<p>barrons & kb,
If you think that some privates are deliberately manipulating and publishing false data in their CDS, would you please identify the colleges and provide some documentation? Otherwise, I think that your charges should be withdrawn. There are literally hundreds of private institutions that do not deserve the negative implications of your posts. Thank you.</p>
<p>Class sizes are a function of the course material being taught and obtaining economies of scale.</p>
<p>For example, intro lecture courses for math, science and economics can be taught in larger lectures because the material is fact based - there is less need for intimate discussion. Class sizes for humanities courses are much smaller to foster discussion and debate.</p>
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<p>Good points. An informed person will understand the trade-offs, and make the choices most appropriate to personal needs. Some smart kids can and should specialize early.</p>
<p>However, for many good students, close interaction with teachers is more valuable than early access to highly specialized courses. If you want not only a job, but a leading role in a satisfying career, one of your biggest assets is good communication skills. Those skills will stay with you long after you’ve forgotten what you learned in Materials Science or Amharic class. Unfortunately, they are hard to develop in large lecture classes. </p>
<p>Of course, there are economic realities. But the best universities (public or private) should strive for small classes for all students, at all levels, in most of their classes.</p>
<p>Ucb,
I agree that class sizes are mostly immaterial once you reach a certain size (50-75 students?) and that some material can be effectively delivered in a large setting. Still, I know that many students get lost in such settings or feel like a number. Or they do most of their learning in the breakout session which often is led by a grad student who maybe does not want to be there and/or can’t speak English worth a lick. It’s not hard to imagine students tuning out in such a circumstance. That is an unfortunate result and one that I suppose is less likely in a smaller class size.</p>
<p>I recently did some work comparing class sizes for a full four-year study program for an engineering student. I compared two highly-ranked publics (undergrad enrollments of 15k and 25k) and two highly ranked privates (each about 6k). I compared by literally going into the online course catalogs of each college and looking at courses of the same name and comparing the enrollments in each class at each school in the Fall, 2008 and in Spring, 2009 semesters. (BTW, I was surprised how easy this was to do and how similarly the curriculums are at various colleges. I suggest anyone who has the interest and the time to give it a try.)</p>
<p>Given all the claims that I have read here on CC about publics not having a class size problem and doing a good job of offering smaller classes to upperclassmen, I was not prepared for what I discovered. </p>
<p>For the introductory, non-Engineering classes (Math, Chemistry, Physics), all 4 schools presented in large class format exceeding 75 students (one public had 450 students enrolled in the lecture for the Intro to Chem for Engineers). No big surprise and this made sense. But this rapidly changed as the privates also offered many classes (over half?) in the first two years with 30 or fewer students. This improved in the sophomore year at the privates as the requirements disappeared and class sizes shrunk even more with none above 50 students. Finally, the large majority of the classes in the junior/senior years at the privates had class sizes of 20 or fewer students. </p>
<p>This differed greatly at the publics. At the publics, the only small class in the first year was the writing seminar (18 students vs 15 at the privates). There were labs with smaller numbers of students, but these were one-hour supplements to the major science and engineering classes. Things improved marginally in the sophomore year, but not by much as most classes were 75 or more students. Even in the junior year, some class sizes exceeded 100 students and most exceeded 50 students. Junior and senior electives were mostly better although even some of these had class sizes of 70. </p>
<p>For the freshmen/sophomore/junior/senior year comparison, the privates consistently offered class sizes that were half to one-third the size of their public counterparts. I expected the privates to be smaller, but not by that much and not that consistently. It was eye-opening and made me wonder more about the financial pressures hitting the publics and what this means for the classroom experience for students at these universities.</p>
<p>I disagree with Hawkette – there is still a big diffrence between 75 students and 200 students. That’s a huge difference. But in any case, even at the largest universities, very few of your classes will have 200 students – and the largest ones will be introductory and general education requirement classes (biology 111, English 101, math 101, psychology 101, etc.) Once you get into the thick of your major, your classes will shrink in size – advanced classes simply do not have 100+ people in them.</p>
<p>Besides, the other thing you have to consider is course opportunities. I went to a school with a lot of small classes, but there was also a smaller selection of courses. I would’ve sat in a 100+ person psychology class freshman year for the opportunity to take “psychology of the American mass media” or “psychology for public health” or some of the other cool course offerings the larger schools had.</p>
<p>In addition to that, for some reason people always talk about ‘getting to know the professor,’ as if you’re going to be friends with this person. Even at the largest public universities, there are still many opportunities to get to know a professor! First of all, in those 100+ person classes, less than 5% of the students ACTUALLY go to the professor’s office hours to ask questions and chat. (I have some friends who are professors and who are advanced grad students teaching their own classes, and they always say this.)</p>
<p>Also, I wish people would stop assuming that graduate students are bad teachers, don’t want to be there, and maybe can’t speak English:</p>
<p>1) I am a graduate student at Columbia. The majority of graduate students at Columbia are native English speakers. Of the ones that aren’t, the majority speak English fluently with a slight accent. You are more likely to get more heavily accented English in math and the natural/physical sciences, but those TAs are still understandable.
