University hopes to lower faculty-student ratio
Consider USC’s faculty hiring freeze over.
The university plans to hire 60 new faculty members in the second phase of a replenishment initiative it began last year. Costs for the 60 new jobs is estimated to be about $4.5 million a year, according to Provost Michael Amiridis. The university will pay these new faculty members up to $95,000 each, which means the plan could actually cost up to $5.7 million a year.
Two years of record freshman classes, coupled with tuition hikes, has left money available for the project, according to Amiridis.
“This will allow us to have more classes taught by faculty members, more opportunities for students to do work with them, more mentoring and more independent study,” Amiridis said.
When the replenishment is complete in about two years, USC will have increased its faculty ranks by about 10 percent since 2008, when its corps dropped below 950. Last year, USC awarded 41 new positions across the Columbia campus in the project’s first phase. Searches are underway for those positions.
It’s part of a long-term effort to hire 200 more faculty members in the next four years.
The hires are designed to lower USC’s faculty-student ratio, Amiridis said. Currently, there are about 19 undergraduate students for every faculty member at USC.
That’s equal to the University of Georgia at 19-to-1 but higher than Clemson’s at 16-to-1, according to the Princeton Review. Tennessee has about 16 faculty members to every undergraduate student while UNC-Chapel Hill’s ratio is 14-to-1.
USC wants that ratio to be about 17-to-1, according to Amiridis. That ratio, used to measure a university’s commitment to quality teaching and faculty-staff interaction, is widely considered a top indicator in national rankings. The ratio counts as 20 percent of US News and World Report’s annual rankings of best colleges and universities.
There seems to be a lot of demand for the new positions. More than 150 proposals were submitted from USC’s various colleges for the hires, Amiridis said. Those new faculty members will be brought on board for next fall, Amiridis said.
USC’s administration plans to again take proposals for the new hires from every college. About 40 will come from the proposal process, and the remaining 20 will be at the administration’s discretion, Amiridis said.