ghostbuster

^^^^ Agreed. Hindi is important (or pashtu) if you are joining FBI or State Department or want to work in Calcutta or Mumbai (Bombay). Otherwise its of zero value here and who would sign up for it? Is it worth running a department and paying one or two professors to fund 6 students? Just saying....

Some kids thrive in big state universities like Ohio State, Michigan, Florida etc. Others would drown and be miserable.

Choice is a wonderful thing. Rejoice and be glad.

CCillinois

Class-size for a lot of classes is a big factor.

I've been in the 'big' classes in a major public university and also a community college with 30 students in those same classes. The classes were just 'better' at the CC. They didn't teach less, they taught less students more efficiently. Classes at big public universities are smaller farther down the line. But, for a lot of classes you are still stuck with large classes.

No matter how much you think large classes are 'fine', they do not teach Calculus to a million students at a time because its 'a better way to teach students'. You think it would be a red flag when half the students drop out of the class when most of them were in the top of their class in high school.



Investigating 'class size' is really hard sometimes.

college_ruled

Many schools post current enrollment/ size cap in their online course listings.

bclintonk

I'd urge you to consider that not all public universities are alike, and your experience may not be generalizable to all public universities. Anymore than if you went to an underfunded private university, it would qualify you to comment on what "private universities" are like in general, up to and including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The devil is in the details. The kinds of sweeping generalizations you make here are not only unhelpful, they're potentially downright wrong as applied to some of the nation's best public universities..

bluebayou

CCI:

Also, don't confuse correlation (drop out rate) with causation (since you were using a math example).

Some big Unis are designed to purposely flunk kids -- yeah, I don't get it either -- and grade the intro premed courses, including Calc, on a strict, mandated curve, with x% A's, y% B's, and D's and F's. In contrast, a community college will award all A's if everyone in the class earns a 90+.

hawkette

IMO, the key point in CCIllinois post was not the public university aspect, but the big class vs small class thought. I think her point was that her experience with smaller classes was a superior learning environment vs large classes.

While occasionally someone will encounter an excellent learning opportunity in a large class (100+ students with outside TA), do you ever wonder how much different (better) that same class would be with that same professor in a classroom of 20 students?

bclintonk

Good gravy! Don't take this personally, ghostbuster, as the comment is meant more generally, but I find the level of sheer anti-intellectualism rampant on CC appalling. India is the "new China," poised to become the world's most populous nation, rapidly emerging as a global economic powerhouse and one of the half-dozen or so most important nations in the world from a geopolitical perspective. I think Americans darned well better start caring about India, if only out of economic and geopolitical self-interest. Not to mention that it's got one of the richest cultural traditions in the world, about which the vast majority of Americans are woefully ignorant.

You're both absolutely right, not many students will take Hindi. Unfotunate, in my view. But my point was not that the only small courses at major universities are in subjects like Hindi. I've said this on CC before: as an undergrad philosophy major at Michigan, I never took a single class in my major that was larger tham about 25 students, most considerably smaller. Oh, and keil, not a single TA---not one. all my classes were taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty in one of the most distinguished philosophy departments in the world, one that no LAC in the country can match. Oh, and the professors all new my name, too. And I took only 2 or 3 big lecture classes outside my major---not because I had to, but because they were classes I particularly wanted to take because of the excellence of the professor. Now I know it's not possible to do that in all majors at a school like Michigan---but it is possible in probably the vast majority of the 115 or so majors available in the College of Literature, Science & the Arts.

My own D DOES want to study Hindi. She'd like to continue to study Portuguese, too; she'll have two years of college-level Portuguese under her belt by the time she actually starts college. Wise, I think, given Brazil's rapid emergence as another major economic and geopolitical power, one we're all going to interacting with much more going forward. But she won't be able to study either of these critically important languages at the vast majority of LACs, and I know of not a single one that offers both. Nor, if her interests turn to a field like philosophy or classics or anthropology, will she come close to matching the depth and breadth of the curriculum available at a school like Michigan. I have no doubt the quality of her classes will be good at any of the LACs she's most interested in. But those schools, while preparing her to be a well-rounded generalist, simply won't provide the same opportunities to go into really substantial depth in any particular field, or to explore off-the-beaten-path interests---like the languages, literatures, and cultures of emerging global superpowers like India and Brazil, something I certainly don't consider "obscure" (keilexandra's word) or "of zero value" (ghostbuster's description).

IBclass06

Of course, that is not the case for everyone. As I have noted before, use of TAs is prevalent in certain subjects. Foreign language instruction, for example -- even in rare languages. Heck, as a grad student at a public, I'll be teaching in about two years.

That said, many privates are equally guilty. If you're wanting to avoid that completely, you'd have to pick a LAC.


I also take issue with the idea that small colleges automatically have smaller classes. My alma mater is roughly twice the size of Rice, but on average its courses are actually smaller.

bluebayou

It depends on the course. For example, I would much rather listen to a world expert discuss the middle east or ancient greece for an hour or so than listen to 18 year-old peers ask stupid questions (so they can make sure they earn the 10% class participation points). But the point is that such a lecture can be accomplished in a room with 20 or 200 -- it don't matter.

