UC Irvine Student, Faculty and Staff Data

The University is a complex mixture of:  undergraduates, who sometimes work for the university; graduate students, who also teach and do research; faculty, who also administer and bring in outside research funding; and medical schools with attached hospitals that serve for education, research, and treatment.

This article is motivated by a letter writer to the LA Times today, who compared the UC student enrollment of 230,000 students to the employees of faculty and staff of 191,000, and immediately concluded that we should get rid of some of the faculty and staff, without any knowledge of the complex dual roles of students as teachers and staff.  It also ignored the vast funds brought in by research faculty and staff and medical schools and hospitals, and the great service that they do to local, state, national and international communities.

I am going to illustrate the above in detail using UC Irvine data of 2012 from its Office of Institutional Research of Planning and Budget.  Similar to the overall UC data, UCI has 28,184 students and 21,800 employees.

First of all, in the total employees, we should separate out the medical center employees of 4, 684, since nobody is going to seriously question its usefulness to Orange County, or the fact that it brings in funding.  Next, we exclude those not on UC salaries, which amount to 2,016, and which bring research money into the system that benefits the local businesses, the state, the nation, and the world.  This brings us down to 15,100 employees.  Of these, 6,877 employees are students themselves, broken down as 2,209 in academic as Teaching Assistants and Research Assistants, 4,134 in staff as Student Assistants, and 511 not paid by the UC.  Subtracting these leaves 8,223.  The general campus staff is listed as 8,876, and subtracting the 4,134 student staff, leaves 4,742 non-student campus staff.  General campus academic employees are listed as 6,224, and subtracting the 2,209 student academics leaves 4,015 non-student academics.

The total student population of 28,184 also has a breakdown into 26,030 on the general campus, 1,511 in the health sciences, and 643 in self supporting Master’s programs.  Of the general campus students, 22,050 are undergraduates, and 3,980 are graduate students.

So the real comparison to the 26,030 general campus students should be the non-student campus staff of 4,742.

UC Irvine functions as a small city of 38,000 people possible on the campus.  It is the second largest employer in Orange County.  Besides managing students, faculty and staff, the staff has to manage a very large physical campus, with its own vast housing, energy production and distribution, grounds, policing, communications, library, computer center, and Under Construction Indefinitely building program.  There are also 294 scientific staff to design, build and run a large amount of scientific equipment.   This whole picture is opposed to a business which might just rent office space where all of these factors are taken care of by outside employees.  UCI does outsource its food services and grounds maintenance.

In discussing the campus faculty, as far back as I can remember, the student to faculty FTE (full time equivalent) ratio at the UC campuses has been about 18 to 1, comparable to other public universities.  Top private universities have about 7 to 1, for comparison.  At UCI, campus faculty in ladder ranks is 920 with an additional 5 acting.  There are 180 full time and FTE lecturers.  There are another 97 lecturer FTE that are split up to support 205 part time instructors, which gives the students another 108 teachers to interact with.  The total number of full time lecturers and instructors is then 288.  Adding in 33 other faculty positions gives a total of 1,244 teaching faculty. This ratio of 26,030 general campus students to 1,244 teaching faculty gives a ratio of 21 to 1.  There is no evidence that teaching faculty should be cut.

In the total for Health Science or the medical school faculty, there are 187 in the regular ranks, and 472 others, mostly clinical, for a total of 662.

Academically, UC Irvine has support staff to run 32 schools and programs, 80 undergraduate degree programs, and 98 graduate and professional degree programs.  It brings in $325 million in research and development funds (2009).

The University of California has suffered budget cuts and furloughs for many years, and now sequestration on grants.  It has had many programs of internal examination of areas or methods of savings and efficiency.  The share paid by student tuition has increased dramatically.  To just look at the employee head count and infer that faculty and staff can be cut is seriously misleading.  In fact, an increase in head count for the same state funding could indicate that we are employing more students, receiving more grant money to support graduate research assistants, and/or spreading the lecturer FTE to more teachers and providing more courses with it.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
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