Which university can you get the best education (not LACs)? I know the Ivies and stuff have a reputation but I heard most of them are bad at teaching undergraduates.
In my experience, this is something that varies between departments and even professors within a department. I am not convinced it is possible to generalize about a university’s approach to teaching.
As a VERY general rule of thumb, the humanities and social sciences tend to place more emphasis on teaching than STEM fields, but even this is variable. It’s not uncommon for math departments to have “teaching faculty” and “research faculty,” for instance, and the former are obviously expending more time and effort on teaching than the latter.
USNews has rankings for undergraduate teaching. Any such ranking will be imperfect, but they probably have access to more data than individuals posting here.
If you want, you could make sure the schools don’t appear on the top research university lists - there are sites that rank schools by number and quality of publications and cites.
As with “overall” rankings, these may or may not apply to specific programs, courses, instructors, etc.
My D is at a school in the top 25 of the USN undergrad teaching ranking and has been satisfied with a majority of her professors. It doesn’t bother her or me that they are also a world-class research university.
FWIW, Princeton is #1, Brown #3, Dartmouth #5, Yale #14 and I’ve never been under the impression that students come out of Ivies having been poorly taught. What is “bad at teaching undergraduates” based on?
Princeton, Rice, and Dartmouth historically have excellent reputations for the quality of undergraduate instruction.
Note that all three (and especially Rice) have undergraduate student populations that are well below average in size for an elite research university.
All universities which do not have PhD programs focus mostly on teaching. Public universities like the branch campuses of U Wisconsin or U Minnesota, and many other public universities. Private universities like DePaul or Loyola in Chicago also focus on undergraduate education, as do most specialized schools like Juilliard.
Research universities, as their names imply, focus mostly on research. While many of them, especially private universities like the Ivies, will claim otherwise, it is not really true. Big research results bring in more fame and fortune than teaching awards. Public universities cannot get away with hiring big name in the field as adornments for the departments the way private universities can, and state universities are still beholden to the residents of the state.
On the other hand, though, private universities are beholden to donors, many who are parents and alumni, who mainly think of these universities as teaching institutes, rather than research institutes. Since a few individuals can have a lot of influence, it is easier to pressure private universities to invest more in teaching.
To get tenure a faculty member at any research university needs to have a stellar research record, a stellar service record, and a passable teaching record. Famous people are hired for their research record, not for their teaching abilities, and having a Nobel prize winner as the instructor of record my be cool, but if they are bad teachers their awards won’t help a student learn the material. It is important to note that professors don’t get Nobel prizes for being great teachers.
Miami University in Ohio has a reputation for being teaching focused as opposed to research focused.
Wake Forest, William & Mary, Richmond, BC have excellent reputations for undergrad teaching (small classes taught by professors - not grad students - who really care about student success). There are many smaller schools like this. These four come to mind because that was a fit criteria for S a few years ago and were high on his list. Attends Wake Forest and it has certainly been his experience.
Northwestern, University of Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale all excel at undergraduate teaching while also conducting lots of research.
Excellent teaching of undergraduates & superior research efforts are not mutually exclusive.
The US News ranking for undergraduate teaching is hard to accept. Georgia State in Atlanta, for example, is ranked at #4, while Chicago, Columbia, Penn & other stellar universities do not make it into the top 60. The US News rankings appear to be based on little substance.
P.S. It might be more helpful to ask which among the top 50 National Universities & Top 50 LACs are great at undergraduate teaching. I suspect that the answer would include almost all, possibly all, of these 100 colleges & universities.
Probably because there are no good quantifiable proxy measures of teaching quality (which tends to be rather subjectively determined) across colleges.
Of course, within a college, different students have different instructors, and even students who experience multiple colleges as undergraduates (transfer students) tend to be at different class levels at different colleges.
I think some quantitative measures can be used for undergrad teaching, one is the quality of faculty who teach the classes and the other the class size. Here is the USNWR class size ranking:
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-list-college/articles/2017-10-17/10-national-universities-where-classes-are-small
If you factor in reputation Yale, Columbia, Chicago and NU come on top.
I know former & recent students at all of the four listed schools–Yale, Columbia, Chicago & Northwestern–and all had great experiences & lots of small classes with brilliant, energetic classmates.
An important factor to consider when choosing among colleges & universities in the retention rate of freshmen who return for the sophomore year.
Of the four universities noted above:
Northwestern University’s retention rate was: 98%
Columbia University = 99%
Yale University = 99%
University of Chicago = 99%.
How is “quality of faculty” (for teaching quality) quantifiable in ways comparable across colleges (or even departments at the same college)?
If class size is the proxy, then that implies that studying unpopular subjects assumes better teaching quality than studying popular subjects like economics or CS.
Retention rate heavily embeds student selectivity in it, so any valid comparison of it to find treatment effects needs to adjust for student characteristics, rather than use raw numbers. Of course, any such remaining variation may come from other factors besides teaching quality.
Son graduated Yale this past May and found the Profs - even those in programs with no formal “undergrad” classes like YLS and Yale SOM - to be very focused on teaching and welcoming to undergrads in their classes.
Personally, I’d be less interested in the size of the class but rather who is teaching it. When I read the OP, I was thinking more about the reputation of research institution professors being focused on their lines of research and graduate students, with TAs teaching many of the lower level undergraduate courses. It would be nice if there was a measure of the percentage of undergraduate classes taught by PhDs (or those holding the terminal degree in their field) to help with comparisons between institutions.
Honors Colleges / Programs at large Southern universities.
For this purpose, how do you count classes where the primary instructor is a faculty member, but there are associated discussion or lab sections run by graduate students?
^^^ Primary instructor for the course, not labs nor discussions, is the attribute to measure for that metric. I would expect TAs to fulfill lab and discussion group roles and believe they are good experience and training. But few are ready to be effective instructors…I saw this first-hand among my peers in grad school. I was fortunate enough to have a research assistantship and did not have to teach.
Are graduate students as lead instructors really that common?
Smaller research schools with smaller graduate program, bigger per student endowment, dedicated faculty, selectivity to attract high IQ/high achieving students and policy commitment to provide quality undergrad education.
Princeton, Brown, Rice and Vanderbilt are the names commonly suggested.