are private schools really better?

[tk21769]

<p>phantasmagoric’s and Midwestmomofboys’ last posts both sound plausible enough. Nevertheless, I think they are a little speculative (or else based on limited personal and anecdotal evidence). Not to say they are necessarily wrong, but …</p>

<p>In the subscription version of the USNWR college site, for many colleges there is a section that lists where alumni most frequently attend graduate school. For Oberlin College, the list includes: Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, JHU, Michigan, Stanford. For Macalester College, the list includes: Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, JHU, Stanford, Vanderbilt. For Kenyon College, the list includes: Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, JHU, Northwestern, Penn, WUSTL. For Agnes Scott College, the list includes: Duke, Stanford, UT-Austin, Vanderbilt, WUSTL.</p>

<p>I haven’t even mentioned where alumni of Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore go to grad school. I’m talking about LACs ranked between #19 and #68 in the USNWR “national LAC” hit parade.</p>

[Midwestmomofboys]

<p>All true as reported to USNWR, but a broad characterization based on a wide range of fields, and may even include professional schools, depending on how grad school is defined. If a student focused on a particular area, grad schools vary tremendously. For instance, in my husband’s field, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Arizona, USC, U Mass Amerst are all ranked higher than John Hopkins and WUSTL. Yet to most people, saying you are getting your Ph.D. from Hopkins sounds much better than Arizona. It depends on sub-specialties etc. I think the key for students and families is to make decisions based on the best learning environment for their student.</p>

[fauxmaven]

<p>For elementary and high schools yes ! Without a doubt .</p>

[turntabler]

<p>Totally depends on the elementary/middle/high school.</p>

[warblersrule]

<p>

@tk21769

Once a professor is much over 20 students, s/he’s lecturing; whether s/he’s lecturing to 35 students or to 75 doesn’t make as big a difference as whether s/he’s lecturing at all.

This is something frequently claimed, but only someone who has never taught would say something so absurd. </p>

<p>With a class of 30 or even 40 students, you can get to know the students - their names, how they’re doing in the class, which students are engaged and which aren’t, etc. Lectures often pause for questions or comments from students, and you can get students engaged during lectures. </p>

<p>With a class of 80 or more, that becomes impossible. No professor will memorize the names of all of his students (except those who do it as a parlor trick), and it is impossible to keep track of the progress of so many students. Heck, you can’t even see which students in the back of the classroom are sleeping! (I had to juggle 75 students, so I know this well.) More importantly, you have grading coming into play; a class of 80 or 100 students is much more likely to have TAs grading work than a lecture class of 30 or 40 students, in which a professor grades all work personally.</p>

<p>Yes, there is a fundamental difference between seminars and lectures, but the difference between a large lecture class and a small lecture class can be very important. </p>

<p>

@Midwestmomofboys

TK – on the Ph.D question, my point is a small, anecdotal one – that in my husband’s top 20 humanitites department, he tells me that their graduate admissions come from universities, public and private, and rarely from LACs. His explanation is that LAC students tend to suffer in two ways in admissions – they may be very good writers, but they are not well prepared to do original analysis and scholarship and their recommendations come from LAC profs who are more focused on teaching than their own cutting-edge scholarship. So, the students have learned from great teachers, but not great scholars.

As with so many things, I think this is something that varies tremendously by field. Personally, I haven’t been too impressed with my university students - most of them are incredibly intelligent but can’t figure out how to engage with the subject on a deeper level. Something I consistently try to drill into my students’ heads is to question the material - figure out the motives of the researcher, determines flaws in the research, recognize gaps in our knowledge, etc. The majority of them are used to passively absorbing material and struggle when forced to take that to the next level; they sit in large lectures, write down things from the powerpoint presentations, and then memorize things for tests. The concept of questioning or rejecting the conclusions of prominent researchers is foreign or even anathema to them. (Troublingly, most of my students are juniors and seniors.)</p>

