<p>“This seems less like desparation and more like improving the undergraduate experience. How can a reduction of class sizes ever be seen as anything besides helpful to the students enrolled? You can argue that its an inefficient utilization of resources but clearly schools like Duke and UChicago that are rolling in money have the leeway to misallocate resources to benefit their undergraduate population.”</p>
<p>Huh? Goldenboy, are you being intentionally obtuse? Those lectures are not being spilt into smaller lectures taught by different faculty members or by the same faculty member but in different semesters. They are being split into smaller lectures taught by the same professor and in the same semester. The classes may be smaller, but the professor is still teacher all of the students enrolled in all of her/his lectures. In other words, those students are not benefiting one bit from being in a smaller class. Whether all the students are taught in the same classroom or in three separate classrooms, that professor can only handle a certain number of students before personal attention flies out the window!</p>
<p>Again, I am not misjudging private universities, I am merely pointing out their lack of integrity. They manipulate data to give high school students and their parents a false sense of “intimacy” and “personal attention”. If they only knew that they could get as much personal attention and intimacy at a flagship public university, they would probably not bother attending private elites.</p>