- In recent years, there have been increasing rumors that the increase in university costs is the result of administrative burdens: colleges hiring more teachers and staff than necessary.
- Federal data sets show that student-to-staff ratios are much lower than the viral claims suggest, even at Ivy League schools.
- Some confusion arises because hospitalists and graduate assistants are considered “administrators.”
The statement is easy to repeat and hard to forget. Some versions suggest that elite colleges employ one administrator for every two students, or even multiple staff members per student. Have these numbers even made it into Congressional policy debatesop-eds and social media posts, often presented as self-evident evidence that colleges have lost control of their staffing levels.
But when these claims are tested against federal data, they fall apart.
Enrollment and staffing figures from the National Center for Education Statistics and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System show a very different picture.
At American colleges, and even at Ivy League institutions, students far outnumber staff. Faculty account for a significant portion of the workforce, and many institutions appear to have large staff only because they operate hospitals, medical schools, or large research companies that serve the public well beyond their student populations (and are usually self-financing).
Let’s dive into the data and see how these rumors break down.
Actual Staff-to-Student Ratios at Ivy League Colleges
The staff-to-student ratio at the eight Ivy League colleges (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, and Yale) is 60%. In other words: approximately 6 staff members for every 10 students. If a college enrolls 10,000 students, there are 6,000 staff members.
If teachers are excluded, the ratio drops to 37%. What are non-faculty employees? This includes admissions, financial aid, IT, libraries, student services, career services, compliance, facilities, administration and campus safety.
The teaching and research staff represents 23% of student enrollment, which equates to an average of 5 students per faculty member. The student/staff ratio is slightly higher if enrollment is limited to students only.
Based on data from College Navigatorthe student-to-faculty ratio at Ivy League colleges ranges from 5 to 9 students per faculty member.
What do the national data show?
The Trend generator tool from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) can be used to obtain national data.
Based on the Trend Generator tool, there are a total of 4 million college employees in the USincluding 1.5 million teachers. There are a total of 3.5 million staff members at 4-year colleges, 1.2 million of whom are faculty.
There are a total of 25.7 million students in college in 2023-2024with 18.3 million at 4-year colleges. Of these, 14.2 million are undergraduates and 4.1 million are graduate students.
The ratio of the number of students to all staff (including teachers) is therefore 6.4 at all colleges and 5.2 at 4-year colleges. When limited to only undergraduate students and faculty at 4-year colleges, the ratio is 11.8.
Where do the errors come from?
The rumors seem to reverse these ratios, treating the student/staff ratio as if it were a staff/student ratio.
It’s also important to remember that total headcount may be skewed for some schools. For example, at medical schools or colleges with university-affiliated hospitals, the total workforce includes hospital staff.
For other schools, graduate students working through assistantships (a form of financial aid) are also counted in the figures.
This may increase the staff-to-student ratio at specific colleges, but not to the level highlighted in the rumors.
Using the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)we can obtain data on individual colleges and subtract healthcare workers and graduate student workers. Note that some faculty have dual roles as university faculty and health care personnel. These factorials were not subtracted.
This graph shows the ratio of staff to students in the 2024 IPEDS dataset, net of healthcare workers and graduate student staff. The mean ratio is 21% with a standard deviation of 15%, the median is 15% and the mode is 12%.
Among the colleges with the highest staff-to-student ratios are medical schools and institutions that graduate students only, such as:
- Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
- Weill Medical College of Cornell University
- Baylor College of Medicine
- Rockefeller University
- Oregon Health and Science University
- Medical University of Wisconsin
- UCSF
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
- Albany Medical University
- University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School
The first college that is not a medical school or graduate-only institution is the Curtis Institute of Music. It has a 50% staff-to-student ratio if limited to non-faculty staff only.
The data also corresponds to non-academic staff. Non-academic staff includes food services, financial aid, library services, student services, IT and facilities, administration, and campus safety.
The following graph shows a histogram of the ratio of non-academic staff to the number of students. The mean ratio is 10% with a standard deviation of 8%, the median is 7% and the mode is 5%.
Consider that if a college enrolls 10,000 students, a 10% ratio would mean there are 1,000 non-academic staff.
Conclusion
Claims about red tape at American colleges persist because they are simple, memorable, and often repeated without context. But when enrollment and personnel data are carefully examined, these claims do not hold up.
A staff to student ratio of 60% does not mean that colleges employ more staff than students, nor does it mean that the workforce is dominated by administrators. It means that there are still more students than staff, and teachers, researchers and operational staff make up the majority of the number.
Much of the confusion stems from inverted ratios, misclassified employees, and the inclusion of hospital and research personnel who perform functions well beyond undergraduate education. When these factors are removed, the typical staff-to-student ratio drops sharply, and extreme outliers are almost exclusively medical schools or graduate-only institutions, rather than traditional four-year colleges.
This does not mean that every college is hiring efficiently or that rising costs do not deserve attention. But debates over college affordability are better served by accurate numbers than viral claims. Understanding what headcount ratios actually measure (and what they don’t) is a necessary starting point for any serious discussion about the cost of higher education.
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