large schools that are also very selective?

ucbalumnus
Thu, 28 Feb 2013 19:21:00 +0000

tk21769:

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.



“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.

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).

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.