<p>I went to Ohio State as an undergrad and Cornell as a graduate student and teach at a public university so I can talk from my limited experience. First, I believe I got as good an undergraduate education at OSU as I would have received had I chosen to go to a private university. I admittedly entered Cornell with some doubts but after a few weeks it became evident that I was as adequately prepared as my classmates.</p>
<p>Will the overall college experience at a large public university be different from a LAC or midsized private university? Of course! Sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better. Almost without exception intro and survey courses will be very large, sometimes 300+ lectures. Small recitation sections will almost always be taught by TA's. However once the class size approaches about 50, the numbers become irrelevent. In fact I think the student get more individual attention with a large lecture and 25 seat recitations vs a lecture with 50 students. As a frosh you will get to know few tenured faculty. I believe that for sciences and math the lecture/recitation format is a fine teaching pedagogy. Not as good for most humanities and socsci subjects. However remember that in college most learning occurs outside the classroom.</p>
<p>There are challenges that are more common at large public universities. Academic advising is often not as good and greater attention needs to be paid to scheduling in order to graduate on time. The most successful students are those who take this on as a personal responsibility. I knew the courses that were required, I knew what prerequisites were needed, I read the entire course catalogue to see what electives might be interesting to take, and I always made it a point to turn in my schedule on the first day of registration and was never closed out of a class or section that I wanted. Personal responsibility.</p>
<p>The public funding issue is a concern indeed. With few exceptions, the public funding of state colleges and universities has declined at an alarming rate in recent years. So far the impact on instruction has not been significant because of tuition/fee increases, greater reliance on outside funding sources, and administrative "belt tightening". In our department for instance we have funded two additional endowed faculty chairs, reduced the conference and travel budget by 18%, scholarships have failed to keep pace with tuition increases, reduced university sponsored graduate assistance budget by 9%, have not filled an administrative staff vacancy, and have deferred renovation of our soils and concrete structures labs. All the news is not bad however. During this same time we have added 3 tenure track faculty positions, increased the % of gradute students on the PhD track from about 25% to 36%, increased government/industry research funding by 30% and formed a GIS research group w/i the department.</p>
<p>However the diversity of students at OSU was incredible, school spirit was palpable, and the opportunities were seemingly endless. If given the chance to relive those 5 years, I would not change a thing.</p>