<p>Although still a distinct minority, LAC graduates are well represented in my own department. (Interestingly, the LACs represented cover a much wider range of selectivity than universities. Almost all universities represented in my department are elite ones like Michigan, Chicago, Brown, Penn, JHU, etc. I will not attempt to guess why this is.) I think universities can provide equally good educations and offer certain benefits (graduate courses, broader course offerings), but I would be hesitant to say that LACs provide inferior educations, especially in the humanities…I say this as someone who has only ever attended research universities. </p>

<p>

@phantasmagoric

It’s a well-known - perhaps unfortunate - reality that if a prof can’t get a tenured position at a university, they end up at an LAC

This is an outmoded position. Let’s face it - the job prospects in academia are garbage. A newly minted PhD is lucky to get ANY tenure-track position at a reputable college, and this holds doubly true for the humanities. Even the history department of West Wichita Southwestern Regional State U is going to be stuffed with Harvard PhDs these days. </p>

<p>It’s true that most scholars would prefer to work at a university, yes, but few scholars start at Harvard right off the bat. I think increasingly the problem with LACs is more having faculty turnover (e.g. as that professor at Oberlin gets offered a job at Chicago) rather than suffering from a lack of faculty talent.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@phantasmagoric

The course offerings at LACs tend to be very limited, which puts them at a disadvantage relative to the students who have been able to take advanced or even graduate-level classes in a subject at a university.

</p>

<p>Could this mainly be due to two factors?</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Small size of the school or department leading to the situation where too few students want to take a given course every semester, so it is not offered, or offered infrequently to collect pent up demand over several semesters.</p></li>
<li><p>The “LAC model” of small classes taught by faculty at the lower division level means that less faculty time is available for upper division courses, compared to universities where lower division courses are taught “in bulk” (and/or where substantial percentage of upper division students are transfers from elsewhere, usually community colleges). Less faculty time available for (specialized) upper division courses means that fewer different courses are offered, and they may be offered infrequently.</p></li>
</ol>

[cptofthehouse]

<p>Which private schools and which public schools? When you moosh them all together, the composites are meaningless. University of Virginia is a whole different school from East Texas Tech, for example, just as Harvard is a whole different story from Alians College, I daresay you might find UVA and Harvard more alike than any number of schools in their respective public/private categories.</p>

<p>My current college freshman who has gone to private schools all of his life from K-12, chose a public OOS over any number of private school choices. As do a number of kids from his private high school.</p>

[bclintonk]

<p>

@warblersrule

With a class of 30 or even 40 students, you can get to know the students - their names, how they’re doing in the class, which students are engaged and which aren’t, etc. Lectures often pause for questions or comments from students, and you can get students engaged during lectures.</p>

<p>With a class of 80 or more, that becomes impossible.

</p>

<p>Totally agree with warblersrule on this. I’d even go a little higher. This semester I had one class with 10 students and one class with 50. Without question, the class with 10 was a more intimate setting and I got to know each of the students better, but the class of 50 wasn’t a lecture, it was a structured discussion and by midway through the semester I knew each student by name, every one of them spoke in class, I had one-on-one interactions outside the classroom with just about everyone, and the discussions, while guided by me, were open-ended and participatory. Student voices were heard and the students were engaged in making the classroom come alive. Much beyond 50 students, and that becomes impossible. I do think US News’ practice of defining a class with more than 50 students as a large class makes some sense, though I would say there’s also a huge qualitative difference between a class of 51 and a class of 100 or more that is obscured by the US News classification.</p>

<p>Where I think people get totally misled is in being bedazzled by the high percentages of “small” classes (less than 20 students) at private research universities. Is that a good thing? Sure. But the percentage of large classes is much more important in determining how students spend their time, because by definition, a lot more students are enrolled in each large class. Keep in mind that if 70% of the classes have less than 20 students, that does NOT mean students spend 70% of their time in small classes. By definition, each of those small classes has only a few students. Every class with 100 students is going to take up as many student enrollments and as much student time as 5 classes with an enrollment of 20, and every class with 200 students is going to take up as many student enrollments and as much student time as 20 classes with an enrollment of 10.</p>

