W&M Pros and Cons?

Farquhar
Sat, 29 Apr 2017 15:35:19 +0000

@IzzoOne

Good points. Someone just looking at Niche and my post would obviously be silly to put too much weight on the views of one person who liked W&M (it has tremendous atmosphere) but felt that he had made a mistake in putting too much weight on its talking points when considering attending. Your view point is particularly worthwhile since you have experience at several highly-regarded schools often considered to be in the same sort of rank as W&M.

But dissenting voices are important and – for me anyway in trying to make sense of the disconnect between my experience and the Niche survey results and US News ranking – I find the argument that students have a response bias from constantly hearing that W&M is one of the top 4 schools in the country for undergraduate teaching compelling. It’s either that or W&M really does have superior undergraduate teaching, which I personally cannot believe. I may have been in the wrong departments though, so I would advise anyone to look carefully at the department they are interested in majoring in.

On comparing W&M to other schools I attended:

I took one course while a graduate student at Harvard that was mostly for undergraduates (Harvard College and the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have the same course catalog and courses are divided into three groups, mostly undergraduate, a mix, and mostly graduate, some of which are all graduate, obviously. You can enroll in virtually any class you want at the university as a graduate student if you can argue that it supports your graduate degree). This was actually the best course I ever took as far as teaching. It had two of the top scholars in the field as professors and a couple TAs who either had PhDs or were working on them. This course had as many students as the biggest classes I ever took at W&M. And I had more personal attention from the main professor than in any other class I ever took. I don’t think I got special attention.

Then I look at the rankings in US News and World Report and see W&M killing Harvard in rankings of best undergraduate teaching. One of the talking points I think I’ve heard that applies here is that schools like Harvard use TAs and W&M rarely does. But when the TAs are as good as the average W&M professor and the main Harvard professor is just as helpful if not more so than a W&M one, I can only see the TA system as a perk.

Granted that was one Harvard class mostly populated by college students, but what are the odds that the only class I selected just happened to be an outlier, and that I managed to take classes with some 30 professors at W&M and only one was pretty great as a teacher, and none were world-class scholars? W&M professors usually have excellent degrees and publish not infrequently, but it’s very rare for one of them to be near the top of her field as a thinker or writer.

I’d also say that most of the classes I took at W&M were very small (a pro). On average the graduate courses I took had maybe 12 students though one had more than 100 and was outrageously excellent as far as teaching and attention went. It was even catered. The average difference in class size between my courses at W&M and Harvard was marginal. If I remember correctly, my average W&M class had 15 to 30 students in it.

The other schools I took classes at were further back than W&M in the top 100 national universities. It did seem like they might be less consistent as far as teacher quality goes. As someone attending for just a year or just enrolling in a class here and there I may have cherry-picked great teachers in a way I couldn’t at W&M.

I’ve probably posted too much here, but I just think this is an important topic. I might not have gone to W&M if hadn’t believed I was about to be enriched by some of the best teaching in the US. But again, W&M is a solid credential. I think it is on the whole as good as UVa, just scaled way down to liberal arts college size and with less money. However, I don’t think most people consider W&M to be quite as good as UVa when they size you up. If you must go in-state to a public school, this whole conversation is less meaningful. W&M is an excellent option in that common scenario.