@OHMomof2 Yes! These rankings and threads about them mess up my head lol
@LucieTheLakie, how is “better” ever objective?
I can certainly see how someone could consider Lafayette “better” than GTech at STEM (if they deem having small class sizes “better”, for instance).
Then that’s what Forbes should say. “Better” for a kid who prefers smaller classes. But they’re clearly trying to claim a lot more than that.
I’m not seeing how it’s much better or worse than any of the other rankings. They’re all flawed in many ways.
But you can say the same thing about US News. In fact, unlike Forbes, US News actually does weigh class size fairly heavily in its rankings. I suspect one of the reasons they confine LACs to a separate list is that the best LACs would blow the top research universities out of the water on that metric, and they don’t want a ranking that doesn’t have HYPSM in the top handful.
Classes with 50+ students, top research universities: #1 Princeton 11%, #2 Harvard 10%, #3 Yale 9%, #4 Stanford 11%, #7 MIT 14%
Classes with 50+ students, top LACs: #1 Williams 3%, #2 Amherst 2%, #3 Swarthmore 2%, #4 Pomona 2%.
As I’ve argued on other threads, the percentage of large classes is actually much more important than the percentage of small classes in determining where students spend their time, because each small class is, by definition, small, i.e., it has relatively few students. One class with 100 students takes up as much student time as 5 classes with 20 students or 10 classes with 10 students. If you do the math, you’ll see that with 11% of classes in the 50+ range, it’s quite possible that students at Princeton and Stanford are spending on average half of their class time in large (50+) classes–not to mention MIT, where the percentage of large classes is roughly the same as at UC Berkeley (15% of classes 50+) or UVA (15%). HYPSM are more similar to the top publics in this regard they are to the top LACs.
But by separating out LACs, US News can have it both ways: they can insist class size matters and count it quite heavily in ranking research universities, and conveniently ignore the fact (and get you to ignore the fact) that students at research universities spend far more time in large classes than do students at LACs. If you want small classes, attend a LAC. If you don’t care about class size, attend a research university—but then don’t make class size a metric by which you judge the quality of research universities.
@LucieTheLakie, Forbes looks at other criteria that could be applied to both RUs and LACs (such as production of American Leaders, per capita PhD production, and per capita prestigious national scholarship winners). Is GTech actually better than Lafayette in those categories? I’d have to look, but it isn’t obvious that GTech is.
Hilarious … all of it.
When our kids are in high school we campaign for more taxes to reduce class sizes. Nobody ever says bigger is better.
Then, miraculously, 3 months after they graduate it doesn’t matter whether you take your Econ 101 in a lecture hall with 800 kids or in a seminar setting where the prof actually remembers you from day to day.
Big research U is great for … wait for it … faculty and grad students and a small handful of undergrads who are doing real research. In my experience it means little to the college sophomore.
Smaller classes and professors teaching them is still the gold standard for undergrad education. Sure if you want to be an engineer or accountant right out of undergrad, you attend elsewhere.
Is Lafayette better than UT? I have no idea. I know which one I’d pick. COA is another topic altogether. Can’t discuss and measure everything at once without losing the ability to make a point.
The fixation on class size as a relevant metric is a curious one.
I took a Shakespeare course in college which had one of the largest enrollments of any class at my college, AND had non-registered students sitting on the radiators which lined the room, falling out of the doorways, and listening in from the hallways because they couldn’t get the class on their schedule.
Why? Because the professor teaching the class was both a world renowned scholar AND a phenomenal lecturer. You never walked out of his class without stunning insights- whether into what Shakespeare had actually written, or what his contemporaries thought he meant, or what later artists had interpreted it to mean.
His classes were over-enrolled because students wanted to learn from him, gain his perspective on works he knew better than most scholars, and hear how he could make the connections between what was on the page and what was happening in real life- for the hundreds of years since people have been bringing Shakespeare to life on stage, film, various parodies and adaptations, etc.
Do you want your kids missing opportunities like this so they can sit in a seminar room with 11 other teenagers and hear the most aggressive of them blather on? There are reasons why certain courses at certain universities attract huge crowds. Sometimes it’s because of the “Easy A” reputation so every premed in town wants in. And sometimes because it would be cruel to put a course which 600 kids want to take in a tiny room and tell 590 of them to go pound salt.
I could describe a Classics course- I think the third largest enrollment at the university (Classics! We’re talking Greek Tragedy here). Cornell has its justifiably famous Psych course. MIT has a Materials Science course where the professor regularly gets standing ovations and the university just can’t find a hall big enough to hold the professor and students where the sightlines allow the kids to see the whiteboard.
Weird how folks want their kids missing out on the big time.