2) Graduate student TAs are required to teach, but considering that the majority of us go into a Ph.D program in order to becoming a professor and teach at a university, the majority of us want to be there most of the time. Matter of fact, they probably want to be there more than the professor, who does not get rewarded for teaching and would probably rather be running an experiment. Most of the grad student TAs and instructors I know here are better teachers than the professors.</p>
<p>very well said juillet.</p>
<p>Hawkette,</p>
<p>I won’t dispute that classes are smaller at private universities with 6,000 total undergrads.</p>
<p>But, engineering education is engineering education…thermodynamics and reaction kinetic lectures don’t need to be taught with only 20 students, the same material is conveyed as easily in a class of 60-80. </p>
<p>From my experience at Berkeley, all of the larger upper-division engineering sequence courses were supplemented with discussion sections led by GSIs. During my tenure, I don’t recall having one foreign TA…most were ChemEs from the midwest…it could be different in computer science. </p>
<p>Engineering electives and labs were much smaller.</p>
<p>All of my professors held regular office hours. If you want face time with a professor, the key is to go to office hours during the first couple weeks of class…not exam week. You learn things like this going to a large public…;)</p>
<p>What if you did an analysis on class sizes for a prospective English or Art History major? I suspect the differences in class sizes between public and private would be non-existant.</p>
<p>and I just want to add something important here:</p>
<p>I’ve worked a few years now as a consultant, and you need the ability to speak out and convey your message/thoughts clearly in large room of people when you work. You’re not always going to be in a hand holding 10 people class for the rest of your life.</p>
<p>^ Heh…reminds me of another subject someone brought up in a different message board:
The “wussification” of American kids in PE classes (i.e., no dodgeball). There’s a trend that kids need to be sheltered, coddled and all feel like winners.</p>
<p>I guess that’s why some shell out big money for that type of environment. To each his own.</p>
<p>Friends who attended Columbia, Duke, Northwestern, Penn and Stanford have all told me of Freshmen classes that had over 250 students. Those that majored in Economics told me that intermediate and even advanced level classes in popular (Financial Econ, Econometrics) or required (intermediate Macro and Micro) Econ classes had 75-150 students in them. My experience at Cornell certain suggests that classes are small there either. Those dimenssions aren’t significantly smaller than the classes I had at Michigan. </p>
<p>One of the greatest myths is that classes at private universities are somehow MUCH smaller than classes at their public counterparts. That is not the case. Classes in popular majors (Biology, Econ, History, Political Science and Psychology to name a few) are going to be large at private and public universities, regardless what people claim. Yes, they may be slightly (10%-20%) larger at public universities, but to hear some people, you would think that classes at public universities are three to four times larger. Furthermore, classes in less popular majors (Classics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics etc…) tend to be small at both private and public universities. The intermediate-advance classes I took in those fields seldom had more than 15-20 students.</p>
<p>Finally, professors at research universities, whether it be little old Chicago, Columbia, Harvard or MIT or large Cal or Michigan, are not going to spend much of their time looking after undergrads, regardless of how small or large the classes are. Professors have several priorities that take precedence over instructing undergrads. Those are:</p>
<p>1) Plublishing papers and/or managing large research projects
2) Advising and guiding the 4-6 PhD students that they are responsible for
3) Finding funding and raising money for their research</p>
<p>Those who think that a class of 75 undergrads can somehow be “intimate” are delluding themselves. They cannot. The professors may recognize your face and know you by name, but it will not go beyond that superficial security blanket. At the end of the day, most of those profs won’t have the time to truly look after their undergraduate students.</p>
<p>Alexandre, I think your argument is a very good counterpoint, but needs to be a little more nuanced.</p>
<p>I never had a class of anywhere near 250 students at the two private universities where I earned degrees. I never heard of a class that large at either school. Typically, the classes I attended as an undergraduate, during all 4 years, ran to around 10-15 students. I attended some lectures for maybe 75 students in History and the sciences. In those cases, there were small lab and discussion break-outs.
