Provost presents data on enrollment and faculty capacity to Faculty Senate
As the University of Idaho pushes to increase enrollment, more students on campus might mean more faculty as well.
To meet UI President Chuck Staben”s goal of increasing enrollment by 50 percent, Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek said UI would need to hire more faculty to accommodate for the added students.
“We have to figure out how we want to continue to grow going forward,” he said at the Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday.
Currently, the average student-to-faculty ratio at UI stands at about 16-to-1, Wiencek said. Theoretically, if UI received more than 2,000 new students and the student-faculty ratio rose to 20-to-1, the university would add about $15.1 million to its annual revenue without hiring any new faculty, he said.
The student-to-faculty ratio also depends on the different types of classes offered, Wiencek said. Where one professor could teach a class of 100 students with ease, some other classes may require a much smaller environment to adequately teach students. Wiencek said UI needs to decide how it is going to maintain a balance.
In the last 10 years, UI has maintained a low level of adjunct faculty at about 10 percent, which Wiencek said he is happy to see.
Yet, he said he is troubled by the steady increase of tenure-track faculty and the already high level for tenured faculty, which stands at more than 50 percent. He also said the university currently seems to be disinvesting in full-time instructional faculty.
Wiencek said there is no rush to set anything in stone yet and his presentation was meant to plant a seed. He said faculty should begin to discuss what this information means in the next couple of years when UI begins to bring in more faculty as enrollment numbers rise.
“It would be great if we had an articulated philosophy statement on how those things … how all those pieces, how that ecosystem works and how we need to make sure that”s balanced.”
While many faculty members feel pride toward multiple positive aspects of working for the university, a lot of faculty members are dissatisfied with their salaries and benefits, according to the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) Faculty Survey that Wiencek presented at the meeting.
“Faculty are satisfied with their job security,” Wiencek said. “They like the environment as far as doing scholarship and collaborating with faculty peers.”
Wiencek said the issues with faculty pay are due to the multiple institutional budget cuts that have taken place in recent years. According to UI”s 2011 financial report, faculty salaries and benefits are 16.7 percent below the average market wage with about a $20 million shortfall currently.
Referencing Monday”s State of the University Address given by Staben, Wiencek said increasing student tuition and fees is likely the most efficient way to grow the university budget.
Like Staben said in his address, Wiencek said the ideal way to increase the amount of revenue gained from tuition and fees is to grow enrollment numbers instead of raising the cost of attending UI.
“There is a path here to move forward substantially with salaries,” he said. “Maybe not get all the way to 100 percent, but rather quickly we can get some significant increase in salary by growing enrollment in a way that our current staff can continue to work.”
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer