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.