Certainly.
That was not necessarily my experience with professors in general (depends on definitions). If you are talking about famous luminaries, then I would agree. However … that does not mean an undergraduate at some private universities cannot get rather intimate discussion classes even with them. In the Humanities at Chicago, famous professors like Norman Maclean and Richard McKeon taught and interacted with undergraduates (read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to get the flavor). James Cronin (Nobel, Physics) received Chicago’s highest award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. So did L</p>
<p>tk, I never said that ALL private research universities have huge classes. But the ones I meantioned all do. And I also did not mean to suggest that all professors do not take a keen interest in instruction. Michigan, for example, has several professors that were known in their field who took great interest in teaching undergrads. Back in my days, professors like Sidney Fine (History), Williams (English), James Holland (Psychology and Electrical Engineering) and Brian Coppola (Chemistry) were all known for their involvement in undergraduate instruction. However, those are not in the majority…and most of them are in the later stages of their career, where they feel like they have contributed enough to their discipline and wish to involve themselves more in teaching. </p>
<p>The point I was trying to make is that the gap between class sizes at elite public universities and elite private research universities is not nearly as large as most people claim.</p>
<p>Hawkette</p>
<p>In your class size analysis, did you look into a website called collegedata.com?
They list % of classes>30, >40, >50, >100. I was wondering whether they use the method of counting the number of students in each section (which I find flawed) or the method of counting the number of students in the overall lecture (which seems more fair).</p>
<p>ucb,
I agree that classes like Thermo or Chem or other introductory classes lend themselves to a lecture format and the class sizes are relatively large at both the publics and privates that I looked at (although the privates tended to have 25-50% fewer students in the lecture hall and even the lab breakout groups were smaller, eg, avg of 10-15 per class at the privates vs. 15-20 at the publics). </p>
<p>The surprise for me was especially for the classes for soph/jr/sr years. Not being personally familiar with engineering departments, I had accepted, at face value, comments that I have read here for several years that upperclass highly-ranked public university students enjoyed class sizes on par with those at top privates. What I found is that there are material differences for the great majority of classes, even for the electives. </p>
<p>At the publics, it was true that the electives were considerably smaller than the intro classes, eg, 30 students or so. However, at the publics, I didn’t see hardly any engineering electives with fewer than 20 students. The exception was independent study projects, which of course are for a single student or perhaps a small group working together on a project. By contrast, for their soph/jr/sr years, the privates had many classes, required and elective, that contained 20 or fewer students. My guess is that undergrad enrollment differentials drive a lot of this difference, but the result was a clear win for the privates. </p>
<p>Two more points about this. First, the publics did have a broader array of engineering offerings. If this is important to a student, then the publics might be a superior choice as there is a larger menu of classes to choose from. Second, neither program offered a lot of opportunities for electives and so the actual opportunities to take these small classes is impinged by this. On average, the publics offered 1 elective per semester for the last four semesters for a student looking to graduate in a four-year window. The privates had a couple more opportunities, but it’s not like either environment was too worried about graduating engineers with a broad appreciation for other subjects. I’m not saying that is wrong, but it does have consequences for one’s class schedule, particularly if one wants to finish on time in four years. </p>