<p>Take Stanford as an example (since tk wants to reject Cornell as an outlier). Stanford’s latest Common Data Set says it has 572 classes with 2-9 students; 509 classes with 10-19 students; 111 classes with 50-99 students; and 78 classes with 100+ students (omitting here the intermediate classes of 20-50 students). So we’d say Stanford has roughly 5 to 6 times as many small classes (<20 students) as large ones (50+ students), which on its face sounds pretty impressive. But it’s illusory.</p>

<p>Let’s assume the average class in the 2-9 student range has 6 students; the average in the 10-19 range has 15; the average in the 50-99 range has 75; and the average in the 100+ range has 120. </p>

<p>Then we’d have about 3,500 students enrolled in the smallest (2-9) classes; about 7,500 students enrolled in the classes with 10-19 students; about 8,200 students enrolled in the classes with 50-99 students; and about 9,400 students enrolled in the classes with 100+ students.</p>

<p>In short, if these assumptions are accurate, students at Stanford are spending about 60% more time in large classes (50+) than in small ones (< 20). And this is not atypical for private research universities. It’s a very different situation at top LACs, where large classes are vanishingly few.</p>

<p>There are lots of good reasons to like Stanford and other top private research universities, but small classes is not one of them.</p>

[ucbalumnus]

<p>

@bclintonk

Where I think people get totally misled is in being bedazzled by the high percentages of “small” classes (less than 20 students) at private research universities.

</p>

<p>Note that public universities can also appear to have a lot of small classes in these listings. Berkeley’s latest common data set lists:</p>

<p>3754 total class sections with undergraduates enrolled.
264, or 7.0%, have 100 or more students.
287, or 7.6%, have 50-99 students.
That leaves 3203, or 85%, with fewer than 50 students, including 2326, or 62.0%, with fewer than 20 students.</p>

<p>But obviously, as noted in post #28, the students spend more time in the larger classes than the percentage of larger classes may indicate. The concept of a weighted average may be applicable here.</p>

<p>Of course, choice of major makes a difference. Large classes are more common for popular majors like biology, for example.</p>

[bclintonk]

<p>

@Midwestmomofboys

. . . on the Ph.D question, my point is a small, anecdotal one – that in my husband’s top 20 humanitites department, he tells me that their graduate admissions come from universities, public and private, and rarely from LACs. His explanation is that LAC students tend to suffer in two ways in admissions – they may be very good writers, but they are not well prepared to do original analysis and scholarship and their recommendations come from LAC profs who are more focused on teaching than their own cutting-edge scholarship.

</p>

<p>Not sure what the field or the institution is, but this vire strikes me as an outlying view. If you look at the faculty of top universities–all graduates of top Ph.D. programs–I think you’ll find graduates of LACs very well represented. I don’t have time to do a thorough analysis of this, but just as an example, the Philosophy faculty at the University of Michigan (my undergrad alma mater)—perennially regarded as one of the top 4 or 5 Philosophy programs in the country–has 10 LAC grads out of 26 tenured and tenure-track faculty whose undergrad alma maters can be determined from the departmental website. Of the 26, 7 are Ivy grads (all Yale or Harvard, none from other Ivies), 3 from other private research universities, 2 from top publics, and 4 from foreign universities. So LACs are extraordinarily well represented. If that’s at all typical, then I think it’s fair to conclude that top LACs have no difficulty placing their top students into top graduate programs, and they do pretty darned well there. </p>

<p>The other misperception on this thread is that LAC faculty only teach and don’t do original scholarship. At my D1’s LAC, all the faculty do research, and they encourage and supervise undergraduates in research, in part because they have no graduate students to supervise in a similar capacity. Many are highly regarded scholars in their respective fields. I’m not saying this is true of all LACs; they differ greatly. But it’s also telling that at my D1’s LAC, an extraordinarily high percentage of the students–I’d guess about 40%–come from households where one or both parents are academics. I don’t think that’s an accident. I honestly believe that if I wanted my D1 to become an academic, there is no school in the country—none–where she could be better preparing herself in her chosen field of study. Some might equal it; none exceed it. Whether she chooses that path remains to be seen, and I’m not pushing it or even encouraging it. But if she does decide to pursue it, I’m pretty confident her chances of getting into one of the very best graduate programs are strong, and her preparation for it will be outstanding.</p>

[tk21769]

<p>

Once a professor is much over 20 students, s/he’s lecturing; whether s/he’s lecturing to 35 students or to 75 doesn’t make as big a difference as whether s/he’s lecturing at all.

