<p>I am choosing between Harvard and Williams. One thing I love about Williams is the small class sizes, and while I realize they will not be as small at Harvard, I was wondering what the average class sizes are. I attended the pre-frosh days and was a little concerned by the sizes of the classes i attended.</p>
<p>less than 20 according to Harvard website</p>
<p>The classes you go to for prefrosh weekend are a bit deceptive – they list all the large lecture classes because those are the ones that won’t be disturbed by having 50-200 prefrosh drop in on them. </p>
<p>I thought carefully about Amherst and Harvard, got into both, and went to Cambridge - definitely the right move for me. My younger brother thought carefully about Williams and Harvard, got into both, and then went to Williams - definitely the right move for him, based on his sports + his personality.</p>
<p>Regarding classes + class sizes, both schools have some advantages + disadvantages:</p>
<p>Good things about Williams:
Classes are smaller, especially intro classes (at both schools, upper level seminars are small).
No TFs - so professors are the ones grading papers + such.
Professors hold students more accountable – i.e. my brother will get angry emails if he misses a class (you could also see this as a negative!).</p>
<p>Good things about Harvard:
With a few very rare exceptions, you don’t get lotteried out of classes (something that happens fairly often @ Williams). If 1,000 people want to take intro econ, they find a lecture hall that can hold 1,000 people.
Professors are accessible **if you want them to talk to them<a href=“they%20hold%20office%20hours,%20answer%20emails,%20accept%20lunch%20invitations”>/b</a>. If you don’t really want to get to know them, they’re not going to make you do so.
More flexibility in your class/work schedule – you can take a lot of large lecture classes, show up only for midterms + finals, and do whatever you want with the rest of your time (play smash brothers, run The Crimson, or whatever). You can also take a lot of tiny seminars and get to know a ton of faculty members incredibly well… it’s up to you.</p>
<p>I think it’s very possible to get a “Williams-style” education at Harvard if you concentrate in one of the smaller departments (i.e. Philosophy or Classics) and choose less-popular Gen Ed classes. If you’re a Psych or Econ concentrator, you’ll have a much harder time filling your schedule with intimate seminars, and if you want to take “Justice”, you’ll be sharing Michael Sandel with ~1,000 of your classmates.</p>
<p>I hope this helps – if you have any other questions about the two schools, just ask.</p>
<p>As I’ve posted in a couple of other threads, my son (who graduated from Harvard last year) was in one of the larger concentrations - one of the three largest in fact - and half his courses had enrollments under 20. He made a conscious effort to look for smaller courses that interested him, but it wasn’t that hard. He developed a number of close relationships with his professors.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to the current course enrollment stats. As you’ll see, there are some very large enrollment courses, like intro economics at 577, but the vast majority of courses have pretty small enrollments:</p>
<p><a href=“http://webdocs.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/reports/statistics/course_enrollment_statistics_icg.pdf[/url]”>http://webdocs.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/reports/statistics/course_enrollment_statistics_icg.pdf</a></p>
<p>And here’s a link to the course catalog, in case you want to match up the enrollments with the courses:</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> University FAS Registrar’s Office: 2009-2010 FAS Courses of Instruction](<a href=“http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/courses/index.jsp?cat=ugrad&subcat=courses]Harvard”>http://www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/courses/index.jsp?cat=ugrad&subcat=courses)</p>
<p>cosar thank you for the link to the enrollment pdf ^. Do you have a link to the webpage that that came from? I would be interested in seeing some of the numbers from last fall. They might help my daughter sort out what she wants to take when next year.</p>
<p>smoda61 - I think your D can also see the class sizes when she looks the courses up in the Q guide.</p>
<p>i’m logged into the Q guide at this very moment - it does have that info</p>
<p>I just liked the format of seeing all the sizes listed - I guess that can be done using the search constraints in the q guide - I’d just love having a printout next to me while looking at the course descriptions</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> University FAS Registrar’s Office](<a href=“http://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/faculty/previous_enrollment.jsp?cat=faculty&subcat=coursestats]Harvard”>http://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/fasro/faculty/previous_enrollment.jsp?cat=faculty&subcat=coursestats)</p>
<p>Note course enrollment stats do not necessarily equal course class size. For example, a math course from last semester shows enrollment stats of a few hundred. S was enrolled in that course in a class taught by a full professor with a size of around 18 for lectures and less than 8 for the recitation section.</p>
<p>The average student in a Harvard department like economics will not have a single professor who knows her name on graduation day. If meaningful student-faculty interaction is important to you, choose Williams.</p>
<p>[Choose</a> Williams over Harvard : EphBlog](<a href=“http://www.ephblog.com/2004/04/21/choose-williams-over-harvard/]Choose”>http://www.ephblog.com/2004/04/21/choose-williams-over-harvard/)</p>
<p>just forget me - thanks</p>
<p>@dkane - That’s a good blog post, but also incredibly one-sided. When you go to a LAC like Williams instead of a research university like Harvard you do gain a lot, but you also give up a lot (research opportunities, brand name faculty/thesis advisors/etc, a larger academic community, grad student advising/academic role models). </p>
<p>A few of your points are really questionable - my housing situation at Harvard was simliar to my brother’s at Williams. And Summers (and now Faust) definitely do care about undergraduate education – whether or not they write personal emails to random prospective students is not a good litmus test for that issue.</p>
<p>@ws59 - Good points, the list is deceptive when it comes to intro language classes and the intro calc math sequence.</p>
<p>dkane - what departments would be big like econ? Would any sciences be smaller?</p>
<p>Biological sciences in total are pretty big, but the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc) are much smaller than concentrations like economics or government. You can look up data for all colleges on the college navigator site (College Navigator - National Center for Education Statistics). According to it H awarded 1779 bachelors degrees last year. Of that total 248 were bio, 106 physical sciences, 245 econ, 177 government, and 173 history, other concentrations were less.</p>
<p>Data for Williams from the same site shows that they only graduated two students with physics degrees last year.</p>
<p>My older Ds first semester at Harvard, she had four classes. The class sizes were 9, 15, 18, and 900 (Ec 10). The Ec 10 class broke out into smaller sections after each large lecture.</p>
<p>There is no doubt in my mind that you are going to get a more personalized education at an LAC than a university. There’s also no doubt in my mind that a university offers a greater variety of overall opportunities. A good student can and will be successful at both.</p>
<p>There really is no one answer. Some people at Harvard will have large classes and others will have more small classes. My daughter’s experience was that most of the science classes were large and impersonal. That being said, she had a great experience at Harvard.</p>
<p>My son had access to tons of research at his LAC. He’s been accepted into several highly prestigious PhD programs.</p>
<p>If you look for what you want at either school, you’ll find it. My advice is to choose the best fit - go with what your heart tells you to do.</p>
<p>You can look those numbers up by department to get the exact numbers if you likethey are available, and ctdad provided a source for the relative sizes of the concentrations at various schools.</p>
<p>I would just add the numbers we saw in a presentation during freshman parent weekend were roughly 35-40 pure physics concentrators in each class over the last few years. It gets complicated because some students do joint concentrations–e.g. chemistry and physics-and other combinationssecondary fields in physics or other fields </p>
<p>Statistics aside, I am not sure a larger or smaller concentration at Harvard means anything one way or anotherthey all offer a superb education. </p>
<p>Also keep in mind most students change their field of concentration at least once from what they indicated as an entering freshman, and many go into fields or onto grad school in seemingly unrelated areas–e.g. history concentrators go to medical school, and math or physics concentrators pursue law or business.</p>
<p>To follow up on GADADs point, of the 8 courses freshman S has taken this year, 5 were classes of 18 or fewer students.</p>