<p>While I’m not going to make any statements about quality of undergraduate education at any institution, I think the “graduate students teaching classes” metric is ambiguous, potentially misleading, and ultimately of little value. </p>
<p>Based on personal experience, I can tell you that the one class where I had a graduate student lecturer at Duke happens to be one of the best taught classes I ever took in college. Does that prove anything? No, it’s just an anecdote. </p>
<p>However, what exactly does the metric even mean? No grad student is the lead lecturer in a course? But does that mean grad students can teach sub-sections of a large course like my grad student teacher did? What about labs? Are they run by professors or grad students or maybe even undergrads? What about recitations? Do those count as “courses” or just sub-components of courses? What about teaching assistants that work under a professor? What if they are the first people that you are directed to go to when you have problems or if they are the ones running office hours? All these things are poorly defined but extremely important if you want to get at the intent behind the metric and yet they are not consistent across institutions nor are there even agreed upon standards. </p>
<p>Granted Davidson may have fewer graduate students and therefore less chance of you running into one. (Edit: it looks like Davidson has no graduate students at all and therefore zero chance of you running into one) But I would argue that that’s probably a disadvantage. Graduate students can be wonderful mentors, friends, and mature people. They are further along in their training but are not so far removed from your experiences as to make their perspectives and advice irrelevant. The point is that it’s always beneficial to surround yourself with people at different stages of life and training because they are often your best sources of information. I know I certainly benefited from working with a diverse group of people ranging from undergrads to senior PIs.</p>
<p>Edit: regardless though, the educational environment at Davidson is very different from that at Duke. If you feel like the close-knit community, small classes, and more personal attention is what you like then Davidson is probably a better fit.</p>