tk21769

Alexandre, I think your argument is a very good counterpoint, but needs to be a little more nuanced.

I never had a class of anywhere near 250 students at the two private universities where I earned degrees. I never heard of a class that large at either school. Typically, the classes I attended as an undergraduate, during all 4 years, ran to around 10-15 students. I attended some lectures for maybe 75 students in History and the sciences. In those cases, there were small lab and discussion break-outs.
Certainly.
That was not necessarily my experience with professors in general (depends on definitions). If you are talking about famous luminaries, then I would agree. However ... that does not mean an undergraduate at some private universities cannot get rather intimate discussion classes even with them. In the Humanities at Chicago, famous professors like Norman Maclean and Richard McKeon taught and interacted with undergraduates (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to get the flavor). James Cronin (Nobel, Physics) received Chicago's highest award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. So did László Babai, a distinguished Mathematician (Erdős number 1) and Computer Scientist. I don't think these examples are highly unusual there. Now, I don't know about the great public universities these days, maybe an undergrad can find similar experiences at Berkeley or Michigan too. Anybody?

Alexandre

tk, I never said that ALL private research universities have huge classes. But the ones I meantioned all do. And I also did not mean to suggest that all professors do not take a keen interest in instruction. Michigan, for example, has several professors that were known in their field who took great interest in teaching undergrads. Back in my days, professors like Sidney Fine (History), Williams (English), James Holland (Psychology and Electrical Engineering) and Brian Coppola (Chemistry) were all known for their involvement in undergraduate instruction. However, those are not in the majority...and most of them are in the later stages of their career, where they feel like they have contributed enough to their discipline and wish to involve themselves more in teaching.

The point I was trying to make is that the gap between class sizes at elite public universities and elite private research universities is not nearly as large as most people claim.

Undclrd Stdnt

Hawkette

In your class size analysis, did you look into a website called collegedata.com?
They list % of classes>30, >40, >50, >100. I was wondering whether they use the method of counting the number of students in each section (which I find flawed) or the method of counting the number of students in the overall lecture (which seems more fair).

hawkette

ucb,
I agree that classes like Thermo or Chem or other introductory classes lend themselves to a lecture format and the class sizes are relatively large at both the publics and privates that I looked at (although the privates tended to have 25-50% fewer students in the lecture hall and even the lab breakout groups were smaller, eg, avg of 10-15 per class at the privates vs. 15-20 at the publics).

The surprise for me was especially for the classes for soph/jr/sr years. Not being personally familiar with engineering departments, I had accepted, at face value, comments that I have read here for several years that upperclass highly-ranked public university students enjoyed class sizes on par with those at top privates. What I found is that there are material differences for the great majority of classes, even for the electives.

At the publics, it was true that the electives were considerably smaller than the intro classes, eg, 30 students or so. However, at the publics, I didn't see hardly any engineering electives with fewer than 20 students. The exception was independent study projects, which of course are for a single student or perhaps a small group working together on a project. By contrast, for their soph/jr/sr years, the privates had many classes, required and elective, that contained 20 or fewer students. My guess is that undergrad enrollment differentials drive a lot of this difference, but the result was a clear win for the privates.

Two more points about this. First, the publics did have a broader array of engineering offerings. If this is important to a student, then the publics might be a superior choice as there is a larger menu of classes to choose from. Second, neither program offered a lot of opportunities for electives and so the actual opportunities to take these small classes is impinged by this. On average, the publics offered 1 elective per semester for the last four semesters for a student looking to graduate in a four-year window. The privates had a couple more opportunities, but it's not like either environment was too worried about graduating engineers with a broad appreciation for other subjects. I'm not saying that is wrong, but it does have consequences for one's class schedule, particularly if one wants to finish on time in four years.

Finally, re the issue of grad courses, this is one area that I was/am not able to evaluate. The course catalogs all listed the graduate courses as well, but there was no way to separate out the enrollment numbers into how many undergrads were in the class and how many grad students were in the class. I'm sure that the colleges have this data, but I don't know how to get it. In any event, I accept the claims of those who post that they were able to take grad courses as undergrads and that these classes were considerably smaller (definitely the case at the publics). I don't know broadly how many undergrad students are taking graduate-level classes, either at the publics or the privates. I would guess that public students enrolled as Honors students likely get a lot of these benefits, but their numbers are typically small, eg, a few hundred students in a class of several thousand.

As for the comments on humanities vs the technical fields, this seems logical to me. Perhaps engineers don't benefit much from classroom environments where classmates talk to one another as an important part of their learning. But this is certainly not the case in many of the humanities fields. I would expect the class size differences to be smaller there and maybe much smaller. I have not done the work and I don't know, so I will accept others' views on this. I will, however, say that the subjects where student participate with each other and with their professor make one element of the college search process very important. It is very valuable to have smart peers as your classmates and so judging the quality of ABC University's student body vs XYZ College's student body can be a critical, determining element of the college search process.

Bottom-line, my analysis taught me that class size difference between publics and privates is NOT a myth, at least not in the engineering departments for the four colleges that I looked at. Perhaps some are using their experiences from a time long ago, eg, the 1990s or the 1980s, to make these claims, but today there are material differences which likely have important influences on the classroom and learning environments.

