FacultyStudent Ratio
Faculty:Student Ratio
[Cueball is sitting hunched over a desk writing while ten people crowd around him, five on each side, all leaning towards him. On the left side, they are Hairbun, a Cueball-like man, Hairy, Megan - who speaks, and another Cueball-like man. On the right are Ponytail, a third Cueball-like man, another Megan-like woman, Blondie, and finally a fourth Cueball-like man.] Megan: How's the work going? Cueball: Can you all at least stand back a little?
[Caption below the panel]: My school tried to game the ratings by having a 30:1 faculty:student ratio

Universities are often rated in various ways to help students/parents pick which one to attend. This comic satirizes the very real culture of schools modifying their actions to artificially inflate their ratings. One metric used in ratings is the ratio between the number of faculty members to the number of students . Typically this is expressed as the student-teacher ratio, which normally determines how much time teachers get to spend with individual students. The lower the ratio, i.e., the fewer students per teacher, the smaller classes teachers have to teach, and thus the more attention the teachers can give to each student. However, having many more teachers than student(s), as in this comic, is not very beneficial to the student(s). (For context for international readers, high student-teacher ratios are common and expected in the United States, Randall's home country, whereas some nations especially in Asia sometimes report much lower ratios, often close to 1:1 in some areas.)
Another metric commonly used to measure a college's exclusivity and therefore prestige is the college's rejection rate; more prestigious schools get more applicants, and since they can accept only a limited number, they must reject many. Less prestigious schools often accept a higher fraction of their applicants, but some schools will reject students whose test scores, résumé, etc. are much higher than average for the school since it's likely that college is a "safety school" and the student won't actually go there. This rejection can decrease the school's acceptance rate and make it appear more prestigious. However, if the above-average student does want to attend that school, they are unable to, even though it would be good for both the college and the student.
For-profit universities and diploma mills may use techniques like this to artificially boost their ratings or use fabricated metrics and accreditation mills to give an inflated appearance of value. Predatory publishers and conferences are other techniques used to inflate the perceived value of a school or to pad curriculum vitae.
In the title text, other metrics are skewed in the school's favor:
[Cueball is sitting hunched over a desk writing while ten people crowd around him, five on each side, all leaning towards him. On the left side, they are Hairbun, a Cueball-like man, Hairy, Megan - who speaks, and another Cueball-like man. On the right are Ponytail, a third Cueball-like man, another Megan-like woman, Blondie, and finally a fourth Cueball-like man.] Megan: How's the work going? Cueball: Can you all at least stand back a little?
[Caption below the panel]: My school tried to game the ratings by having a 30:1 faculty:student ratio
