Ivy League vs. Liberal Arts

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True. My daughter is at Harvard, so I can only address it. There are a handful of huge classes in the very popular majors. Especially LS 1a (all of the bio and premeds) and Ec 10 (economics). These classes can have as many or more students that the entire freshman class at Williams. With limited exceptions, Harvard does not cap enrollment so any student can take whatever classes he/she wants without fear of the class being “full”. And of course, these large classes also have “sections” which are smaller groups that review material with a Teaching Fellow (grad student). Your experience really depends upon your major. My daughter is a physics major. Her introductory physics class (honors level) had about 45 students in it and it also had sections. Her first math class was her at only truly huge class with about 200 students, but she could have chosen different math sequences that would have had much smaller class sizes. At the same time she also had seminar classes as a freshman that were capped at 15 students. Certain subjects lend themselves to large lectures while others are more discussion based so large classes generally are not an issue. And there are many departments where the class sizes are almost always very small like you would expect from a LAC because there are few students majoring in them.</p>