<p>How about Cornell?..It should definitly go down as well...Then again, we're Brunonians ..so who cares!!</p>
<p>haha perhaps this will shut my dad up....for about 30 seconds</p>
<p>If you are going to say that having graduate students is good for the undergraduate experience in all cases then you have to do quite a dance to rationalize some of the findings of Larry Summer's Undergraduate Education Task Force which noted that in several social science departments students (most notably, economics) students had a quite difficult time finding faculty who knew them and faculty who would readily oversee their theses.</p>
<p>Not sure that is so much due to the presence of graduate students as the undergrad student faculty ratio in these departments, and the department culture.</p>
<p><a href="afan:">quote</a>
Well, I'm not sure more grad students means "more availability of recitation sections, office hours, and courses for the undergrads".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The first two items are clear; grad students run sections and office hours in addition to whatever is provided by professors themselves. I assume you are disputing whether it increases the course offerings. </p>
<p>Faculty are reluctant to add new courses (which, being timely or just new, often become highly subscribed) unless grad students are available to take over a lot of the work. It is just too difficult otherwise. If faculty at research schools had to operate without this support system there would be a smaller number of larger classes, with the grad student labor concentrated in those. It's hard to overstate how much big universities rely on this labor.</p>
<p>It's a good thing Brown is a small university with few large classes that require the support of graduate students. It's also a good thing we manage to have enough TAs to hold breakout sections for any course with over 40 students by university mandate and are able to easily meet this mark while having few classes which have strictly restricted enrollments. It's also nice that professors all hold office hours that are often unattended anyway so there is plenty of time to go and get help from the professor themselves without an issue. I've never waited more than a day to sit down for as long as I'd like with a professor and chat about a class.</p>
<p>It's hard for people who aren't at schools like Brown to recognize the power of having a grad school that is sized, by design, to be the proper amount of students so that we can better the undergraduate experience. The main goal behind our having a graduate school is to attract better professors by offering world class research, attract better undergraduates because we can offer them the same research opportunities larger schools can, and to have better teaching resources for professors.</p>
<p>So I'd say the size of are graduate school is just right to make undergraduate education, our focus, better, and a tad small to make some of our very strong programs rise to more prominence. That's fine by me.</p>
<p>And yes, as the above stated, Larry Summers had quite a few interesting things to say about that number of graduate students and it's effect on undergrad education.</p>
<p>Siserune,</p>
<p>Those effects presume that the grad students are heavily involved in teaching the courses. If they are, then more grad students, at the same level of involvement, would mean more sections and more office hours with these students. However, if the grad students are largely supported by research funds, rather than tuition money, and do not have large teaching roles, then having more grad students does not imply any major effect on sections or office hours (that is, if sections are lead, and office hours are provided, by faculty rather than grad students). The extra grad students may be like research faculty, largely invisible to undergrads.</p>
<p>The same applies to numbers of courses. At universities that rely heavily on grad students to support courses they do permit a larger selection. If they are not that involved in teaching then their presence on campus has little effect on course selection.</p>
<p>At many universities with large grad student populations and lots of grad student teaching, the grad students mainly support the lower level courses. The course diversity that is most useful to undergrads comes in the advanced courses in their majors. These tend to be small, at least at places like Brown, and require much less, if any grad student support. So one could have plenty of advanced courses without much grad student input.</p>
<p>"To have top faculty you need a supply of top grad students, labs, libraries, undergraduate slave labor and all the other hallmarks of a research-focused university. More grad students means more availability of recitation sections, office hours, research mentoring and courses for the undergrads. That Princeton is more grad-oriented is, directly or indirectly, a big part of the reason it ranks at the top as an undergraduate program, and deservedly so."</p>
<p>Siserune, only if those teachers actually care. Many professors would gladly add on work without the "slave labor" of grad students because they <em>gasp</em> care and like to teach. Maybe your conclusions are colored by having professors that care more about their grads and their research than about teaching undergrads and doing research with them. It's not like that everywhere, and it's not like that at Brown. </p>
