Same deal at UO:
4499 degrees,
4500 employees

seems like a common ratio

1:1 is not the same a 1.14:1.

PSU says it has 29,524 students and 6,909 employees. That's 1 employee per 4.27 students.

U of O says it has 24,591 students and 4,500 employees. That's 1 employee per 5.54 students. Big difference. Yet better school.

Oregon State website states 26,393 students with 3,481 faculty members. Could part of the problem be PSU has included non-faculty in that number? And IMHO the best of the other schools mentioned here in the comment section.

There's definitely a difference between faculty count and total employee count. The PSU and U of O numbers I'm citing include both faculty and staff.

Got to do apples to apples Jack. PSU Pres is including student workers.
From the publication Holding OUS Accountable: A Question of Priorities"

Table 1, Fac and Staff:
OSU 4237
UO 3893
PSU 2218

Source:
Oregon Transparency website, State Workforce section,
http://oregon.gov/transparency/state_workforce.page. Data for fiscal year 2010 were aggregated from the eight spreadsheets available for download.

Could it be that Wiewel uses the biggest number possible when touting his economic impact? Why am I not surprised?

In any event, I would tend to doubt that OSU has nearly twice the number of employees as PSU.

To compare K-12 schools and university staff-to-student ratiso, I looked at several sources and then ran across this e-newsletter from 12/4/12 by State Senator Doug Whitset of K-Falls, excerpt below:

"A second major cost-driver is the significant increase in the number of public school employees. Oregon K-12 public school enrollment rose about fifteen percent during the eighteen years between 1992 and 2009. During that same time period, the number of full time K-12 teachers increased about thirteen percent. Therefore, the student to teacher ratio has remained nearly the same.

However, the number of administrators, and other non-teaching staff, grew by forty-seven percent in Oregon between 1992 and 2009! The rate of growth of full-time, non-teacher, employees was more than three times as fast as the rate of student growth. Oregon school district budgets are being eaten alive by the cost of salary, health insurance and PERS retirement benefits for these non-teacher additions to the K-12 workforce.

In my opinion, the rapid growth in the number of public employees is a consistent feature of collective bargaining by public employee unions."

However one feels about public employee unions, the fact that non-teacher employees grew faster than teachers is rather shocking. It is a testament to the growth of bureaucracy (from expanding federal, state and local regulations) and lack of financial judgement of education administrators. The first priority of any bureaurocracy is to survive. The second is to grow. I suppose the mission is in there somewhere, but clearly it runs a distant third at best. Remember this when anyone says, "it's for the children."

A lot of political types (no matter PDC, CoP, Mult County, METRO, etc.) have a hard time with the math when they put together these economic justification numbers.

I'd take all their figures as throw-aways to keep the populace bleating yes and in the mood to keep giving them more money.

Things are getting worse, ...

According to data PSU sent to the feds, last year, the school had 62% more grads than staff.

Something makes me think someone in the university system is fudging numbers somewhere.

Just a guess though.