The University of the West Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

Does University of the West have a good student to faculty ratio?

Check out the information on class structures and faculty to get a feel for the academic life at University of the West .

Excellent Student to Faculty Ratio

Student to faculty ratio is a common metric used to gauge the number of teaching resources a school provides for its students. With 10 students for every one instructional faculty member, University of the West ranks among the best colleges when compared to the national average of 15.

Breakdown of Instructional Staff

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 the West as primarily performing research or public service.

This College Among the Worst for Full-Time Teachers

University of the West's use of full-time instructors ranks among the nation's lowest, with only 25.0% of instructors teaching on a full-time basis.

High Reliance on Part-Time Teachers or Adjuncts

75.0% of the teaching staff at University of the West are part-time non-faculty or non-tenure track faculty. This high use of adjuncts is far above the national average of 51.4% . A high use of adjuncts instead of tenured professors is controversial, and some consider this statistic to be indicative of a college'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.

Reliance on Graduate Assistants Unknown

We were not able to determine University of the West's reliance on graduate students.