Brown University's Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

Does Brown Have a Good Student to Faculty Ratio?

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

Importance of Faculty Composition at Brown

The student to faculty ratio, as well as the number of full-time vs. part-time instructors, can give you an idea of how much attention you'll receive as an individual student at Brown University.

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 9 students for every one instructional faculty member, Brown University ranks among the best colleges when compared to the national average of 14.

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 Brown University as primarily performing research or public service.

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

Brown University's utilization of full-time teaching staff ranks among the highest in the nation, with 85.0% 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 Brown University, only 15.0% 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 51.0%, which could be indicative of Brown University'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? An adjunct is a teacher that has either no contract or a very short term contract for a single semester or year. These teachers often instruct only a single class or two at a given college and may have teaching or non-teaching jobs elsewhere. The term 'adjunct' can be used very loosely in academia, and many schools classify these instructors differently. To account for this difference, 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

Brown University has 470 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 379 non-instructional graduate assistants.