<p>So I’m a junior starting to look at colleges, and it seems to me that because most top schools are private, they are also very small. I don’t need a school to be giant state university size, but I think I’d prefer a school with at least 10,000 undergrads. Ignoring cost and location, what top colleges are there that meet that requirement?</p>
<p>UPenn, Cornell, and the top 5 publics all have over 10k undergrads.</p>
<p>NYU has around 20,000 undergrads. I’m not sure you would consider these quite to be “top” colleges, but Southern Cal and George Washington U also have over 10,000 undergraduates.</p>
<p>If you’re willing to come down a little from the 10,000+ mark, Northwestern has close to 9,000 undergrads.</p>
<p>Harvard has 7k undergrads!</p>
<p>How are you defining selective and “top colleges”? You can plug your criteria (more than 10,000, residential, not-for-profit, percent admitted etc.) into College Navigator and get a list. If you exclude public schools, it narrows it down a lot.
[College</a> Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/]College”>College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics)</p>
<p>Boston College has 9000.</p>
<p>Only two of the US News top 20 national universities have more than 10K undergraduates. One exception is Cornell, but its enrollment includes students in several schools (Hotel Administration, Agriculture, etc.) besides the College of Arts & Sciences. The Cornell CAS enrolls only 4100 students. UPenn’s ug enrollment barely tops 10K; that number includes nursing students (as well as CAS, Wharton, and Engineering students).</p>
<p>Is it a coincidence that the “top” schools tend to be small?
Many of them are old (7 date from colonial times) and located in built-out environments with limited space for physical growth. However, even without that constraint, it may be harder to maintain the same liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control as enrollments get very large. Of the top universities with UG enrollments over 10K (USC, NYU, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA), only at NYU do (slightly) less than 10% of classes enroll 50 or more students. Is that a coincidence? Maybe it is just too hard to hire enough high-quality faculty to keep classes small in popular majors like English and biology when enrollments grow too large. I would think, too, that highly selective “holistic” admission would be harder and harder to pull off by the time applications start to reach Berkeley-sized numbers (> 50K).</p>
<p>“Of the top universities with UG enrollments over 10K (USC, NYU, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA), only at NYU do (slightly) less than 10% of classes enroll 50 or more students. Is that a coincidence? Maybe it is just too hard to hire enough high-quality faculty to keep classes small in popular majors like English and biology when enrollments grow too large.”</p>
<p>At Princeton, which is the epitome of undergraduate-focused research universities, 11% of classes have more than 50 students. At Stanford, 12%. At MIT, 11%. And Cornell, 18%. I am not sure how that’s better than 14% at Cal, 15% at UVa or 17% at Michigan. I do not think it is accurate or fair to insinuate that any of those universities have have a lack of liberal arts focused academics, sense of community or academic quality control. It is in fact insulting to make such assumptions.</p>
<p>To the OP, Cal, Michigan and UVa are very selective. Their mid 50% ACT/SAT ranges are in the 28-32/1260-1460 range (Cornell has similar ranges).</p>
<p>Another not quite as big as you mentioned, but definitely check out Washington U in St. Louis.</p>
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<p>I don’t think it’s at all coincidence that “the ‘top’ schools tend to be small,” but I think you have the causation arrow reversed. The simple fact of the matter is that it’s much easier to fill a small class with high-stats applicants than it is to fill a large class with applicants of a similar caliber. </p>
<p>Truth be told, a school like UC Berkeley or Michigan enrolls more top-stats students than Harvard. Harvard’s 25th percentile SAT CR score is 690, which means 3/4 of its entering class, or 1246 entering freshmen, scored above that level, and the same number scored a 700 or higher on SAT M. At UC Berkeley, about 45% of entering freshmen, or 1,999 freshmen, scored 700 or higher on SAT CR, and 60%, or 2,666 entering freshmen, scored 700 or higher on SAT M.</p>
<p>The difference, of course, is that as a public university UC Berkeley has a much bigger class to fill (4,443 freshmen v. 1,661 at Harvard), so it’s got to reach deeper into the applicant pool to fill it, and that brings down its SAT medians. There’s not much question that if UC Berkeley had to fill only 1,661 seats in the freshman class, as Harvard does, its entering class stats would be much stronger, and so would its US News ranking. No “coincidence” there: a small undergraduate student body is a major contributing factor to “top” private schools’ ability to be highly selective. (It’s not the only factor, obviously, because many small schools aren’t very selective, but it’s a major factor).</p>
