US News Best Colleges 2010 - 80 schools with an unusual commitment to undergrad teach

[Geneseograd]

North (Master's Universities)

Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report

Methodology

Methodology: Best Undergrad Teaching - US News and World Report

[Modadunn]

does this mean they have the best TA's? Because while I can't speak for all, many of these schools enlist quite a few TA's to teach low level undergraduate courses to some degree.

[sacchi]

Which of these schools are supposed to have TA's? They are in the Master's Universities category, so they don't have PhD programs, and hence PhD students, which are the usual source of TAs.

When we visited TCNJ, they said that they have no classes taught by TAs.

[SJTH]

That is just one of the "Best Undergraduate Teaching" lists--that one is "North" and there are others--one for National Universities, and this one for Liberal Arts Colleges

Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report

[Modadunn]

TA's run discussion classes; Professor is lecture only.

[morandi]

Like sacchi, I'm wondering which of these schools have TA's. They are in the Master's Universities category, which means there are no PhD, or terminal degree programs. My experience, teaching at one of these schools, was professors have a heavy teaching load but they do it all themselves.

[dragonmom]

Click around in the related links and you come up with this VERY strange list:
Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report

Jarvis Christian in Hawkins, TX and Rust College in Holly Springs, MS have lower acceptance rates than HYPS? Alice Lloyd College and College of the Ozarks tied with MIT? Someone fed the wrong data in....or else those pranksters at CalTech got into the USNWR computers.

[StitchInTime]

Best Colleges: Undergraduate Teaching at National Universities

[justmytwocents]

Click around in the related links and you come up with this VERY strange list:
Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report

Jarvis Christian in Hawkins, TX and Rust College in Holly Springs, MS have lower acceptance rates than HYPS? Alice Lloyd College and College of the Ozarks tied with MIT? Someone fed the wrong data in....or else those pranksters at CalTech got into the USNWR computers.

This is an obvious mistake - not sure how they got 7.6% admission rate for Rust College, for example, but by the college's own admission (see their webpage at www.rustcollege.edu) they are less selective with an average student ACT score of 16.

Similarly, Jarvis Christian College admits 100% of applicants (not 4.5% that US News reports), Alice Loyd College of Kentucky admits 41% of applicants (not 10.5% that US News reports), Tougaloo College admits 96% (not 25.6% that US News reports), and so on.

One thing that really confuses me is that both The College Board and US News & World Report claim that Mississippi Valley State University admits 24.7% of applicants, making it more selective than Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, or Emory. I know someone who used to be a faculty member there; this seems totally ludicrous to me. MVSU is (or at least was, until two years ago!) practically an open-admission school, with the average freshman GPA of 2.58 and middle 50% ACT scores of 15 - 18, and less than 70% of their faculty hold doctoral degrees. Now, I don't say this to demean the school, which serves an important function in the Delta region of MS, but I'm just totally mystified by this purported statistic.

What's going on with the data? I wonder if there is a problem with the data inputted for Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs)? Rust, Tougaloo, and MVSU are all HBCUs.

Or just schools from the South? For example, US News also claims that Delta State University (also, coincidentally, in the Delta of Miss.) is as selective than Colby (30ish% admit rate). To put this in perspective, this school has a 43% 6-year graduation rate, an average incoming GPA of 2.9, and 25/75 ACT scores of 18-22.

Good catch dragonmom.

[LasMa]

I can only speak for D's school, but all of her classes are taught by professors except a Psych discussion section. Her school is #5 on the LAC list.

[Geneseograd]

Keep in mind just because a school has a lower acceptance rate doesn't mean it is more competitive than some of the top schools you all have mentioned....you need to look at the applicant pool at each school. For example, the acceptance rate at SUNY Geneseo is around 32 or 33% however, the average SAT score is 1340, Highschool average is 94. Students self select the colleges they are going to apply to as well. IF a student is a B student with a very average SAT score they typically do not apply to Geneseo. Geneseo's applicant pool for the most part are students with SAT scores over 1200 and highschool averages at a minimum of 88. There are other SUNY schools with similar acceptance rates but with very different applicant pools.

[2collegewego]

I think some of those colleges have high acceptance rates among groups that traditionally perform poorly on standardized tests and may not have the highest gpas. That doesn't mean there aren't mistakes on the published stats-- just that some of the HBCUs, for example, have lower acceptance rates than many people would think but there standardized test scores aren't terribly impressive.

[nngmm]

Which of these schools are supposed to have TA's? They are in the Master's Universities category, so they don't have PhD programs, and hence PhD students, which are the usual source of TAs.

Many schools (including the very best ones) employ undergrads as TAs (starting sophomore year). They don't "teach" classes, but they are section leaders, graders, etc.