I found the professors at Williams “amazing,” and extremely accessible. The Tutorials program, in particular, is an incredible way to get close with expert scholars and grow as a scholar yourself. Life-changing, even.
I’m still in contact with some of my amazing undergrad professors (from a large public u) 3+ years after graduation.
Agree that you’re going to get a mixed bag pretty much anywhere. You’re probably most likely to have those gigantic lecture-hall style/taught-by-the-TA at very large privates or large publics, and even then only in intro-level classes for certain majors. This bothers some more than others. There is also the trade-off of course that your son would likely have a larger course catalog from which to choose and a wider variety of times/profs than at a smaller school.
For what it’s worth, I go to Northeastern which most would consider medium to large. I have done 4 semesters of school at this point, and can think of 3 professors I’d rate poorly, 10 I’d consider exceptional, and 3 that were above average. I feel like that’s a pretty solid record. I know that at least 2/3 of my “poor” professors are widely liked as well, just not my style.
Oh for the love of peet @WorryHurry411. Why do you start these threads? Your kid will get a great education at any of the top schools you’ve picked. You can buy c=a copy of US News to get the info on # of PhD faculty who teach at each school.
Not exactly. The category takes its name from those schools, but it’s generally any non-flagship, no-brand-name state school.
There are some really amazing professors at our Service Academies.
I took a class in college called War Movies. It was in the experimental studies school, was taught by two guys who couldn’t have been more than 25 years old, and they were great. I thought the course was very well organized, and I probably remember more from that class than any other I took. It was political, historical, fun, horrible all at once (and had a lot of John Wayne in it). It was like taking a class from Ben and Jerry.
I had seasoned professors who were horrible and new profs or TAs who were pretty good.
Amen to jym’s post.
WorryHurry, I know you’re a chronic worrier. I get it. I am too. But I promise, from the bottom of my heart, that a good student will succeed almost anywhere s/he goes.
Amazing professors exist at every college, but you have to seek them out. A motivated student will do that.
You can substitute “amazing professors” for almost anything else that you’re looking for and it will exist at any decent-sized, decent university. Even a “dreaded” directional.
I hang out with a lot of PhD students at top universities in all sorts of programs. They went to everything from a nearly-all Hispanic college on the Texas/Mexico border that 99.9% of Americans have never heard of all the way through Harvard. But every single one of them has been well-prepared for their PhD programs. Why? They were motivated students who made the best of their educations.
Deep breaths.
I think it is more likely that almost any school you go to, there will be amazing teachers who make a kid fly, and teachers you would like to put a bag over your head and tape shut rather then listen to one of their lectures shrug. TA’s generally teach (outside recitations and lab lectures) low level courses, you likely (not always, but likely) would get a TA in a so called core course than a majors course. In Chemistry, the majors lecture and the general chem lecture (the one with like 200 students in it) are likely taught by faculty, same in physics, with math I had professors except for Calc I and Calc II (grad students taught those), upper level math were professors. BTW, some of the TA’s were decent teachers, my biggest problem with some of them was they were foreign students and had problems with English (I don’t know why they were allowed to teach, to be honest).
Like others, obsessing about great teachers may be overkill, I had teachers who inspired me, I had teachers I thought were over rated gasbags impressed by their own brilliance, I had other ones who were tough SOB’s, who made me work harder than I ever did and I ended up remembering those classes, other ones where I had my eyes opened, others I literally taught myself. Great teacher is a relative thing, and after sitting in on some classes taught by someone they brought in (famous figure from the Vietnam era, one of the architects of the Vietnam policy, was hanging out at my school), I kind of rather would have someone who wasn’t so famous…
One of the advantages of going to a top university is not so much that the professors are better – a student is rarely going to have important relationships with more than 2-3 professors, and you can find 2-3 great professors almost anywhere . The TAs, however – there can be a much bigger difference there. I had amazing TAs when I was an undergraduate at Yale, studying literature. Several of them became stars in the field, and it wasn’t hard to tell that they were headed that way as graduate students.
Grad students can perform an important role in bridging the gap between undergraduates – who know next to nothing, and who devote comparatively little time and energy even to the subjects they care about most – and senior faculty.
LACs on the other hand, don’t even use TAs (at least for teaching), and the professors are on the faculty for teaching rather than research or publishing (although at top LACs they do plenty of that as well), and, perhaps more importantly, they have no graduate students to occupy their time and resources (and research support positions).