The University of California - Riverside Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

Does UCR have a good student to faculty ratio?

Get a feel for student life at UCR by checking out the information on classes and faculty below.

Poor Student to Faculty Ratio

University of California - Riverside , with 23 students for every instructional faculty member, ranks among the lowest in comparison to the national average of 15 :1. This ratio indicates that the number of students split between the same faculty is much higher than normal, and could mean students will experience larger class sizes and fewer opportunities to connect with professors, especially in introductory courses.

Instructional Staff at the College

The following table shows all the employees the school considers instructional, and therefore, part of the above student-to-faculty ratio. These include both those employees designated as either "primarily instructional" or as "instructional combined with research/public service". It does not include employees that have been identified by University of California - Riverside as primarily performing research or public service.

Do You Like Being Taught by Full-Time Teachers? Then You're Picking the Right School.

University of California - Riverside's utilization of full-time teaching staff ranks among the highest in the nation, with 87.0% of instructors employed full time.

Any Questions?

• Research-Focused College: This school has a large number of faculty that spend a significant amount of their time on research projects. This can be a big plus if you are interested in pursuing graduate work or performing research yourself. However, the risk for all students, particularly undergrads, is that many of the faculty may be focused on their research, not on your instruction.

Not Many Adjunct Teachers Here

At University of California - Riverside , only 13.0% of the teaching staff are part-time non-faculty or non-tenure track faculty. This use of adjuncts is far below the national average of 51.4%, which could be indicative of University of California - Riverside's commitment to building a strong, long-term instructional team.

Colleges often use part-time professors and adjuncts to teach courses, rather than full-time faculty. This hiring practice is primarily a way to save money amid increasingly tight budgets. However, it is a controversial practice with strong views on either side. We encourage you to understand this topic more deeply, and how the colleges you are interested in approach faculty hiring. It's your education and your money on the line. Make sure you know what you are getting for it.

Additional Information

• What is an Adjunct?

  On this page, we refer to an adjunct teacher or a part-time teacher interchangeably, although each school may have a slightly different definition. In short, an adjunct professor can either work full-time or part-time during a school semester, but they have no contract or a contract that lasts only a short amount of time. To come up with the numbers for this page, we use the total number of part-time non-faculty and non-tenure track faculty to represent the count of adjuncts for the college or university.

You May End Up Getting Taught by a Grad Assistant

University of California - Riverside has 1,415 instructional graduate assistants that teach or provide teaching-related duties. These responsibilities could range from entirely teaching lower-level courses themselves, to assisting professors by developing teaching materials, preparing or giving exams and grading student work. We suggest you ask the college to what extent graduate assistants are relied on for instruction, so you know what you are paying for.

Additionally, the school has 558 non-instructional graduate assistants.