<p>As for “liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control”—I think that’s just wrong. I’ve spent a lot of time at both Michigan and Berkeley, as well as a number of top private schools. Schools like Michigan and Berkeley have every bit as much liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control as any private institution. And to the degree people rely on widely used rankings like US News to identify which are the “top” schools, it’s worth noting that things like “liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control” just don’t figure into those rankings at all.</p>
<p>One other area where size does matter in the US News ranking: the ranking favors a high rate of spending per student. Institutions with lots of resources and few students will always do better on that metric than institutions with lots of resources and many students, in part because some costs are fixed regardless of the number of students—Yale’s libraries cost just as much to assemble and maintain as UC Berkeley’s comparably-sized libraries, even though the former serve far fewer students—and partly because bigger institutions are able to achieve some economies of scale that allow them to provide some services on a lower cost-per-student basis. For example, Michigan uses its size to negotiate substantial discounts on purchases from preferred vendors, producing millions of dollars in annual savings, and it produces most of its own heat and electricity through an 86% fuel-efficient central co-generation plant, operating at twice the efficiency of the average private power plant. Savings like these are reflected in a lower operating cost per student, which US News rewards with a lower ranking.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that it’s possible for a relatively small university (< 10K undergraduates) to have a relatively high percentage of large classes (>= 10% with 50 or more students). I don’t doubt that those universities are in other respects excellent universities. At 7 of the USNWR top 20 national universities, 10% or more of classes do have 50 or more students. </p>
<p>My question is whether it is very feasible for a large school (> 10K undergraduates) to simultaneously maintain both high quality instruction and consistently small classes, as many small schools seem to do. More germaine to the OP’s question: Is it also very feasible for a very large school to maintain highly selective, holistic admission standards? It appears to me that the answer to both questions is “no” (relative to the most selective smaller schools, that is). I’m not making any insinuations (because I’m not convinced high selectivity is an essential feature of excellent academics). Nor am I pointing the causation arrow in one direction or another. However, I don’t believe it is a coincidence that we don’t see examples of very large schools that share these 2 characteristics, which are common to many (not all) highly ranked, smaller schools. The size of institutions, like the size of living organisms, has effects on their structure and behavior. It is no more “insulting” to suggest that than it is to point out that a rabbit is more agile than an elephant.</p>
<p>Is it possible to not have these features, and yet have a consistently strong liberal arts focus, sense of community, and academic quality control? I don’t doubt that within some large universities, all of these things are very much alive and well. What I doubt is that they can easily be maintained in history and biology classes of 100+ students.</p>
<p>Anyhow … universities in the USNWR top 100 w/ about 10K-15K undergrads include:
UPenn, Cornell, UVa, UMiami, Northeastern, Syracuse, Clemson, Baylor, UCSC, Drexel, SUNY Binghamton, Miami U., SUNY Stony Brook, and UVermont.</p>
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<p>“High quality instruction” is not necessarily synonymous with “consistently small classes”. Small classes are likely better on average, but there is no guarantee that a small class has high quality instruction or that a large class has low quality instruction.</p>
<p>The trade-off with having consistently small classes is that more faculty time is spent on freshman and sophomore level classes, which means either hiring more faculty (more expensive) or reducing offerings of junior and senior level classes (which can be a problem at smaller schools that emphasize small class sizes). Not every student will choose the same option in such a trade-off (and note that the big public universities tend to take in a lot of transfer students, who would obviously benefit more from greater offerings of junior and senior level courses but have fewer of the big introductory courses).</p>
<p>In theory, the small LAC model can be scaled up to a big LAC model school, but I don’t know of any big very selective schools that do this.</p>