<p>By the way, by your logic, LAC's must be a terrible place to go to school. I think we can all agree that's not true.</p>
<p><a href="afan:">quote</a></p>
<p>However, if the grad students are largely supported by research funds, rather than tuition money, and do not have large teaching roles, then having more grad students does not imply any major effect on sections or office hours
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Departments that swim in enough money to fund their grad students primarily from research tend to also (1) admit very large numbers of grad students, and (2) require a quota of teaching from that enlarged pool of grad students. This is what happens at top chemistry and biology programs, for instance. There is also a lot of informal arrangement in research-driven departments between PhD advisors and their grad students; professors slated to teach classes tend to ask their student(s) to operate as assistants for the course, whether officially required or not.</p>
<p>
[quote]
The same applies to numbers of courses. At universities that rely heavily on grad students to support courses they do permit a larger selection. If they are not that involved in teaching then their presence on campus has little effect on course selection.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>At universities of the kind under discussion (Princeton, Brown, etc), to the extent that grad students are not involved in teaching, it prevents some courses from being offered. It's not just grad students; a research driven department will tend to have more postdocs as well, and those also drive up the number of undergrad courses. A big part of the reason for inviting the postdocs is to have them take over some teaching in the undergrad classes.</p>
<p>So again, a research focused department will have more courses (and to the extent it has grad students, more office hours and extra help).</p>
<p>
[quote]
At many universities with large grad student populations and lots of grad student teaching, the grad students mainly support the lower level courses.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>The more grad students and the higher the research level of the department, the more grad students will ALSO be involved in teaching mid-level and advanced courses. Predominant involvement in low-level courses happens at schools with masters programs that are terminal or stepping stones to the PhD (usually state universities). At those places, the masters students are nothing but free labor for the big lecture classes, but we are talking about top 10 private universities. </p>
<p>
[quote]
The course diversity that is most useful to undergrads comes in the advanced courses in their majors. These tend to be small, at least at places like Brown, and require much less, if any grad student support. So one could have plenty of advanced courses without much grad student input.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>One "could", but in reality, one does not. Comparison of course offerings at research oriented, high grad student enrollment universities with comparably selective but more undergrad focused institutions will show fewer advanced courses at the latter.</p>
<p>Dude, just give it up...Rambling, rambling rambling......</p>
<p><a href="MovieBuff%20opined:">quote</a></p>
<p>Rambling, rambling rambling......
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Leave the complaints for PM. Post #29 added on-topic information and is of the same length as the preceding few postings. If the material in this thread doesn't interest you, why read or post?</p>
<p>Dude, go to bed, relax, just let it go. You keep rambling and rambling. You are not contributing anymore to the discussion. Check the other thread about Brown's Curriculum....It will do you some good ( hopefully )</p>
<p>Again, go to bed, relax. Watch a movie !</p>
<p>(MovieBuff opined again..)</p>
<p>"Relax and let it go" yourself. Specifically, let go of the need to control discussion, the need to always respond, and the need to tell others what to do.</p>
<p>Some people here apparently want to discuss whether grad students improve undergrad education. If that subject doesn't suit you, why stop others from talking about it?</p>
<p>"One "could", but in reality, one does not. Comparison of course offerings at research oriented, high grad student enrollment universities with comparably selective but more undergrad focused institutions will show fewer advanced courses at the latter."</p>
<p>Actually, you're just really wrong here. One of the things I looked at when selecting colleges (I got into higher ranked schools and chose brown) was the course selection. Brown has an extremely extensive course selection, more so than many other schools with more extensive grad programs. And for the record, universities are about more than just biology and chemistry, so using those programs as overall evidence of a university's quality is faulty. Furthermore, you're not taking into account how much the professors and grad students CARE about the undergrads. You can have all the courses in the world, but if the professors don't want to teach, and are merely doing it to fill their required teaching quota, your education will suffer. </p>
