What is FTE?
Full Time Equivalent (FTE) is the total number of full-time entity it would take to meet the commitments currently met by both the full-time entity and the part-time entity. If there is no part-time entity, then FTE figure is equal to the headcount figure. (Entity in this case refers to either academic staffs or students).
Why do we use FTE?
The purpose of using Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) is to counter any bias universities that either have a very high or very low number of part-time students or staff.
Universities around the world have slightly different interpretations of what FTE means, but all of them are providing calculations or educated estimates that make more sense than purely using a headcount number.
As a verification guideline, we would generally expect the FTE figure to sit somewhere between the full-time headcount and the total headcount.
FTE figures are utilized to compile the rankings.
How is FTE calculated?
Simplified example
If your university had 10,000 full-time students and 1,000 full-time staff and no part-time students or faculty whatsoever, then the headcount and FTE figures would be identical. If you had 1,000 full-time staff and an additional 500 part-time staff who each work for exactly 50% of full-time workload then the Headcount would be 1,500 but the FTE would be 1,250.
Entirely accurate measure
This will depend on the sophistication of your systems but if a full-time contract represents 35 hours a week, for example, you can total the number of hours worked by your full-time staff, add to it the total number of hours worked by part-time staff and divide by 35 to get an FTE number.
Estimate
A typical formula for estimating FTE in the US is to take the total of your full-time staff and add to it one third of your part-time staff. Essentially this is suggesting that, on average, a part-time staff member works 1/3 of the time of a full-time staff member – a similar measure can be applied to part-time students. This would appear to give a reasonable estimate for FTE.
Figures/ headcounts calculated here are based on a full academic year.
The following is the formula for FTE used by QS:
FTE Estimate = Full-Time Headcount + 1/3 of Part-Time Headcount
Headcount is basically the number of heads.
To visualize the example:
No. of Full-time students: 10,000 headcounts
No. of Part-time students: 4,000 headcounts
No. of Full-Time Academic Staff: 5,000 headcounts
No. of Part-Time Academic Staff: 0 headcounts
Results:
FTE for Students = 10,000 + (1/3 * 4000) = 11333.333
FTE for Academic Staff = 5,000
Please note that a student can be represented more than once as an FTE. If a student is taking a full-time program and a part-time program, he/she will be counted into the Full-Time Headcount AND Part-Time Headcount.
What happens if the institution does not submit any FTE figure?
Where a Full Time Equivalent figure is not supplied adjustments will be made to make numbers comparable across institutions. This is done using derived ratios from other institutions in the country or region which have supplied both headcount and FTE numbers.
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