Where to go to benefit from seriously amazing professors

Parent Cafe
1

I don’t want to be paying hundreds of thousands in tuition for my kid to be taught by newbies.Which schools use these practices and where do kids get experienced and accomplished professors? I guess LACs are better in this regard? Which ivied or top tier are best and worst?

Many undergraduate classes (even at many Ivies and other highly selective schools) are taught primarily by teaching assistants. Think about that for a moment: you sacrificed your way through four years of high school to get to the school of your dreams, only to find that your teachers are a bunch of graduate students who themselves are only just out of college.

2

All colleges are going to have wonderful professors and terrible. If your child is looking at specific colleges and majors, I’d have them contact the department and ask if there are any students your child can talk to. Have him/her ask them.

Also remember- someone may have a wonderful experience with a professor and someone else can have a terrible one with the same person. YMMV

Honestly, almost any “top” college is going to have “seriously amazing professors.”

3

Research universities are in the business of training the next generation of professors. They have to gain experience teaching. The graduate students at top universities will be highly accomplished. I don’t see a problem with having TAs lead section meetings of a large class, help students in tutorial sessions, help grade tests, etc under the supervision of the professor, who is the primary lecturer.

If you don’t want to experience any TAs, go to a LAC. Some universities have fewer TAs than others: Dartmouth, for example, functions more as a very large LAC in that respect.

4

Oh please. I went to a couple of public universities. My main mentors were internationally known in my field.

Your kid will find excellent professors…and lousy ones…no matter where you finally let him go to college.

5

I take your question to be: which schools have the lowest percentage of adjunct professors and teaching assistants. Is that correct?

You can google and and find websites that break this down for you.

In general you’re right that LACs tend to have very few TAs–mainly they don’t have grad students to draw from to be TAs. Adjuncts as a rule aren’t necessarily bad, because properly used they can bring real-world experience to the classroom. For example if you bring in a designer from Braodway to co-teach your costume-design class, the students can learn things from that person than, say, from someone who specializes in primarily teaching costume design. Both are valuable, but the one from Broadway may have an update on practices in use currently. An overreliance on adjuncts however means that a college may be shortchanging the students by not providing full-time professors and all that implies, such as the ability to mentor the student after class time, the professor having his/her own research that the student can participate in, the professor providing funding opportunities through grants won or donations coaxed from alumni, networking opportunities from the tendrils of care that he/she still extends to his/her former students, etc.

As far as quality of professors, it may be helpful to know that getting an academic position currently is so competitive that people from top schools go to teach at “lesser named” schools all of the time. Meaning a lesser named school may have top teaching talent, because there are so few jobs out there. You can check the background of professors in a given department by pulling up their profiles/ CVs. Remember: College Confidential parents tend to overly concern themselves with the “top” schools as defined by USN&WR. From inside academia, colleagues look at each other as being in the small club of the same discipline–or not. Someone at Princeton might look at whether his colleague from undergrad, Joe who’s at Indiana U, is still doing work on horney toads, or whatever interests them. They know that Prof. X is at Utah Direction U and does amazing work on plant proteins, that no one else does. Do you think that because Prof. X is not at MIT that his excellent research on plant proteins will be ignored? Not by the plant protein community, that’s for sure. They could give two flips about the name of his school as long as his research is solid. Whereas there is some correlation of Top Name School with Top Professors, because of the glut of talent compared with the small number of open positions, it’s not a perfect correlation in the least. Many top Unis also have senior faculty who have seen better days, and have floated to the top as dead wood, they are not producing anything any more. Because they are famous, schools may opt to keep them around anyway. That doesn’t mean your child will benefit directly from that person, unless 80-yr-old Prof. Y actually runs research and can teach still. Many top schools, like Yale, do not or rarely give tenure. This means that someone with a gig at Yale knows they will not get tenure in all likelihood, and after their contract ends, may go to teach at CUNY or at your local directional U. Any full-time professor position is challenging to land, much less one that offers tenure. If you’re curious, google the percentage of tenured profs at places liek MIT etc. It might be interesting . . …

6

I would focus on the Colleges That Change Lives schools. Most of them have faculty whose focus is teaching and not as much on research

7

I went to a huge public undergrad school and had all of one (maybe 2?) TA and never was the TA the main teacher. Yes, there are majors where you have courses primarily taught by TAs but that is avoidable and generally it is only the lower level courses where you’re probably not going to develop strong relationships with profs anyway.

8

Generally, TA’s teach discussion and lab sessions, not the whole class (except maybe freshman comp or foreign language.) It’s a complete myth that most classes at ANY college are taught by TAs.

My S went to an Ivy and had classes taught by world-class authorities, who were also engaging instructors.

Which was similar to my experience at UMich.

9

My kid did not go to an Ivy. Her school had NO teaching assistants or adjuncts (except private instrument teachers). She had excellent professors.

