Good universities for linguistics?

tk21769
Sat, 03 Aug 2013 18:39:55 +0000

Linguistics is likely to be a relatively small undergraduate program nearly anywhere. So, you might expect linguistics classes to be quite small nearly everywhere. Are they?

UC Berkeley has detailed online course information that includes class-by-class enrollment sizes and instructor names. Here are the class sizes for “core” undergraduate linguistics courses there in 2012-2013:
LINGUISTICS 100 P 001 LEC Intro to Linguistic Science 101 enrolled
LINGUISTICS 110 P 001 LEC Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology 96 enrolled
LINGUISTICS 115 P 001 LEC Phonology and Morphology 106 enrolled
LINGUISTICS 120 P 001 LEC Introduction to Syntax and Semantics 96 enrolled
LINGUISTICS 130 P 001 LEC Comparative and Historical Linguistics 48 enrolled
These 5 courses comprise the core of the undergraduate program, which all majors must take.The lectures (typically 3 hours/week) generally have corresponding discussion sections (typically 1 hour/week) with fewer than 20 students enrolled. These break-out sections are taught by graduate students. The major also requires 10 elective courses, which appear to have enrollments of under 20 students in most cases.

I don’t know if Michigan or UMass post similar details somewhere.
In general, Berkeley has smaller average class sizes than Michigan, UMass, or other state universities (according to USNWR data). I don’t know if this holds for Linguistics courses in particular.