World's Best Universities: Student-to-Faculty Ratio

U.S.News & World Report's World's Best Universities rankings, based on the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, identified these to be world's top universities in 2009.

Schools by Location The Top 200 Asian and Middle Eastern Australian and New Zealand British and European Canadian Schools by Subject The Top 200 Arts and Humanities Engineering and IT Life Sciences and Biomedicine Natural & Physical Sciences Social Sciences Methodologies World's Best Universities Methodology Subject Area Rankings Methodology Academic Peer Review Citations per Faculty Member Student-to-Faculty Ratio Employer Review Survey International Student and International Faculty Factors Weightings and Statistical Scores About the World's Best Universities Rankings

How is the widely used student-to-faculty ratio measure incorporated into the World's Best Universities rankings?

A student-to-faculty ratio is, at present, the only globally comparable and available indicator that has been identified to address the objective of evaluating teaching quality for the U.S. News World's Best Universities rankings, which are based on data from the THE-QS World University Rankings produced in association with QS Quacquarelli Symonds. Clearly, this ratio is not a comprehensive qualitative classroom evaluation. It does directly measure the "commitment to teaching," which ought to correlate strongly with the level of teaching quality.

For the calculation of this indicator, QS gathers two distinct data sets:

Full-time-equivalent (FTE) students. QS requests a number of data points pertaining to students. At present, the total student numbers are drawn from the separate undergraduate and postgraduate numbers supplied to QS. Where these data are unavailable or incomplete, total student body numbers are used.

Full-time-equivalent (FTE) faculty. The faculty numbers used are totals. It would be ideal to separate the teaching and research faculties and use the former for calculating this indicator and the latter for citations per faculty, but it has not been possible to do so because data that specific have so far been unavailable for many countries in the study. The definition of exactly what data we request has evolved over the years to minimize ambiguity.

Student-to-faculty ratio is a commonly used measure in many evaluations and rankings around the world. There are countless ways to calculate it. QS collects data not only directly from the institutions themselves but also from government ministries, Web sources, and other third parties. Where it's possible, the data are cross-checked against multiple sources to verify the measure's authenticity.