I just love hearing about these large classes that were so captivating–maybe even transcendent–and have stuck with you through the years! Wonderful point you make that small is not necessarily best.
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This is very helpful. Thank you!
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Wow! You are making me want to go to Bowdoin! Sounds way better than what we eat in our house!
I agree that DS may be more Carleton than Bowdoin, but more and more I just think he could thrive at any of these schools if he were lucky enough to get in.
So glad your Bowdoin student has had such a transformative experience there.
Grinnell and W & M seem absolutely fabulous as well. We visited both. DS plans to apply to W & M. I wanted him to keep Grinnell on his list, but he had a tough time with the location. Grinnell and Carleton seem to attract very similar students.
Thanks for the link to the fellowship page. I will definitely encourage DS to reach out to a chem prof.
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It’s wonderful that your son has been able to visit so many schools. He does have a great list already (but keep Brown!).
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Chemistry departments can be challenging to evaulate in that they partly function as service departments for pre-health students, so it can be difficult to tell who the true student-chemists might be. Nonetheless, it seems positive that chemistry is a fairly common major at Skidmore, with 19 chemistry first majors in a recent year. However, Skidmore does not offer a major in biochemistry / molecular biology, which might be limiting for students interested in these areas.
As an additional resource for evaluating opportunities in chemistry, perhaps consider survey-based information on lab facilities:
St. Olaf, it seems worth noting, appears in the site.
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Yes, I remember this colloquy (pretty sure merc81 does too):
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I know in the popular imagination (and on CC) big classes are horrible
@blossom, you made a lot of great points in your post. My wife had one of those large lecture halls back in the Dark Ages in which the lecturers were Crick and Watson, the discoverers of the structure of DNA. Needless to say, the course was packed. It was packed because there was no other way to meet the demand and to provide students with the rare opportunity to hear it straight from two o the most prominent scientists if the day back at that time. I think you made that point really effectively that when a college has rock stars on the faculty, they need to open the doors to those large lecture halls so that as many students as possible can have access with “access” being the key word.
With regard to small classes, the reason they are important is that there is no other way to accomplish certain objectives. It’s not that they’re better, it’s that you simply can’t run an interactive seminar with 100+ students in the room. The 5 aspects to the language arts are reading, writing, listening, speaking, and viewing. And listening can’t just be something passive. Active listening requires interaction. Small classes are important because they increase your options for types of instruction which can be utilized and therefore the types of skills which students can develop.
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Agree with you 100%. I took a poetry seminar with 12 students and two faculty members (from different disciplines). You couldn’t have achieved the same ends in a lecture hall- or even with 25 students.
But Crick and Watson- wow.
One of my kids still describes what happened when the professor (who had won a Nobel prize the day before) walked into the lecture hall. It was like Elton John and Paul McCartney decided to attend your music recital-- the students went absolutely nuts. Everyone was expecting a TA to announce “professor X sends apologies”-- and yet, here he is, a week before finals, ready to give the “summation lecture” to wrap up the semester.
So I respect these “fantastic scholars, amazing teachers”. Would be a pity to limit enrollment !!!
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Perhaps a topic for a different thread, but our family’s assessment is very different based on experiences at various levels (observations from high school of those bound to different colleges, observations while studying at college, observations working for colleges, etc.)
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One data point that can sometimes be helpful when comparing programs at similarly sized schools is number of students in a given major. For example, one might believe students gravitate towards the strongest depts at a given college, or that higher numbers represent proportionately more opportunities to learn from or network with other students in a given field.
The CDS might obfuscate in this case by combining different fields into “physical sciences,” but other sources from the college sites suggest about 5x more (pure) chemistry majors at Carleton (which has about a 10% larger student body). It looks like about 38 vs 8. Both links sample over only one year, however.
That said, these are both amazing schools and I think a student could get a fantastic chemistry education at either.
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Appleton was so exciting when I was young. Our town didn’t have an orthodontist and I was very jealous of the kids who got to go to Appleton once a month as they got to shop in stores our town didn’t have. And it was close enough to Green Bay that you MIGHT see a famous Packer or other star just walking around.
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I personally think the percentage of classes at 50+ (or even 40+) is the more useful metric. Forgive me if I’m stating the obvious, but comparing the student to faculty ratios between universities and LACs is problematic.
For one thing, with universities, the numerator only includes a count of undergrads even when the denominator includes faculty that spend time with grad students.
For another thing, with universities the grad students also receive disproportionate focus. The CDS rules out faculty that only spend time on grad student work, but not faculty that spend some or (more likely) most of their time on grad student work.
Since LACs generally don’t have grad students, their ratios offer a more accurate description. Ideally there would be some sort of adjustment for universities based both on how many grad students the included profs are also teaching and how much more time each grad student receives individually when factoring in classes, advising, and research activity. I suspect USNWR has different rankings for LACs and universities partly because of such problems when comparing, but also because their missions are so different.
As a side note, there is a peculiarity with the Brown ratio calculation. According to their 2024-25 CDS, they have 1,022 full time instructional faculty and 57 part time. That would mean they have 1,041 full time faculty equivalents. Yet they use 1,238 in their ratio calculation. There’s also something funny with the student count, as they used the 7,199 in the ratio calculation despite section B indicating 7,191 full time students and 718 part time for 7,430 full time equivalents. If these are actual errors (maybe not?), then the ratio would be 7.1 to 1. But again that’s more usefully compared to other universities with similar undergraduate and graduate splits than to schools with no (or very few) grad students.
