The University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

Does University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus 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 New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus .

Student to Faculty Ratio is Well Below Average

University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus , with 24 students for every instructional faculty member, ranks among the lowest in comparison to the national average of 15 :1. This ratio indicates that the number of students split between the same faculty is much higher than normal, and could mean students will experience larger class sizes and fewer opportunities to connect with professors, especially in introductory courses.

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 New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus as primarily performing research or public service.

This College Among the Worst for Full-Time Teachers

University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus' use of full-time instructors ranks among the nation's lowest, with only 19.0% of instructors teaching on a full-time basis.

High Reliance on Part-Time Teachers or Adjuncts

76.0% of the teaching staff at University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus 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.

No Graduate Programs

Many U.S. colleges utilize enrolled graduate assistants to help instructional faculty, however, as University of New Mexico - Los Alamos Campus does not offer graduate degree programs, this practice is not applicable to this college.