Does teaching count? The relationship between US News World Report faculty resource measures and students experiences with faculty

Abstract

Prior scholarship has revealed that U.S. News & World Report rankings of higher education institutions are by-and-large not related to student engagement; however, these studies often fail to disaggregate the rankings by their component categories such as student outcomes and faculty resources. The 2019 Best Colleges Rankings category of Faculty Resources constitutes 20 percent of the overall score for an institution and includes measures of class size, faculty salary, proportion of full-time faculty with the highest degree in their fields, student-faculty ratio, and the proportion of faculty who are full time. However, it is unclear whether these measures are related to student experiences with faculty. The purpose of this chapter is to understand whether the measures rankings use for faculty resources relate to student engagement using data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Each spring about 300,000 first-year and senior students participate in this survey and report their involvement in educationally purposeful activities. For the purposes of the current chapter, we focus on the measures within the Faculty Resources category of the U.S. News & World Report rankings to see how (or if) they relate to the NSSE’s measures of Student-Faculty Interaction and Effective Teaching Practices. Analysis includes multilevel modelling to account for covariates at the institution level (size, private vs. public, selectivity) and student level (gender, race and ethnicity, first-generation status). The results from this chapter will inform consumers as to which aspects of the rankings indicate quality experiences with faculty, while providing cautionary evidence to institutional administrators touting their rank.