The CDS I3 shows class sizes. Of 1272 sections at Brown, 55 are 100+ and 106 are 50-99. But just over 1/3 are 2-9 students, its most populous zone plus another one third 10-19.
Bowdoin has zero at 100+ and four at 50-99 of 402 classes. 41% are 10-19, which is the largest class size
Carleton shows zero at 50+ and four at 40-49 of 335. Over half are 10-19.
Of course each student may or may not experience any of those larger classes and if so, likely infrequently.
When discussing faculty ratios, the conversation typically comes around to class size, which of course is an important manifestation of student:faculty ratio. Going beyond that, an important benefit of small class size is access to professors outside of class. It’s one thing for faculty to have iffice hours when they are accessible to students, but it’s something else for a professor to be available to students when s/he teaches 3 sections each with fewer than 20 students vs a professor who teaches 3 sections each with more than 40 students. When we then get into the large lecture halls, it’s hard to imagine how those professors can possibly have time to be available to the numbers of students they teach. This isn’t to say that the college with large lecture halls is a bad option, but it does mean that an applicant’s decision should factor in how Important faculty access is to him/her.
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Something to bear in mind is that when determining the likelihood of encountering a class of a given size, it’s the larger ones that need to be weighted more.
So if in a given year Brown offers 437 classes of 2-9 students but 55 of 100+, courses in the latter range (biggest classes) are significantly more likely to be encountered than courses in the former (smallest classes).
(Take the average of each range, multiple it by the number of classes for that range, then compare for total seats occupied. Doing that predicts the 100+ classes are twice as likely if assuming the max end of the range is 100 and approaches 3x if assuming the max end is 150. If the max end is closer to 400 as I’ve read in their student paper, then the larger classes could be 6x as likely, depending on the actual distribution of counts in the range.)
Often intro STEM courses tend to be among the biggest on a campus. Experiences in those early courses can sometimes determine whether a student sticks with STEM.
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Absolutely! Unfortunately, students in high school often have a limited appreciation of what access to college faculty offers. I think for many it just means getting help when stuck, which perhaps they feel is unlikely to be a problem because high school was easy for them. Too often they don’t realize while still in high school and forming their application list that not only can college be far more rigorous, but faculty access can mean mentoring and opportunities for projects that lead to promising employment opportunities and/or strong grad school applications.
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This is so variable by major. And for a college (like Brown) where you don’t apply or declare a major freshman year- the “data” is really of limited utility.
At Cornell the largest class over the last several years has been a Psych course (social science, not STEM). At Brown in my day, the biggest classes were Poli Sci and Literature- because of superstar professors. So knowing that the Bio class that all the wannabee premeds is large– helps the kids who have no intention of taking that bio class how???
People on CC really idealize small classes (more so than in real life) for reasons that I don’t understand. My MIT kid had huge classes for the required core and often tiny classes for the “required” HASS distribution courses (you pick your own, but the university determines how many of which type you need to take). He had strong relationships with the professors in both types. And of course- by junior year, virtually all his classes were small. But this is only one piece of it. The professor who supervised the research project he worked on, the professor who accompanied a group on a summer fellowship program and bonded with the team- both in a supervisory capacity and socially, the professors he met as part of an EC, and the professor who was his advisor/thesis mentor– he didn’t have courses with any of these.
When a research spot is posted there isn’t a requirement “must have a personal relationship with the professor” before they’ll consider you. There will be a paragraph or two of the actual requirements- technical lab skills, computer languages, hours and times you MUST be available for team meetings, etc. But they aren’t sticking your resume into the “professor likes this kid” and “professor has no idea who this kid is” piles.
Major in philosophy- your classes will be small. Major in CS and at least for two years your classes will be big. Take any of the courses to meet the med school application requirements- they’ll likely be big until the dropouts begin.
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I agree that all huge classes are not terrible.
But I think the “Classes That Are Huge Because The Prof is a Star” cohort is quite small, and the “Classes That Are Huge Because They Are Intro Classes For Popular Majors” cohort is vastly larger.
I remember my 500 person “Introduction to Social Psychology” class, with multiple choice tests and no discussion, and cannot help but think my experience would have been very different in a 20 person – or even 50 person – class.
And that is the consideration, really, in deciding what college experience best suits the student.
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Perhaps I miss your meaning, but a student doesn’t need to have reached the term where they declare to have ruled out certain majors based on bad initial experiences. For some students (evidently not yours), unsatisfying if not bad experiences are more likely when the classes are large.
I hope you don’t think I claimed otherwise. I do think a student who has spent one-on-one time with a professor discussing academic topics at length is more likely to get helpful guidance from that professor on what research opportunities they might want to consider (not to mention other advice, like electives to consider). It would not be surprising if such a student had some advantage over other students if applying for a research position in that professor’s lab and all else were equal. Sometimes the research idea itself can even come out of those very conversations between professor and undergrad. I also think a student applying to grad school who has had such conversations with a professor, taken their class, and worked in their lab can sometimes expect a deeper letter of recommendation than one from a professor who never had such conversations, didn’t teach the student, and delegated the lab supervision to a grad student.
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Perhaps because your experience was at Brown and your kid’s experience was at MIT?
You frequently post that in your experience large classes are due to “superstar” professors who are so famous that students are glad to be packed into huge halls in order to experience their lectures. What has this got to do with a student’s experience at 99% of the colleges in this country?
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