<p>Finally, re the issue of grad courses, this is one area that I was/am not able to evaluate. The course catalogs all listed the graduate courses as well, but there was no way to separate out the enrollment numbers into how many undergrads were in the class and how many grad students were in the class. I’m sure that the colleges have this data, but I don’t know how to get it. In any event, I accept the claims of those who post that they were able to take grad courses as undergrads and that these classes were considerably smaller (definitely the case at the publics). I don’t know broadly how many undergrad students are taking graduate-level classes, either at the publics or the privates. I would guess that public students enrolled as Honors students likely get a lot of these benefits, but their numbers are typically small, eg, a few hundred students in a class of several thousand. </p>
<p>As for the comments on humanities vs the technical fields, this seems logical to me. Perhaps engineers don’t benefit much from classroom environments where classmates talk to one another as an important part of their learning. But this is certainly not the case in many of the humanities fields. I would expect the class size differences to be smaller there and maybe much smaller. I have not done the work and I don’t know, so I will accept others’ views on this. I will, however, say that the subjects where student participate with each other and with their professor make one element of the college search process very important. It is very valuable to have smart peers as your classmates and so judging the quality of ABC University’s student body vs XYZ College’s student body can be a critical, determining element of the college search process. </p>
<p>Bottom-line, my analysis taught me that class size difference between publics and privates is NOT a myth, at least not in the engineering departments for the four colleges that I looked at. Perhaps some are using their experiences from a time long ago, eg, the 1990s or the 1980s, to make these claims, but today there are material differences which likely have important influences on the classroom and learning environments.</p>
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<p>I’d prefer a broader range of engineering classes versus worrying about whether my thermo class is 60 students vs. 30 students.</p>
<p>Public universities educate more people. </p>
<p>Where it matters most, in engineering employment opportunities, differences between public vs. private is nil.</p>
<p>Hawk, please show me where I said one word about privates manipulating data (although some cases HAVE been reported–I do not recall by whom). All I said was state schools have to report lots of data honestly becuase they are all considered official state records. No more.</p>
<p>As to a lack of small classes at a big state engineering school–Wisconsin has dozens and dozens every term. Here’s a report that breaks out the number of students by class including those that are mixed undergrad and grad. And this is just one semester. Typically different upper electives are taught every semester–some every other year.</p>
<p><a href=“http://registrar.wisc.edu/students/acadrecords/enrollment_reports/Stats_CourseCredit_Spring_2007-2008.pdf[/url]”>http://registrar.wisc.edu/students/acadrecords/enrollment_reports/Stats_CourseCredit_Spring_2007-2008.pdf</a></p>
<p>In the linked report the student count is in the first column. The rest are nunbers of credits earned by class level. That way you can see mixed undergrad and grad classes.</p>
<p>Hawkette has gathered some interesting data and presented it nicely.
The numbers do suggest clear differences between the public and private national universities.</p>
<p>Surely these numbers don’t tell the entire story. There may well be significant variation by department and class level. However, if we’re really dealing with a big myth here, the burden of proof is to present a new improved set of numbers that tells a different story than the set in the second post above. Either that, or show us how to re-interpret those numbers in a way that supports the “myth” view. The only mathematical interpretation offered here, so far, suggests the numbers actually understate the gap.</p>
<p>hi hawkette.</p>
<p>I appreciate the vote of confidence for public universities, but in truth, the definitions and measures for many metrics are imprecise. It’s the nature of the beast. So you can report things accurately and truthfully and still not provide information that is comparable to other schools. Or as informative about the true undergrad experience as some would have you believe.</p>
<p>I was just looking at some GF spending figures for all the public U’s in Michigan, data provided to the state annually by each school as part of a legal requirement, and verifiable against federal reporting. But the numbers were grossly incomparable because the schools–legally, accurately, and justifiably–had different ways to categorize similar expenses.</p>