This is something frequently claimed, but only someone who has never taught would say something so absurd. </p>

<p>With a class of 30 or even 40 students, you can get to know the students - their names, how they’re doing in the class, which students are engaged and which aren’t, etc. Lectures often pause for questions or comments from students, and you can get students engaged during lectures.

</p>

<p>I’ll grant all that is true. But so what? Getting to know students’ names is very nice (truly), but it’s not the real point of engagement. Pausing for questions and comments is important, but you’re still describing a lecture, not (unless the professor is really breaking form … which can happen) a real discussion.</p>

<p>I’ll also grant phantasmagoric’s earlier point that even a class of 5 students can be conducted as a lecture. It’s a point that sometimes is lost on me because, at my private alma mater, virtually every small-enough class was a discussion class. There was no category of “seminars”, distinct from other small classes, in which students were deemed finally initiated well enough into the mysteries to be allowed to talk. Any 18 year old who was motivated enough to have been admitted was expected to come to class having not only read the material, but also having thought about it, in preparation for a real discussion. Once the students had done all that, it would have been rather bad form for the mentor to hold forth for 50 minutes without seriously engaging the students. That meant more than just pausing now and then in a monologue. For that to work at all also meant having a program designed around material that was truly discussable (by any literate, motivated, reasonably thoughtful person, not just an initiated specialist).</p>

[tk21769]

<p>

If you look at the faculty of top universities–all graduates of top Ph.D. programs–I think you’ll find graduates of LACs very well represented.

Of course.
For example, on Stanford’s history department site, you’ll see faculty with bachelors degrees from:
Amherst, Barnard, Colorado College, Haverford (2), Middlebury, Pomona, Reed, Smith, Swarthmore, and Wellesley. </p>

<p>On Harvard’s English department site, you’ll see undergraduate degrees from Chatham College, Oberlin (2), Pomona, Swarthmore, Vassar, and Whittier.</p>

<p>In the biology department at JHU, LACs are less well represented, but they are still there. There’s a Middlebury graduate. There’s one from Kalamazoo.</p>

<p>When I present evidence that private LACs dominate the PhD production rankings, it is suggested that their alumni must be attending obscure graduate schools. Then when I present evidence that in fact they often attend some of the most prestigious graduate schools, it is suggested that they must be attending only the weak departments at those schools. Well, I suppose that might be true. Is it in fact true? If so, what’s the real evidence?</p>

[NJMom23]

<p>TK Cornell is not a public/private hybrid. It is 100% private. It just so also happens to be a land grant college, but that does not dictate class size. And while it does have some large classes it has world class research opportunities and financial resources that out-class the VAST majority of other universities both public and private.</p>

[tk21769]

<p>^ O.K., points taken. However, Cornell’s percentage of large classes still make it something of an outlier (for whatever reasons) among peer, private research universities. At most other T20 national universities, only 4% - 10% of classes would exceed 50 students. 15% - 20% (or greater) would be more typical of public universities (with a few exceptions such as Berkeley, UVa, and UNC, which are in the 10% - 15% range … or W&M, with fewer than 10% of classes > 50).</p>

<p>At T20 LACs (including the service academies), the percentage of classes > 50 generally is 0% to 5%.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’m not knocking Cornell. I’m not knocking public universities, either. I’m just pointing out some of the apparent, systemic, typical differences between public and private schools at the top-N levels. Some of these differences shrink or disappear or become insignificant in comparing specific features of specific schools for specific students. Nevertheless, they at least partially account for (or even justify) the popularity of certain private schools, despite their high sticker prices.</p>

[phantasmagoric]

<p>

@warblersrule

This is an outmoded position. Let’s face it - the job prospects in academia are garbage.

