<p>At Stanford, you’re going to have a lot of intro classes that are taught by TAs rather than professors. Many of the top professors at Stanford barely even spend any time in the classroom. They are either conducting research or somewhere else giving lectures or doing other work. The same is true with Harvard; it is not undergrad oriented</p>
<p>This may be true at Harvard, but not really so at Stanford. First off, Stanford offers 100-200 seminars for freshmen and sophomores capped at around 15 students that are exclusively taught by professors, not TAs. Second, although I am not yet a student at Stanford, the general consensus amongst undergrads there (freshmen in particular) is that having a TA teach a course is rare. Most classes, including freshmen ones are taught exclusively by professors and TAs tend to only be in charge of leading supplementary sections for the larger classes that need to be broken up. Also, according to Stanford statistics, 75% of classes have less than 20 students and the student:faculty ratio is about 6-7:1</p>