I took an Anthropology class with 800 students. The professor, well known around the world for his findings, gave a lecture on creationism vs evolution (active topic on campus back in the days of the Moral Majority) and got a standing ovation. Only class I ever had where the prof got any kind of ovation like that. At least in that case, size didn’t matter and only enhanced with the communal experience. That said, it would have been nice to have smaller classes at times to get to know the teachers. But the people inventing RISC processors or discovering Australopithecus aren’t always teaching at small schools.
Yes, whether class size matters is also a subjective matter. HLS seems to have rather bigger 1L class sizes than some much smaller lesser-known law schools, yet I don’t see people suggesting that those smaller law schools are more worthwhile than HLS.
And even at giant RU’s, depending on your major and what a honors college in it offers, you may be able to put together a schedule full of small seminars.
“There are reasons why certain courses at certain universities attract huge crowds.” @blossom
I attended a large university with 500+ person lectures for many courses. Sure there was the occasional class with a famous/world renowned person and sure they could be great lectures. But I wouldn’t say there was a strong correlation between class size and the quality of the lectures. Most of the largest classes were large because they were popular survey courses that fulfilled distribution requirements (often not called that) or were required for anyone considering a given major.
The difference was with a 500+ person class, whether the lectures were fantastic or completely ordinary, is that the people giving the lectures were not the ones giving you feedback on your work on or grading your papers or projects – grad students were. If you were like me you proactively sought out the large lecture profs during their office hours, but I was the extreme exception to the rule and if everyone did it there wouldn’t be nearly enough capacity anyway. Your post seems to place all the emphasis on the lecture which is only one part of the learning equation. These days, if all someone wants is a great lecture they can probably find it free online. I’m not dissing large schools as inherently inferior – I loved my experience and it worked out fine. But smaller undergraduate-focused schools with great faculty-to-student ratios give better access to a direct iterative process of feedback and improvement with the subject matter experts giving the lectures.
@blossom
That’s the exception to the rule. We’ve all had the ‘yeah but this one time’ experience. The ‘big time.’ I got a good laugh out of that.
You miss one, kind if important, piece: interaction. You can’t replicate it in an 800 seat auditorium. If the professor has 11 kids he/she can manage the agressive participant and prevent your example, and can make sure everyone is engaged.
to make your point, you assume the worst case scenario for small classes and the absolute best case scenario for the large lecture hall. I find that curious too. What makes you think you need to be at gargantuan u in an 800 seat lecture hall to take a course from a guy like that?
What you describe is a great lecturer. The fact that the class is big has nothing to do with that. But there are clear disadvantages to big classes. Also , let’s not kid ourselves here: the grad student teaches as many of those courses as the actual professor. At a small college, you get the faculty almost 100% of the time.
Big time … Please.
BTW, in the American Leaders ranking (which partially is based on total number), UT-Austin is far ahead of Lafayette, but in per capita PhDs and per capita prestigious national scholarships/fellowships, Lafayette beats UT-Austin.
I heard a rumor a long while ago which was to the effect that the first published rankings of colleges simply said: It Depends. But the publisher soon learned that issue didn’t sell very well (was only a cover so probably not a surprise). US News, Forbes, Money and company learned from that. College presidents did too. Parents and students are still struggling with it though. 
Maybe we should create a “CC Fit-Based Rankings Presented by Fitbit” – make some cash with the sponsorship. hehe
@MiddleburyDad2 “Also , let’s not kid ourselves here: the grad student teaches as many of those courses as the actual professor.”
I’m curious what places that occurs at. I’m familiar with 3 UCs and none of them do/did that in my experience. TAs run a section for the lectures, yes; but give the lectures which are 75% of the course time, no. Are there schools where grad students are predominantly giving the lectures?
^^^ It depends what you define as “teach.” If teaching is just a lecture, most are done by professors. If teach is more broadly defined as a two-way process where you demonstrate what you learned, apply it with papers and projects and demonstrate your ability to extrapolate the information you are given as opposed to just regurgitate it, then much of that feedback comes from TA’s in the large classes.
@youcee it’s a common complaint from kids and parents. I’ve sat in on lectures and guest lectured at the University of Washington. I’ve seen it there but I’ve heard from people at Michigan and UCLA and similar schools say the same thing.
%? I don’t have any idea.
@MiddleburyDad2 I’ve heard that complaint on these boards, but I’ve just never seen it myself. Myself, I don’t count a TA running section as teaching the course. I would be curious about any instances at UCLA since that is on our son’s radar.
Probably a topic for another thread, but a lot of the first-year learning in Chemistry, Physics, etc at some private and public schools is online homework using ALEKS and another system I forget the name of. That’s in conjunction with the normal lectures. The feedback on those is supposedly very good and really helps to learn the material.