</p>

<p>Of course - the job market in academia has only gotten worse. But if LACs were once considered the last-resort for those who couldn’t get a tenured position at a university, wouldn’t a worsening job market just exacerbate that phenomenon? Then again, that might improve the stature of LACs, if great researchers are continually landing at LACs, similar to how great students are continually shut out of the top privates and end up at top publics. It could also be the case that the real last resort these days is working at No Name University or Unknown Religious U or College of Why Did They Choose Such a Terrible Name. These kinds of schools existed before but may have become even more of the “wasteland of academia.” (Harsh, but true.) But the end result for LACs is the same - they’re seen as the inferior choice for researchers, and the quality of the research that profs at LACs produce is generally in line with that.</p>

<p>To be fair, I’ll add that the second-rate research quality isn’t completely the profs’ fault, but probably also has to do with the structure of a LAC - a prof doesn’t have a squadron of grad students to produce papers on which the prof can tack their name without having to do much work.</p>

<p>Your point re: faculty turnover may be valid, though I can’t say. It does seem plausible that universities will hold off on hiring certain faculty, perhaps because a) they want them first to go through a ‘trial period’ as a faculty elsewhere to prove they have the stuff, or b) it completely depends on which positions are open at a given time.</p>

<p>

@ucbalumnus

Could this mainly be due to two factors?

</p>

<p>I think those two factors explain most of it, but a third factor would be the absence of grad students, who start out more advanced. Most of the classes at a university actually don’t require you to be all that advanced. After a certain level, usually after the ‘intro to [subfield]’ courses, undergrads can really go down any advanced path (e.g. move on to graduate courses), although some classes have to be taken in sequence. I firmly believe grad students can have a very strong positive effect on undergrads, but only when the two populations tend to mix a lot (undergrads are then exposed to more advanced students and more advanced topics). So when there are fewer grad students, your point (1) takes effect even more: there’s less ‘splintering’ of interests/paths, and there are fewer students who start out at an advanced level, such that some topics will just never have a demand. That of course means these advanced classes aren’t available for undergrads to take advantage of.</p>

<p>That leads me to my point re: bclintonk’s analysis. </p>

<p>

@bclintonk

In short, if these assumptions are accurate, students at Stanford are spending about 60% more time in large classes (50+) than in small ones (< 20).

</p>

<p>This is definitely right (although the basis numbers are a bit off, since Stanford’s CDS doesn’t include the 200+ introductory seminars administered by the VPUE). I used to point this out as a better way of looking at average student experience, and still do actually, since it’s more illustrative than looking at % classes in a given range. But it still doesn’t tell the whole story. The criterion for including a class in the CDS numbers is whether at least one undergrad is in that class, which could be an undergraduate or a graduate course. But undergrads are free to take most graduate-level classes, which tend to be small. No one will stop you, and indeed students are prepared to take them once they take the ‘intro to [subfield]’ class in a given area. They can and should do this, which is what I’ve told many, but some are afraid of it (even though grad classes are actually a bit easier in workload although more intellectually demanding). Many students do, but it’s impossible to tell how many. The reasons for why some students don’t are equally elusive - perhaps they prefer the undergrad classes, or they aren’t aware that they can take the grad classes, or they don’t have room after their major requirements + electives, or whathaveyou.</p>

<p>So the CDS numbers can tell you what the average student experience *was *in a certain point in time (e.g. fall 2011), but it doesn’t tell you what your experience could be. It’s further muddled by the variations in department. And while grad courses tend to be small, some are larger. If a single undergraduate enrolls in one of those courses, then that grad course is counted. By the same logic above, this one grad class will dwarf many of the small grad classes that at least one undergrad enrolled in. So the additional variation in department depends on which kinds of grad classes undergrads tend to enroll in.</p>

<p>For example, in CS at Stanford, if undergrads take a grad-level class, it’s nearly always one of the big classes, e.g. in the CS 220 series, even though there are tons of seminars that they could take within those same interests. Why? They’re “all the rage.” It’s not the same in other departments, e.g. psych undergrads who take grad-level classes tend to go for the seminars. (This is in my experience, at least.)</p>

