Thursday, November 15, 2001

Faculty demand on rise in key areas
By Kristina Iodice
Copy Desk Chief

When a prospective student asks about the student-to-faculty ratio, admissions personnel and TCU literature all say 15-to-1— but that number is an average of the entire university and does not reflect the differences between different schools and departments.

When Ashley Hungerford, a senior radio-TV-film major, first arrived to TCU more than three years ago, she was told the university had a 14-1 student-to-faculty ratio. She still had trouble getting into the lower-level radio-TV-film classes.

The last time the department added a new faculty member was before department chairman Roger Cooper came to TCU. The only faculty changes in the last decade have been associated with normal turnover, he said.

“We’ve gone from about 80 to 160 (students) in the last 10 years and through all that time we had no increase in faculty. It really put a lot of strain on our program,” Cooper said.

There are simply too many students and not enough faculty, Hungerford said.

The problem is an example found in many of the schools and departments across campus: the struggle between balancing a growing student population with a limited number of faculty.

Provost William Koehler said about 30 faculty positions have been added over the past five years.

“We conclude that needs were identified and there has been action taken to meet some of those needs, and the process goes on,” he said. “Most faculty will say that they need more colleagues. It’s just kind of the way the world works.”

Koehler said there is a pressing need for more faculty in key areas, especially since student enrollment has increased significantly over the past five years. Each time the administration thinks something has been achieved in terms of having more faculty per student, enrollment increases and ground is lost, he said. The issue is part of the budget process each year.

Capital support from donations and gifts, finances building improvements. The operating budget is used for many expenses including faculty salaries and additions, said Chancellor Michael Ferrari.

“Every high-quality institution wants to have as low a ratio as possible, but we are still trying to keep tuition reasonable.”

Most of the time, a growing number of enrolled students is a positive thing for a university. However, there is a major problem when departments and colleges are struggling to manage the students already enrolled, before new students even arrive.

Mary Volcansek, AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences dean, said at least eight more faculty lines in the college would be needed to take care of the students already enrolled at the university.

“We’re talking about faculty we need for the students who are here now,” said Tommy Thomason, journalism department chairman.

Cooper said the university encourages departments to keep the number of adjuncts to a minimum and classes can only accommodate a limited number of students, which makes it difficult for students to graduate from the radio-TV-film program in four years.
Administration officials told the department to find a way to fix the problem without adding additional faculty.

Now, students who want to be radio-TV-film majors must formally apply. Three core classes must be completed with at least a 2.5 GPA. A writing sample, academic transcript and letter of application must be reviewed before a student can take additional courses.

However, it will take two or three years before the department sees the effects of the new rules, Cooper said.

Other areas in the College of Communication are also struggling to balance the number of majors with the number of faculty members.

Journalism has been one of the fastest-growing majors at TCU during the past half-decade. During the 1990s there were roughly 300 students and seven and a half full-time faculty for the department, department chairman Tommy Thomason said.

urrently, the department has about 460 majors and eight full-time faculty members.
Last year, Thomason researched faculty-student ratios in journalism programs at accredited private universities.

“Of every accredited private university journalism program in the nation, ours has the worst student-to-professor ratio, at 53 students for every full-time faculty member,” he said. “The next-worst ratio was Brigham Young at 39 students per full-time faculty.”

Many journalism courses are taught by adjunct faculty members. Adjuncts offer a different perspective, Thomason said, but they don’t advise students and are not readily available.

David Whillock, interim dean for the College of Communication, has been asking for additional faculty for the college on a continual basis.

“We cannot continue the quality of education we want by holding onto a ratio of 50 students to one,” he said. “We’re trying to fulfill every need but we have a finite amount of funding.”

Adding new faculty positions, and finding the people to fill them, is the single most important need at TCU, said Mary Volcansek, AddRan dean.

All new faculty positions need to be approved by the Board of Trustees. The search for one new addition can cost around $2,500 and it is not a one-time purchase, she said.

“It is a real long-term commitment and I think that’s why the board is reluctant to add more than a few at a time,” Volcansek said.

Last year, she requested seven new faculty members and received three assistant professor lines. Yet because of the flat tuition rate and the additional credit hours that students are likely to take, the new positions will hardly help solve the needs of the college, Volcansek said. Currently, those positions are filled with lecturers and they are in the process of trying to find assistant professors.

“We’re the ones who are carrying the bulk of increases in credit hours that the block pricing,” she said. “Students are taking more courses and almost all of those fall largely with us.

“Large classes are not by definition bad, it’s just that we would like to have more that facilitate discussion, more that facilitate personal attention. When I’m teaching, once a class goes over 35, it might as well be a hundred in terms of what I can and can’t do with students,” she said.

The near future poses additional problems for AddRan. Volcansek said she plans to request five to seven new faculty lines on the list due in early November. The target for the new core to take effect is the fall 2003 semester and it will make a difference where faculty positions are needed, she said.

