-time.  Amazing! 

But let's take a closer look.

If you head on over to the AFT Higher Ed Data Center which is all data compiled from reports institutions of  higher education are required to submit to the U.S. Department of Education, you might find a different story.  For instance, here is the instructional staff data on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  What you see is that in the Fall of 2007, Nebraska reported that they have 1,539 full-time faculty (a third of which are not on the tenure-track) and 401 part-time faculty.  Now I was an English major, but my math tells me that means that only 79 percent of the faculty is full-time.

Now the U.S. News data are for 2008, but I am going to guess they didn't convert to 100 percent full time faculty in one year's time, particularly given that the ten-year trend data in the Data Center shows a slight increase in part-time faculty as a proportion of the whole.

Of course, that isn't the whole story because by asking what percentage of "faculty" the question allows the institutions to conveniently ignore a whole class of employees that universities increasingly rely on to teach undergraduate courses:  graduate employees.  Another look at Nebraska's data shows that they reported having 1,852 graduate assistants.  That is nearly the same number of graduate assistants as all faculty at the University of Nebraska, and we know that graduate employees at research institutions such as Nebraska are carrying more and more of the instructional workload.

Now to be fair, we could do this same analysis with just about any institution in the U.S. News rankings-although Nebraska's claim of 100 percent was too tempting to pass up.  The real point here is why is this statistic included in the rankings?  Surely it is because it is intended to show that these top colleges are investing in those that parents and students assume are responsible for their education, but clearly readers of U.S. News are not getting the full story.  To do that they are going to have ask for more information about who is teaching undergraduates at the colleges they are considering and how well the college supports those faculty members and instructors.