<p>The point is that it’s impossible to know the effect that grad-level classes have on student experience with regard to class sizes. They do have a significant effect on the academic offerings available to students, whether or not the students take advantage of them.</p>

[phantasmagoric]

<p>

@tk21769

I’ll grant all that is true. But so what? Getting to know students’ names is very nice (truly), but it’s not the real point of engagement. Pausing for questions and comments is important, but you’re still describing a lecture, not (unless the professor is really breaking form … which can happen) a real discussion.

</p>

<p>I agree with this. Knowing students’ names doesn’t really tell you a lot. You can’t really speak to the students’ strengths, knowledge, abilities, talents past a very superficial level when a class is 50 students. It’s also not just the professor’s side of the story here that matters here, but the students’. Consider the problem with time. If you have an hour-long class, how much time does each student in a 50-person class have to say something? A minute each, if the professor completely shuts up? 3 minutes if there are 20 students? 4 minutes if there are 15? </p>

<p>If the data were available, it’d be interesting to compare the time per student per class meeting at LACs vs. universities. My favorite class of all time had only 5 students in it and we met for 75 minutes twice a week. The professor did teach/lecture, but most of it was discussion. I wonder at what point in this theoretical time/student/class metric would the value to any given student start to break down. You’d think that it’s very linear, but I’m pretty sure that diminishing returns set in fast after a given point. That’s why I’d cap it at 15. Even though that’s not much different from 20, the difference on discussion is tangible, IMO.</p>

<p>

I’ll also grant phantasmagoric’s earlier point that even a class of 5 students can be conducted as a lecture. It’s a point that sometimes is lost on me because, at my private alma mater, virtually every small-enough class was a discussion class.

</p>

<p>It’s true that the smaller the lecture, the more discussion there is. But how would your alma mater decide “small enough”? At what point does it decide “this is a lecture”? While that point isn’t rigid at Stanford, it defines the line between seminar and lecture. The only difference between the two is how much discussion there is, but the line is less distinct than the nomenclature would suggest.</p>

<p>

@NJMom23

Cornell is not a public/private hybrid. It is 100% private. It just so also happens to be a land grant college, but that does not dictate class size.

</p>

<p>While it’s true that being land-grant doesn’t mean that it dictates class size, it’s also untrue to say that it’s “100% private.” The contract colleges get funding directly from the state for operation, give preference to in-state students, take lots of transfers, tend to be easier to get into, etc. In other words, they exemplify public colleges. These public colleges are operated in conjunction with private colleges (e.g. CAS), which don’t get funding from the state for operation, don’t have a preference for in-state students, don’t take many transfers, tend to be harder to get into, etc. For all intents and purposes, the two two exemplify public and private, and they coexist, so it’s not wrong to say that Cornell is a public-private hybrid, which is unique but also true to what it is.</p>

[annasdad]

<p>

It’s a well-known - perhaps unfortunate - reality that if a prof can’t get a tenured position at a university, they end up at an LAC, which is seen as a last-resort option for most researchers.

</p>

<p>Tenure decisions, especially at research universities, have nothing to do with teaching ability.</p>

<p>

Yes, many of them are great teachers, but their scholarship is usually not up to par.

</p>

<p>Well, leaving aside the fact that few professors at any school really qualify as “great teachers,” one does not need to be an outstanding scholar to teach undergraduates.</p>

<p>

The course offerings at LACs tend to be very limited, which puts them at a disadvantage relative to the students who have been able to take advanced or even graduate-level classes in a subject at a university.