10

Another vote for CTCL schools as a good starting point.

11

The depth of high quality, knowledgable profs is amazing due to the glut of PhDs in this country. You can get very good teachers anywhere. For my kids, it came down to access. They picked smaller schools where pretty much all classes were taught by profs. My large public university experience was riddled with foreign TAs with poor English language skills. The amount of time my kid got directly with profs at their LACs was amazing to me.

12

You also have to be careful about what you mean about a great professor as well. There has been an ongoing battle within schools, because universities are often caught up in the prestige game, which is based on the research the professors do and get published, and to be quite blunt the superstar researchers may not be great teachers but have a reputation for what they published. I had a guy teaching a class who was in serious consideration for the field medal in math years ago, and quite honestly, he couldn’t teach his way out of a paper bag and made pretty clear he resented teaching us peons (on the other hand, I had a chem professor who had done some amazing things, all kinds of first rate research, patents, you name it, who was hyped up to teach, and this was a first year chem for majors class, loved that guy).

Besides things like lab lectures, recitations and lab courses, or recitations and help with math, the only other classes I routinely saw taught by grad students were things like the required expository writing (that we called suppository writing), some of the lower level math classes (calc1 and calc 2), and they were generally Phd students already with a lot under their belt, also had it in some of the classes that were core classes, like a class in Japanese literature I took, it all depended. TA’s are not necessarily inferior teachers, I had some who were first rate teachers.

adjuncts, too, are not necessarily bad, depending on the course, a lot of times adjuncts are people who have worked in industry, they often are master’s level at least degree people, and in certain areas that can be really, really valuable (in grad school, the guy who taught my TQM classes was adjunct, he had been the head of NYNEX office of quality, and man could he offer practical advice on how to deal with tough situations), so they might be better than that ‘great teacher’ who thinks teaching classes is an annoyance , keeping them from their research. Sadly, a lot of schools have been hiring ‘wandering gypsies’ to save money, adjunct and assistant professors, who teach at many places and to be honest, even if they are good teachers, get burned out from what I hear, so if you see a program, especially undergrad, where a lot of the teaching is adjuncts or assistant (non tenure track) teachers, you may want to question that.

13

@Thumper-- I only said Ivy because of the particular mention by the OP. Of course great, well-educated profs are everywhere. As @intparent says, there are a glut of PhDs in the country, teaching in everything from research institutes, to LACs, to directionals, to community colleges.

14

My daughter is a fourth year Ph.D student at a large research university, often mentioned on CC as being a top school. She is required to be a TA as part of her funded program. She has NEVER been the “primary” teacher in any of her assignments. I would be surprised if that is the case anywhere.

15

I didn’t have great experiences with TA’s in college, but the best Math teacher I had was an adjunct. The guy was amazing. He didn’t water it down or make it less theoretical. He was just a great teacher.

I’d still bet that you’d have a better percentage of good teaching experiences at a smaller school.

16

Do NOT merely choose colleges from the “Colleges that change lives lists”. ALL colleges/universities change lives. Many large top tier universities will have top grad students to interact with in labs and discussions (and you don’t need to be a professor to do a good job teaching foreign languages- HS teachers do it all the time). The beginning college classes do not matter as much as those at the upper levels. Consider the depth of the learning available once in the intermediate to advanced major.

ALL schools will have old fossils and newbies. Again, TA’s are not the ones who are the primary teachers and who decide what is to be taught anywhere. I would rather have a top notch TA leading my discussion/lab than some average professor at an LAC who isn’t fresh and on top of cutting edge research.

OP- you are obsessing about your child’s future based on many threads you have started. Relax, there are literally hundreds of good options out there that will do a good job for your child’s specific wants and needs. btw- let your child direct the college search- it is his/her life, not your pocketbook that matters. Your child needs to be the primary one doing the college search. Your job is to listen, offer some suggestions for schools to consider and have that discussion about family finances.

I had, as did son, some fantastic professors at our flagship. It helps to be in the Honors Program too.

17

Honestly – at my (prominent) state flagship. I had lots of classes where lecture was hundreds of people, and that was the only contact with the prof. Especially for the first two years. Sections were taught by TAs. They graded papers and tests, and were where you were supposed to go for help. In my Calc class we had no professor at all, only a TA section. All labs were TA taught and graded. Now I had some very good TAs, and some terrible ones. But the idea that TAs aren’t teaching classes and aren’t the primary interaction point at a lot of large research universities is wrong.

18

I would disagree with this in that if the student does not lay a good foundation they are not going to be able to build off of it later.

19

Personally I am a fan of small LAC’s. I went to Williams and most of the professors I had were very good teachers. It also was not uncommon for them to attend school events or invite you and your fellow students to their houses for dinner. Most classes are small, too, allowing ample opportunities for interaction with professors and classmates.

20

New term for me: What is a “directional”?