Let's chat about priorities.
If I asked you to tell me your priorities in life, you could probably give me, with some thought, a reasonably complete list. Being a generally trusting guy, I would probably accept your word.
Now imagine you have $630 million to spend however you wish. I could ask you about your priorities, but I wouldn't take a list seriously. This time, to be believed, you'll have to show me how you spent your bucks.
Dartmouth talks a great list. Its promotional materials invariably convey the image that small classes and close student-faculty interaction are top priorities. But Dartmouth - which, unlike you, actually has $630 million a year to bandy about - is never particularly candid about how it spends its money. And there is reason to believe that to the people who control how the dollars get spent, ensuring small classes is not a priority at all.
The best way to make classes smaller is to offer more classes. That means hiring more faculty. Dartmouth's public relations people recently weighed in on this issue on the "Ask Dartmouth" website. In discussing "how [the faculty has] grown over the past few years," a nameless bureaucrat confidently reassures us that "the Dartmouth faculty has grown significantly over the past decade." Moreover, "both [College] President [James] Wright and Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt have made it a top priority to increase the faculty still more." Good. The bureaucrat gets numerical: "The number of tenure-track faculty... in the Arts and Sciences has grown from 336 in 1998 to 372 in 2007. This is an 11 percent increase."
I laughed when I read that statistic. An 11 percent increase over a decade is an absurdly slow rate of growth. Do the math: it works out to 1.1 percent annual growth over the nine hiring cycles during that period. In absolute terms, it's a net gain of only four professors a year. Is that the best Wright and Folt can do in pursuit of this "top priority?" But if you count non-tenure-track faculty, the numbers are much better! There we see 380 to 429 over the past decade, which works out to an annual growth rate of... 1.3 percent. Five professors a year.
Incidentally, the bureaucrats themselves seem unclear on how many professors we have. Elsewhere on Dartmouth's website - on the "Facts" page under "About Dartmouth" - the current number of tenure-track Arts and Sciences faculty is listed as 363, nine less than the number listed in "Ask Dartmouth." If that number is correct, we need to revise our figure. Three professors a year.
Do not be fooled; be aware: The bureaucrats inflate these numbers all the time. Vox of Dartmouth routinely places new faculty "In the Spotlight," highlighting all the great professors we gain each year. And all the great professors we lose? Slipped somebody's mind. Also, annual turnover in visiting faculty is high - over 20 in some years. Though visitors' appointments are temporary, each is technically an added faculty position. They can thus be included in vaguely-worded counts.
Ask Dartmouth also addresses the question, "Is it true that Dartmouth created more than twice as many administrative positions as faculty positions over five years?" The response immediately launches into statistics. "According to a 2006 analysis by McKinsey & Co., during the period from 2001 through 2005 the College added 111 administrative positions and cut 28 positions for a net growth of 83 positions in the College-only budget." That makes it easy. The net gain in administrative positions over five years was more than twice the net gain in tenure-track faculty positions over 10 years.
To get at class sizes more directly, let's turn to the U.S. News and World Report's annual college rankings. Not the rankings themselves - I don't care about how some statistician is paid to spin numbers. But the raw numbers are telling.
In particular, the rankings list the percentage of classes at each institution with fewer than 20 students and the percentage with 50 or more students. In 2005, 64 percent of Dartmouth's classes had enrollments under 20. That's seventh in the Ivy League - only better than Cornell! And fully 10 percent had 50 or more students - tied with Princeton and Brown, worse than Columbia, Penn and Yale. So much for the myth that Dartmouth's classes are smaller than its competitors'.
It is apparent from past years' rankings that Dartmouth has seen modest improvement, but the increases have not been steady. The under-20 figure was 57 percent in 2002, 56 percent in 2003 and 61 percent in 2004. Other statistics tell a similar story. Dartmouth's 2005 student-to-faculty ratio of 8:1 was the third worst in the Ivy League, only lower than Cornell's and Brown's. Since 2002 it has improved from 9:1. The improvement is good, but we still don't approach the best. Yale's ratio is 6:1; Princeton's, 5:1. And the percentage of our classes with over 50 students has actually increased.
According to the registrar's website, Dartmouth's economics department is offering 39 courses this term. Some 35 have capped enrollments, but only nine of those caps are set at under 20. Of the 35 capped courses, as of April 8, 11 had enrollments that met or exceeded their caps, and another 13 were within three students of their caps. Those data speak for themselves. For an institution that sells itself on its supposedly small and accessible classes, the facts are pathetically out of line.
Where are Dartmouth's priorities? Do we want more faculty? If we do, we're doing horribly. Sure, we have seen small gains over the past decade. But on "top priorities," small gains are just not good enough. To brag about sluggish improvement is the definition of mediocrity. That's not Dartmouth.
