The University of Pennsylvania Student to Faculty Ratio & Faculty Composition

Does UPenn have a good student to faculty ratio?

Use the student to faculty ratio, as well as the faculty composition to get an idea of how much attention you'll receive as an individual student at UPenn .

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 6 students for every one instructional faculty member, University of Pennsylvania ranks among the best colleges when compared to the national average of 15.

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 Pennsylvania as primarily performing research or public service.

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

University of Pennsylvania's utilization of full-time teaching staff ranks among the highest in the nation, with 99.0% of instructors employed full time.

Any Questions?

• High Number of Non-Instructional Staff: This college lists less than 20% of its employees as instructional which could merely be the way the school reports their numbers, or, it could indicate an unusually high number of faculty has various duties, with only a few focused primarily on instruction.

Not Many Adjunct Teachers Here

At University of Pennsylvania , only 1.0% 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 51.4%, which could be indicative of University of Pennsylvania'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.

Reliance on Graduate Assistants Unknown

We were not able to determine University of Pennsylvania's reliance on graduate students.