cornell engineering vs michigan vs berkeley

[Truust]

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Not true. Cornell has big classes, too; 18.3% of its classes have 50 or more students, compared to 14.5% at Cal and 18.1% at Michigan. Of the three, Cal does have more super-large classes-- 8.5% of its classes have 100+ students, compared to 7.4% at Michigan and 6.6% at Cornell, but they’re still roughly in the same ballpark. There’s a common misconception that if a school is private, it won’t have large classes. In Cornell’s case, that’s just flatly wrong. There are many reasons to like Cornell, but small classes isn’t one of them. When I visited there with my D, the tour guides actually boasted that the largest class on campus had 1300 students. That’s more students in a single classroom than there were on the entire campus at the small LAC D finally chose to attend.

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<p>I did acknowledge that Cornell is in fact a big school, but he will certainly not face similar class sizes. To elaborate, it doesn’t really matter for the lower division courses, which all 3 have big class sizes for. Even though both Cal and Cornell have 1000+ student classes, it is irrelevant at the lower division level since no one really NEEDS a small class for a lower division course.</p>

<p>BUT, several of Cal’s upper division courses, at least for my major, have 200+ students. That can be a really impersonal experience for some people imo. (I should point out to the OP though that there are discussion sections for each class of ~25 students so it’s not as big of a problem) I’d imagine that Cornell’s upper division courses for the most part DO NOT go to such high sizes. But I could be wrong since I haven’t looked at Cornell’s upper division courses specifically.</p>

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Actually, I hear about this problem much more at Cal and other units in the UC system than at Michigan. Not so say it doesn’t happen at Michigan, but I don’t think it’s nearly as common, and I don’t think you can generalize on the Cal experience. (For that matter, my D had trouble getting into a couple of popular classes she wanted to take at her tiny LAC; it can happen anywhere).

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<p>As someone who registered for courses last month, I can tell you that I wasn’t able to enlist in 2/4 courses that I wanted to. There are several courses that fill up VERY quickly, and if you don’t sign up for them in the first phase you won’t get them (and you can only sign up for ~2 courses in your first phase of course choice, so you inevitably have to defer some choices to phase 2, at which point some courses are filled to the top and then some). I also hear from quite a few people that they’re stuck high up on waitlists for certain courses they need.</p>

<p>It’s not really much of a problem for choosing courses to do with your major since you get priority for that, but if say, I wanted to take CogSci 1 or MCB C62 (very popular courses),there’s no way I’d get in if I phase 2’d them.</p>

<p>I mean, I guess if you plan everything out and decide what to phase 1 and phase 2 very carefully, you could potentially get all the courses you want, but it’s just a hassle you wouldn’t find at Cornell.</p>