<p>I used to go to Tulane, which has a much larger graduate program (at least it did before Katrina) than Brown, and it had a much, much lower selection of classes. But I predict you are going to say "But Tulane is not Harvard," and you're right. But more to the point, the graduate TA's were heinous because they so didn't want to be there. Many of the professors of the lower level classes were either 1. brand new and couldn't teach, or 2. could hardly be bothered to do so because undergrads were less important (especialy true in math). You didn't see upper level faculty until your upper years of school in most cases. At Brown, for instance, neuroscience 1 is team taught by two extrememly caring and enthusiastic senior faculty. </p>
<p>Another point, and this just shows how little you actually know about Brown, is that many (science at least) classes have undergrad TA's and grad TA's. The undergrad spots are very competitive. The students aren't doing it because they have to, but because they have an extensive knowledge of the subject (you have to in order to get the job) and they want to! </p>
<p>You can quote numbers and theories all day long but they don't mean anything until you put them into context. </p>
<p>And like I said before, any LAC student would be rather shocked to hear that their education is suffering so because of the lack of grad students. Why? The high student to teacher ratio ensures that many classes can be offered and that students don't need to depend on grad students. They get experienced professors who many times are more involved in their students AND their research than just their research. I offer up big props to the quality of undergrad education at LACs. I originally looked very seriously at Pomona. I asked a biology professor why Pomona and one of the things she said was that the teachers at say Harvard and Pomona have different priorities (this is something a JHU professor said as well when he asked me where else I was looking). She, simply put, said Pomona professors are more interested than educating students than furthering their own personal research goals. I don't think that can be said of many professors at Harvard etc. It is well known that Brown, with it's small grad program, is kind of a cross between an LAC and a research university. </p>
<p>And the bottom line, siserune, is that you're not really discussing if grad students improve undergrad education. If you were, that would be the title of the thread. You came here to bash the quality of Brown's education and this is simply the vein of argument you're using right now. Before it was the open curriculum.</p>
<p>And for serious, who says "opined" past the 18th century?</p>
<p>For what it's worth, one of the major things people on my tour look for is that graduate students are not the one's teaching courses.</p>
<p>Also, for what it's worth, as a chemistry concentrator, I have nowhere near the time or ability to take all of the chem courses offered at Brown in the chem department-- it's simply impossible to do so as an undergrad. With only 10-15 concentrators in Chemistry each year and 25 faculty members, we offer a tremendous amount of personal attention while still having just about any course you can think of, and certainly enough courses that you couldn't possibly take them all. So arguing about the course offerings in chemistry is a completely ridiculous moot point-- we're already offering more than people can take, a tremendous variety, and allow undergraduates to take graduate courses (no extra paperwork involved).</p>
<p>So if you want to argue our approximately 100 graduate students who don't teach could help out more if they were 200 graduate students and did teach... Well, you'd be plain wrong. </p>
<p>You ignored my last post, so you'll probably ignore this one as well, but the truth is, Brown expands its graduate school in conjunction with undergraduate desires and needs. Our chemistry department recently (last 5 years) expanded by three professors and about 20 grad students for this very reason. We're exactly as big as we need to be to offer top education to our undergraduates. You can argue otherwise, but hell, you're not here, you're not studying science here, and your statements would be based on unqualified conjecture and extrapolation versus actual experience.</p>
<p>Rachel-- Bill O'Reilly says "opined" on his program at the end of every night when referring to the ability of his viewers to email in and rant about the program.</p>
<p>Siserune raises some interesting points, and obviously is familiar with university education. Are you a faculty member? On this particular point, there is plenty of data.</p>
<p>The proportion of students on TA's and RA's actually varies quite a bit, even among top programs. I would be careful about generalizing about how many of the grad students are participating in teaching simply from the size of the program. The currently available NRC grad school survey results are dated now, but informative for this purpose.</p>
