“According to the registrar’s website, Dartmouth’s economics department is offering 39 courses this term. Some 35 have capped enrollments, but only nine of those caps are set at under 20 [students]. Of the 35 capped courses, as of April 8, 11 had enrollments that met or exceeded their caps, and another 13 were within three students of their caps. Those data speak for themselves. For an institution that sells itself on its supposedly small and accessible classes, the facts are pathetically out of line.”
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
“To get at class sizes more directly, let’s turn to the U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings. . . . [T]he rankings list the percentage of classes at each institution with fewer than 20 students and the percentage with 50 or more students. In 2005, 65% of Dartmouth’s classes had enrollments under 20. That’s seventh in the Ivy League — only better than Cornell! And fully 10% had 50 or more students — tied with Princeton and Brown, worse than Columbia, Penn and Yale. So much for the myth that Dartmouth’s classes are smaller than its competitors’.
“. . . Other stastistics tell a similar story. Dartmouth’s 2005 student-to-faculty ratio of 8:1 was the third worst in the Ivy League, only lower than Cornell’s and Brown’s. Since 2002 it has improved from 9:1. The improvement is good, but we still don’t approach the best. Yale’s ratio is 6:1; Princeton’s, 5:1. And the percentage of our classes with over 50 students has actually increased.”
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
“The best way to make classes smaller is to offer more classes. That means hiring more faculty. Dartmouth’s public relations people recently weighed in on this issue on the ‘Ask Dartmouth’ website. In discussing ‘how [the faculty has] grown over the past few years,’ a nameless bureaucrat confidently reassures us that ‘the Dartmouth faculty has grown significantly over the past decade.’ Moreover, ‘both [College] President [James] Wright and Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt have made it a top priority to increase the faculty still more.’ Good. The bureaucrat gets numerical: ‘The number of tenure-track faculty . . . in the Arts and Sciences has grown from 336 in 1998 to 372 in 2007. This is an 11 percent increase.’
“I laughed when I read that statistic. An 11 percent increase over a decade is an absurdly slow rate of growth. Do the math: it works out to 1.1 percent annual growth over the nine hiring cycles during that period. In absolute terms, it’s a net gain of only four professors a year. Is that the best Wright and Folt can do in pursuit of this ‘top priority’? But if you count non-tenure-track faculty, the numbers are much better! There we see 380 to 429 over the past decade, which works out to an annual growth rate of . . . 1.3 percent. Five professors a year.”
(Bracketed material and ellipses in original.)
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
“The best way to make classes smaller is to offer more classes. That means hiring more faculty. Dartmouth’s public relations people recently weighed in on this issue on the ‘Ask Dartmouth’ website. In discussing ‘how [the faculty has] grown over the past few years,’ a nameless bureaucrat confidently reassures us that ‘the Dartmouth faculty has grown significantly over the past decade.’ Moreover, ‘both [College] President [James] Wright and Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt have made it a top priority to increase the faculty still more.’ Good. The bureaucrat gets numerical: ‘The number of tenure-track faculty . . . in the Arts and Sciences has grown from 336 in 1998 to 372 in 2007. This is an 11 percent increase.’
“I laughed when I read that statistic. An 11 percent increase over a decade is an absurdly slow rate of growth. Do the math: it works out to 1.1 percent annual growth over the nine hiring cycles during that period. In absolute terms, it’s a net gain of only four professors a year. Is that the best Wright and Folt can do in pursuit of this ‘top priority’? But if you count non-tenure-track faculty, the numbers are much better! There we see 380 to 429 over the past decade, which works out to an annual growth rate of . . . 1.3 percent. Five professors a year.”
(Bracketed material and ellipses in original.)
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
“[T]he bureaucrats themselves seem unclear on how many professors we have. Elsewhere on Dartmouth’s website — on the ‘Facts’ page under ‘Ask Dartmouth’ — the current number of tenure-track Arts and Sciences faculty is listed as 363, nine less than the number listed in ‘Ask Dartmouth.’”
–The Dartmouth, Apr. 16, 2007
available at http://thedartmouth.com/2007/04/16/opinion/priorities/print/