</p>

<p>Most LACs have areas they specialize in. One of the colleges where my D was admitted (not the one she is attending) has a great neuroscience program, with courses that are rarely found at the undergrad level at any school, and nearly 100% placement into med school or PhD programs. The same school, OTOH, has very limited math offerings - a kid going there, wanting to major in math, and starting at a level above Calc III would run out of courses before graduation. Another example, the college my dad taught at for 32 years, was renowned for its history (many top scholars started there) and biology departments (a Nobel prize winner and a number of professors at top-line med schools have degrees), but not for much else.</p>

<p>So for a kid who is truly undecided, or even mostly undecided, I think there are advantages to going to a school with a broad range of deep majors. But for the more focused kid, I think they’re going to do just as well - perhaps better - both educationally and recommendation-wise at a LAC that is known for their field.</p>

[phantasmagoric]

<p>

@annasdad

Well, leaving aside the fact that few professors at any school really qualify as “great teachers,” one does not need to be an outstanding scholar to teach undergraduates.

</p>

<p>Likewise, one does not need to be a great teacher in order for college students to learn. I’ve said it a thousand times: if you need someone to get up in front of you and teach in order for you to learn, you have much, much bigger problems than whether your prof can teach.</p>

<p>The most value that a prof offers is not in relaying material that you should have been able to learn on your own, but in creating a cohesive curriculum, selecting appropriate material, pushing students to acquire knowledge and skills through assignments and projects, and facilitating discussion and engagement with the material among your peers (when it’s a discussion-based class).</p>

<p>To that end, most research profs are more than capable. Are many of them not so good at giving a lecture? Of course. Are some not the best at explaining difficult concepts? Yes. These are the sorts of things when people think of a professor’s teaching ability. But that’s largely irrelevant compared to the above tasks that most professors at universities are great at (since they are experts in their field). Now other points - such as whether a prof is too demanding, or poor at evaluation, or uncaring about whether students are engaged - are valid, but they’re different issues altogether. Whether these are included in “teaching ability” is up to you to decide. A professor can be great at all that I listed, plus be a great lecturer, and still not care one bit about whether students are engaged.</p>

<p>Universities are right not to care all that much about “teaching ability” in that strict sense of the phrase. In the grand scheme of student learning and class structure, it’s only a very small part. </p>

<p>One thing I do know: you put one of those supposedly “poor teaching” professors in a small seminar wherein they get to engage students on specific topics related to their research, and these professors come alive. They’re the best teachers you could have. But undergrads are just too damn selfish - they want it to be all about me, me, me and don’t even consider what might engage the prof.</p>

<p>That’s why I support making research universities less disjoint in the grad-undergrad division. Treat undergrads like grad students; require they to do research, to develop a research program, to create original scholarship. The students will learn far more than they could ever possibly learn by just taking classes, and professors will actually want to engage with them. Students will object to that, and I have no sympathy for them - if you don’t want to do real learning and critical thinking, which only research truly requires, you shouldn’t be at a research university.</p>

[Haystack]

<p>^^^^</p>

<p>Good points. I love this but Which research universities actually do this?</p>

<p>“That’s why I support making research universities less disjoint in the grad-undergrad division. Treat undergrads like grad students; require they to do research, to develop a research program, to create original scholarship. The students will learn far more than they could ever possibly learn by just taking classes, and professors will actually want to engage with them. Students will object to that, and I have no sympathy for them - if you don’t want to do real learning and critical thinking, which only research truly requires, you shouldn’t be at a research university.”</p>

<p>I haven’t seen it, other than in very small pockets, at any university I have been at…Arizona State, Iowa, and Northwestern</p>

[phantasmagoric]

<p>Princeton requires a thesis. The undergrad/grad divisions at Stanford, MIT, and Caltech are well-integrated today, even though students aren’t required to do a thesis. To varying degrees, other research universities are integrated as well.</p>

<p>I’m not sure whether it’s possible to integrate the two completely at any research university. The undergrads do have to be of a certain caliber to develop a research program. For some universities, e.g. most public universities whose main purpose is to get students in and out with a degree, this wouldn’t work, simply because these universities do have a very dual mission (research + degree mill, and I don’t mean that pejoratively).</p>

<p>This is similar to the approach that Oxbridge has to undergraduate education. I’d just like to see an intensification of the research aspect. And since it would still be a 4-year degree, students would have room to explore before choosing their major/focus, and they’d still be able to do electives along the way.</p>