When it comes to increasing faculty numbers, it always comes back to an issue of money. Volcansek said there are three ways to generate income for the university: the endowment, philanthropy and enrollment.

The stock market has been down, which affects the endowment directly and also philanthropy because people will not make as many contributions, she said.

“If enrollment stays stable we still have the problem of providing the classes. If we can’t count on as much philanthropy and we can’t count on the endowment, then there won’t be as much money for new faculty positions,” Volcansek said.

The radio-TV-film department is not the only area that began enforcing a set of admission standards. The M.J. Neeley School of Business requires students to apply to the business school January of their sophomore year. It was unreasonable and unfair for business school students to have trouble finding classes, said Charles Williams, associate dean for undergraduate studies.

The new requirements include a formal interview, a test on Microsoft Office skills and a specific cumulative GPA in lower-level business classes. The school also limits enrollment in upper-level courses to business majors.

Williams said the reason behind the decision was that were some upper-level course required for majors have 50, 60 or 70 students enrolled.

“The key is we’re committed to small classes and an outstanding business education,” he said. “We wanted students in the undergraduate program to get the TCU experience.”

In the last seven years the number of majors in the business school has doubled, but the number of faculty has not doubled, Williams said.

“Last year in the business school we were averaging 40 students per class and this fall we are down to 37 students,” he said. “It’s still much larger than the rest of TCU, but that number is going in the right direction.”

He said all three of the business school programs — undergraduate, Master’s in Business Administration program and executive education — need to be served, but the undergraduate program is the one with the problem.

However, not all areas of the university are straining to meet student needs. Babette Bohn, art history professor in the art and art history department, said determining faculty needs is more complicated than looking at the number of majors.

Last year, the art history section of the department had 23 majors, 20 minors and also a Masters of Art program taught by four full-time faculty. The art history faculty also teach courses for other majors within the department.

Bohn said the department is not over-staffed. She said she works between 70 and 80 hours each week and one of her classes has 115 students.

She said departments like journalism and radio-TV-film are clearly understaffed, but that doesn’t mean the art department has too many faculty. The art history professors teach a variety of classes that non-majors and non-minors take to fulfill certain UCR requirements.

Koehler said each year the administration analyzes each area of the university, looking at credit hours taught be full time and part-time faculty and comparing those numbers to target figures.

“It’s not just a matter of the number of faculty and the number of students you really have to get in detail and look at what is being taught by whom,” he said. “We don’t want, for example, all the full-time faculty to teach juniors, seniors and graduates and all the part-time faculty teaching freshmen and sophomores.”

Tenure can contribute to the problem because faculty lines cannot be moved from department to department. Koehler said the hope is that there is enough turnover, either by faculty leaving the university or retiring to maintain a relative balance between students and faculty on campus.

“There is a price to pay for the tenure system, and that is frequently a university cannot adjust quickly enough to changing student enrollment patterns, but we try to do that over a bit more time.”

There has also been discussion about putting limiting undergraduate enrollment. If the cap was drastically lower than current enrollment, there would be enough faculty, but no one would support an enrollment cap that would cause a reduction in faculty, Koehler said.

“I think it important to examine the idea of an enrollment cap and try to come to grips with what is the optimum size of the undergraduate enrollment and then try to have an admissions plan so we can always maintain that enrollment,” Koehler said. “As long as the enrollment keeps going up, you’re always chasing it in terms of staffing.”

Koehler said student-to-faculty ratios are often misleading, since the students and faculty are usually not defined. He said he thinks there is a better way to analyze the student experience than using student-to-faculty ratio alone.

“I think what admissions is trying to convey, which is accurate, is that there is more opportunity to contact and be taught by faculty at TCU than there may be at other institutions,” Koehler said. “I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in whether it is 14.8 or 16.1, not until somebody defines the parameters and the terms.”

Ferrari said it is more important to get at the quality of education rather than a number.

“If you only concentrate on driving down the faculty-to-student ratio without looking at anything else, what have you really accomplished anything other being able to say in marketing materials that you have a certain ratio?”

Ferrari said he is waiting to see what comes out of the new core before determining the financial implications in terms of faculty needs.

“The faculty-to-student ratio is an important statistic, but by itself it still doesn’t tell you what goes on inside the classroom.

“We’re trying to strengthen the university and the quality of the education,” Ferrari said. “We’re also trying to do a better job of managing our expenses and costs.”

Long-term plans change according to finances, and unless there are dramatic economic changes in the next six months or so, which is possible, the goal is stretched out, he said.

“A two- to three-year timeline becomes a three- or five-year goal. We don’t abandon the goal, but we’re going to have to temper it in some way.

“I want to do everything we can do to ensure a high-quality education. I want to make sure we don’t over-promise or under-deliver.”

Kristina Iodice
K.K.Iodice@student.tcu.edu