The Carnegie Mellon University Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

What is the faculty composition at Carnegie Mellon?

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

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, Carnegie Mellon 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 Carnegie Mellon University as primarily performing research or public service.

How Seriously Does This School Take Hiring Full-Time Teachers? Very Seriously

Carnegie Mellon University's utilization of full-time teaching staff ranks among the highest in the nation, with 77.0% of instructors employed full time.

Reliance on Part-Time Teachers is Way Below Average

At Carnegie Mellon University, only 23.0% 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 49.0%, which could be indicative of Carnegie Mellon 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?

  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.

Grad Assistants May Not Teach Classes

Carnegie Mellon University reports 2,789 graduate assistants, however, none of them are considered instructional, meaning they do not teach or perform teaching-related activities.