<p>One of the many items of data they collected was the proportion of students who are supported under research or teaching assistantships. Several websites offer a convenient way to list the programs by a number of factors, including how the grad students are supported. For curiosity I generated a list of Chemistry grad programs (limited to save space to the top 40), along with the proportion of students who were on RA (research assistantships) or TA (teaching assistantships). Programs are ranked overall by their scores on "FQ" (faculty quality) as judged by those who responded to the NRC survey. "size" is the number of PhD's awarded per year. "Score" is another stat reported that does not mean anything here.</p>
<pre><code> Score FQ TA RA size
</code></pre>
<ol>
<li>University of California-Berkeley 11.5 5.0 5% 73% 57.4
<ol>
<li> California Institute of Technology 11.1 4.9 8% 50% 24.6</li>
<li> Harvard University 11.1 4.9 2%* 45% 24.8</li>
<li> Massachusetts Institute of Technology 11.1 4.9 3%* 69% 25.4</li>
<li> Stanford University 11.1 4.9 1%* 64% 26.6</li>
<li> Cornell University 9.6 4.6 13% 68% 21.0</li>
<li> Columbia University in the City of New York 9.1 4.5 1%* 33% 17.0</li>
<li> University of California-Los Angeles 9.1 4.5 35% 54% 26.0</li>
<li> University of Chicago 9.1 4.5 11% 77% 17.0</li>
<li> University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 9.1 4.5 17% 67% 36.8</li>
<li> University of Wisconsin-Madison 9.1 4.5 15% 71% 31.8</li>
<li>Yale University 8.6 4.4 25% 51% 18.0</li>
<li>The University of Texas at Austin 8.1 4.3 22% 64% 28.8</li>
<li>Northwestern University 7.6 4.2 8% 40% 22.0</li>
<li>Texas A & M University 7.1 4.1 19% 65% 28.4</li>
<li>Indiana University-Bloomington 6.7 4.0 23% 54% 20.4</li>
<li>Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus 6.7 4.0 7% 80% 25.2</li>
<li>University of California-San Diego 6.7 4.0 18% 52% 16.0</li>
<li>University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 6.7 4.0 9% 64% 33.8</li>
<li>Ohio State University-Main Campus 6.2 3.9 40% 42% 26.6
Adjust your weights → -+ -+ -+ -+</li>
<li>Princeton University 6.2 3.9 16% 63% 14.0</li>
<li>University of California-San Francisco 6.2 3.9 10%* 41% 6.6</li>
<li>University of Minnesota-Twin Cities 6.2 3.9 33% 51% 29.4</li>
<li>Iowa State University 5.7 3.8 18% 78% 20.8</li>
<li>Purdue University-Main Campus 5.7 3.8 42% 38% 49.8</li>
<li>University of Pennsylvania 5.7 3.8 13% 51% 22.2</li>
<li>Johns Hopkins University 5.2 3.7 32% 52% 11.4</li>
<li>Rice University 5.2 3.7 2%* 46% 11.2</li>
<li>University of Florida 5.2 3.7 30% 53% 33.2</li>
<li>University of Washington-Seattle Campus 5.2 3.7 33% 50% 27.4</li>
<li>University of California-Santa Barbara 4.7 3.6 31% 47% 12.4</li>
<li>University of Pittsburgh-Main Campus 4.7 3.6 30% 65% 17.8</li>
<li>University of Rochester 4.7 3.6 9%* 63% 9.8</li>
<li>University of Utah 4.7 3.6 7% 71% 22.6</li>
<li>Colorado State University 4.2 3.5 14% 78% 12.6</li>
<li>University of California-Irvine 4.2 3.5 14% 65% 23.6</li>
<li>University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 4.2 3.5 23% 52% 31.8</li>
<li>Emory University 3.7 3.4 9% 53% 13.4</li>
<li>Michigan State University 3.7 3.4 49% 41% 22.8</li>
<li>Brandeis University 3.2 3.3 31% 45% 6.0</li>
<li>Duke University 3.2 3.3 31% 53% 13.4</li>
<li>Stony Brook University 3.2 3.3 11% 70% 11.6</li>
<li>University of Colorado at Boulder 3.2 3.3 15% 70% 18.2</li>
<li>University of Oregon 3.2 3.3 20%* 52% 4.6</li>
<li>University of Southern California 3.2 3.3 34% 54% 15.6</li>
<li>University of Virginia-Main Campus 3.2 3.3 8% 76% 14.8
So, for example, Berkeley had 73% of grad students supported by RA, Brandeis had 45% receiving such support.
Among this group universities ranked in the top 40 by faculty quality, the percent of grad students on TA's ranged from 49 at Michigan State to 8% at Northwestern and UVa. There are many large programs here, including Berkeley, with low proportions of grad students on TA support.</li>
</ol></li>
</ol>
<p>Berkeley, with more than twice as many doctorates per year than Caltech, had a smaller percent of grad students on TA's.</p>
<p>I just provided full data on chemistry since Siserune brought it up. I checked "Cell and Developmental Biology" as well and found a much lower overall proportion on TA's. The percent on RA's also covered a wide range. One can check many other types of programs at the same site. The list is too long to reproduce here.</p>
<p><a href="http://graduate-school.phds.org/%5B/url%5D">http://graduate-school.phds.org/</a></p>
<p>haha, well, jason, we all know bill o'reily is a douchebag, so what does that say about our lovely siserune? </p>
<p>Another thing -- my favorite teacher first semester last year was actually my graduate TA section leader of my anthro culture and health class. As a general rule, professors are better to have than TA's because they are either more experienced or more motivated to teach, but that's not always the case. That's why most people on your tours probably ask that quesiton. </p>
<p>But you can just as easily have a bad TA as a bad professor. It all depends on if they want to teach and can teach, which depends highly on the atmosphere and focus of the school.</p>
<p>To get as far from bio and chem as possible, I also checked classics. The programs are much smaller, but the range of TA support is even wider- from 0 to 100% among the top programs.</p>