The 100% figure claimed by Columbia cannot be accurate. Among 958 members of the (full-time) Faculty of Columbia College, listed in the Columbia College Bulletin online, are included some 69 persons whose highest degree, if any, is a bachelor’s or master’s degree.12
It is not clear exactly which faculty are supposed to be counted in this calculation. The U.S. News methodology page is silent on this point. The instructions for the Common Data Set, which is co-organized by U.S. News and from which it draws much of its data, stipulate that only non-medical faculty are to be counted in collecting these figures. Information on the degrees held by faculty in Columbia’s professional schools is not readily available.
Even following the most favorable interpretation, however, by counting all faculty, both medical and non-medical — and very optimistically assuming that all faculty in the professional schools have terminal degrees — we are still unable to arrive at a figure rounding to 100%, since the 69 faculty of Columbia College without terminal degrees exceed 1% of the entire cohort of 4,381 full-time Columbia faculty in Fall 2020. If we exclude medical faculty as directed by the Common Data Set, then our calculations should be based on Columbia’s 1,602 full-time non-medical faculty in Fall 2020. We conclude that the proportion of faculty with terminal degrees can be at most (1602-69)/1602, or about 96%. To the extent that professional school faculty lack terminal degrees, this figure will be even lower.
Institutions providing a Common Data Set have to divulge, on section I-3 of the form, the subtotals of full-time non-medical faculty whose highest degrees are bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral or other terminal degrees, and likewise for part-time faculty. This makes it possible to check (or at least replicate for non-medical faculty) the percentage stated by U.S. News. If Columbia provided a Common Data Set, like the vast majority of its peers, then the existence of substantial numbers of Columbia faculty without terminal degrees could not have been so easily overlooked.13 Columbia’s peers, which acknowledge having faculty without terminal degrees in their Common Data Sets, have been placed at a competitive disadvantage by doing so.
Most of the 69 Columbia College faculty without terminal degrees in their fields are either full-time renewable lecturers in language instruction or faculty in Columbia’s School of the Arts. Conceivably it might be claimed that, for some reason, these groups should not be counted in the calculation. Such an argument encounters significant difficulties, however. One is that without these groups, it is even harder to arrive at the student-faculty ratio of 6:1 reported by Columbia (see §5 below). More fundamentally, it simply is the case that language lecturers and Arts faculty are full-fledged faculty members. Both groups are voting members of the Faculty of Columbia College, Columbia’s flagship undergraduate school, and also of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences.14
In any case, these 69 persons include some distinguished scholars and artists, and even a winner of the Nobel Prize.15Columbia would surely be a lesser place without them, even if 100% of its faculty really did then hold terminal degrees.