OTOH, some courses like Writing 101 or Calculus are probably much better taught in a small setting. Indeed, a math prof who used to post on cc recommended that kids take Calc in HS for that very reason alone. (Of course, if students learned better how to write in HS, there would be no need to offer Writing 101.)

noimagination

Different students have different learning styles.

norcalguy

It's important to remember that class sizes between different majors can vary widely. Biology, business, etc. are large majors at most universities and will have large sizes. More obscure majors will have small class sizes, even if they are offered at large state schools. So, a university-wide student/faculty ratio is quite meaningless.

Secondly, there comes to a point where you simply have too few kids in the class and it's impeding learning. For a discussion course, I'd rather have 10-15 students in the class than 5 students simply because you are exposed to a greater range of ideas and perspectives. I think it would be simply dreadful to fill up 50 minutes time after time with ideas from only a couple of students.

Thirdly, some courses are simply better taught lecture-style (mainly the hard sciences). For that, it doesn't matter if the course has 100 students per lecture or 250 students per lecture. There's very little discussion going on and I'd prefer that there be as little discussion as possible. I don't want to waste my time hearing answers to other people's questions. There may arise a situation where the course has so many students that it's hard to access the professor during office hours. But, I have rarely found that to be the case. In fact, most professors are begging for students to come to their OH's.

bclintonk

Well, I don't know if "guilty" is exactly the right word here, but it's a good point. Most private universities and some publics refuse to tell us what percentage of their classes are taught by grad students---they simply fill in "N/A" in that box in the data set US News uses. Some do tell us, and it's worth noting that Yale's figure, 9%, is not so very different from Michigan's, 14%. But to my mind, there's a world of difference between Yale's 9% or Michigan's 14% on the one hand, and UNC-Chapel Hill's 25%, UIUC's 27%, U Georgia's 29%, and Purdue's 30% on the other.

But what's up with the "N/A"? They think the question is "not applicable" to them? Why? Clearly it's not because the answer is 0; a number of schools do report 0%, not difficult to do at all if that's the true answer. Do they mean the number is "not available"? Why---because they've never bothered to count, perhaps because they think it's such an unimportant fact? I think a lot of prospective applicants might find it quite important and highly relevant. Or do they mean the number is "not available" to us, the consumers of the data---because they're not making it available, perhaps because they're embarrassed to admit it?

Of the top privates that do report, Brown says 3%, Stanford 6%, Rice 6%, Case Western 6%, Notre Dame 7%, U Miami 8%, and Yale 9%. Absent better information to the contrary, I'd have to assume Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Cornell et al are somewhere in the Stanford-Yale range---not a trivial number but not a huge one, at the end of the day not so far from a school like Michigan but significantly less than some other public research universities.

hawkette

Bc,
When you compare a large universe of colleges, you see a mostly clear picture about the relative use of TAs at publics and privates and also about the relative use of TAs within each of the sub-groups.

Here is the data for the USNWR Top 75 National Universities:

% of classes with TAs , Private National University

0% , Princeton
0% , Wake Forest
0% , Yeshiva
0% , Pepperdine
1% , George Washington
1% , SMU
3% , Brown
6% , Stanford
6% , Rice
6% , Case Western
7% , Notre Dame
8% , U Miami
9% , Yale

na , Harvard
na , Caltech
na , MIT
na , U Penn
na , Columbia
na , U Chicago
na , Duke
na , Dartmouth
na , Northwestern
na , Wash U
na , Johns Hopkins
na , Cornell
na , Emory
na , Vanderbilt
na , Carnegie Mellon
na , Georgetown
na , USC
na , Tufts
na , Brandeis
na , NYU
na , Boston College
na , Lehigh
na , U Rochester
na , Rensselaer
na , Tulane
na , Boston University
na , Syracuse
na , Fordham
na , Worcester
na , BYU


% of classes with TAs , State University

0% , UC SAN DIEGO
0% , UC IRVINE
1% , U WISCONSIN
4% , GEORGIA TECH
5% , U FLORIDA
7% , U WASHINGTON
8% , VIRGINIA TECH
10% , CLEMSON
10% , RUTGERS
14% , U MICHIGAN
15% , U MARYLAND
16% , U VIRGINIA
16% , TEXAS A&M
25% , U N CAROLINA
26% , U CONNECTICUT
27% , U ILLINOIS
29% , U GEORGIA
30% , PURDUE

na , UC BERKELEY
na , UCLA
na , WILLIAM & MARY
na , UC DAVIS
na , UC S BARBARA
na , PENN STATE
na , U TEXAS
na , OHIO STATE
na , U PITTSBURGH
na , U MINNESOTA
na , U DELAWARE
na , INDIANA U
na , MICHIGAN ST
na , UC S CRUZ
na , U IOWA


BTW, of the Top 40 LACs, only 14 bothered to report a % number. Those that did reported 0%.

I think that you're intentionally off on your guesstimate in order to put your favorite school in a more favorable light.

VastlyOverrated

^^^^^

I know for a fact that some (and probably most) of those numbers are wrong. I've worked as a TA at two universities listed at 0%!

dstark

USNWR is not the authority on education. It's a magazine.

Some of those numbers about % of classes taught by a TA look very strange to me.

UCSD and UCI are really 0%? Hmmm.

How are these numbers derived?

If a professor teaches a chemistry class of 500 with 10 TAs leading the discussion groups, does that count as 10 classes taught by a TA? One class? 0 classes?

And do all schools agree on what the definition is of classes TAs teach?