UCBChemEGrad

I'd prefer a broader range of engineering classes versus worrying about whether my thermo class is 60 students vs. 30 students.

Public universities educate more people.

Where it matters most, in engineering employment opportunities, differences between public vs. private is nil.

barrons

Hawk, please show me where I said one word about privates manipulating data (although some cases HAVE been reported--I do not recall by whom). All I said was state schools have to report lots of data honestly becuase they are all considered official state records. No more.

As to a lack of small classes at a big state engineering school--Wisconsin has dozens and dozens every term. Here's a report that breaks out the number of students by class including those that are mixed undergrad and grad. And this is just one semester. Typically different upper electives are taught every semester--some every other year.

http://registrar.wisc.edu/students/a..._2007-2008.pdf

barrons

In the linked report the student count is in the first column. The rest are nunbers of credits earned by class level. That way you can see mixed undergrad and grad classes.

tk21769

Hawkette has gathered some interesting data and presented it nicely.
The numbers do suggest clear differences between the public and private national universities.

Surely these numbers don't tell the entire story. There may well be significant variation by department and class level. However, if we're really dealing with a big myth here, the burden of proof is to present a new improved set of numbers that tells a different story than the set in the second post above. Either that, or show us how to re-interpret those numbers in a way that supports the "myth" view. The only mathematical interpretation offered here, so far, suggests the numbers actually understate the gap.

kb10

hi hawkette.

hoedown

I appreciate the vote of confidence for public universities, but in truth, the definitions and measures for many metrics are imprecise. It's the nature of the beast. So you can report things accurately and truthfully and still not provide information that is comparable to other schools. Or as informative about the true undergrad experience as some would have you believe.

I was just looking at some GF spending figures for all the public U's in Michigan, data provided to the state annually by each school as part of a legal requirement, and verifiable against federal reporting. But the numbers were grossly incomparable because the schools--legally, accurately, and justifiably--had different ways to categorize similar expenses.

UCBChemEGrad

I took the Common Data Set numbers of class sizes for Berkeley and compared on a percentage basis to its cross-bay rival, Stanford:


Class Size Stan % Berk %
2-9 36.0% 33.9%
10-19 36.2% 27.7%
20-29 8.0% 15.0%
30-39 4.3% 5.8%
40-49 3.7% 3.4%
50-99 7.0% 7.4%
100+ 4.7% 6.8%


On a percentage basis, they look quite similar.

Biggest differences are in class sizes 10-19 and 20-29.

mikemac

To me this is the most compelling issue in this thread. Any HS student should do this for schools they are considering, and also visit area colleges to attend classes of the various sizes and see what works for them. To each his own... For some students it may not matter what size the class is. Others have a distinct preference. If it never matters, why should colleges go to the expense of having the prof show up at all? Why not find some good prof, tape the lectures, and send them out on DVD's? Then just have the discussion sections at the campus. Thousands of profs across the country would be spared the trouble of trekking to a classroom 3x a week.

My counterargument to "why not" (and an implicit disagreement with UCBChemE) is my belief that significant events that happen in a college education aren't part of the explicit curriculum. Finding a teacher that knows you, that sparks an interest in going farther in a subject or area, has set many a student onto a life path. In a large impersonal class you don't get that. Which brings to mind another topic, that of whether genius level performance is innate or learnable. Academic research so far has come down on the side of learnable. One of the pioneers of the field is Anders Ericcson, and in his research he found Which, to me, says that even if students master the topics of "thermodynamics and reaction kinetics" something more important may be missing ...

hawkette

barrons,
Just so I'm reading your link correctly, can you help me understand the difference in the column labeled "Students" (first column) and the one labeled "Total Undergrad?"

barrons

Students equals people. Total undergrad is the total credits earned in that class by undergrad. So if 160 is under Total Undergrad column and the class was worth 4 credits for undergrds it means that 40 students were in the class is all the credits were earned by UGs. If it shows some credits in the grad students columns that measn the total students included some grad students or it was a mixed class. Now some intro level undergrad classes that lots of people take you might see 1400 in the students column. That does not mean there was one section with 1400 students, they probably had 3-6 sections of the class so for larger classes this report is not much help. But for the majority of advanced classes there is only one section so you can assume if the students number is under 50 or so it's just one section. The only way to tell is to match the class up with the class timetable for that term. But we were mostly looking at upper level so it's good for that in most cases.

UCBChemEGrad

mikemac,

The quote about the Julliard kids is quite interesting...but don't you think it was more of a function of talent before the kids were enrolled in Julliard? Julliard isn't taking random kids off the street and mentoring them to be great musicians...they are taking cream of the crop, super talented musicians, and mentor them to become world class concert musicians.

IMO, the same is true with elite privates...they set the bar high for admission, only take the cream of the crop talent, pass the kids through with high GPAs, and take the credit for producing outstanding alumni.

Publics have a different mission. But, it is interesting to note that despite the different mission, class size (the subject of this thread) is not much different when looked at on a percentage basis like I did in Post #41.

And all Hawkette did was look at some random course on internet-based schedule of classes and make a determination...if she was willing to share the links of these school's schedule of classes, I think it would help support her argument...otherwise it's just her word.