Class Sizes in Introductory Science Classes

One of the features that has attracted me to the NE LACs, including Williams, is the small, more intimate class sizes to really make connections with one’s professors. However, I was looking at Williams’ course catalog and was noticing that in many of its introductory classes (especially in Biology) it appeared to have almost 100 students in one lecture period. Is this typical of Williams or am I misreading statistics?

I sat in on a few larger classes at previews. Organic chemistry had about 80 people in it and I’ve heard Psychology 101 is one of the largest classes at about 100. However, it’s fairly standard for intro classes to be larger and the further you get along your class path, the smaller the classes will become. Also, the professor still knew all of the students’ names and would call on them to answer questions.

From the Common Data Sets:

Class sections with enrollment of over 100 people: Williams: 2, Harvard: 49, SUNY Binghamton: 108
With 50-99: W: 9, H: 61, B: 113
With 40-49: W: 22, H: 32, B: 82
With 30-39: W: 36, H: 51, B: 184
With 20-29: W: 61, H: 96, B: 385
With 10-19: W: 186, H: 316, B: 497
With 2-9: W: 232, H: 506, B: 311

So, by calculation:
Williams has 0.36% of classes over 100 and 76% with 19 or fewer students.
Harvard has 4.4% of classes over 100 and 74% with 19 or fewer students.
Binghamton has 6.4% of classes over 100 and 48% with 19 or fewer students.

So, yes, a very small percentage of class sections at Williams are large lectures— e.g., Intro Psych. As you can see, there are many more class sections with smaller enrollments. You can see from the data above that, at Williams, there is an inverse relationship between the number of classes and class size, with the most classes at the smallest sizes and the fewest at the largest sizes.

At any school, the large lecture classes will typically be broken into smaller groups for labs or discussion sections. At most universities, those subsections will be run by grad student TAs. The grad students may be only slightly older and more mature than the undergrads, and may be from countries where English is not the native language.

At a LAC like Williams, however, there are no grad students*, so the smaller subsections will be run by academic staff. The prof who lectures will likely have to handle at least one of the subsections. Other subsections may be handled by well-qualified instructors who are hired specifically for this purpose. In my experience (as an undergraduate at a LAC and as a grad student at a research university), the LACs do it better.

*(Williams technically does have grad students, since it participates in two specialized MA programs, in art history and development economics. However, the MA programs operate more or less independently, in partnership with other institutions in Williamstown. They don’t supply TAs to the College.)

Williams would really stand out in this comparison if the CDS had a category for classes “with 2”, due to their tutorial system. Unfortunately, the CDS doesn’t go that low.

There is some suspicion that many schools have target class sizes of 19, because the USN&WR rankings include a factor for “Classes under 20”. This may be one reason why few other schools offer tutorials, even though Williams students rave about them. Obviously it is more expensive to offer tutorials as opposed to seminars or lectures, and the extra expense would result in zero return in the rankings. If USN&WR says that a class size of 19 is sufficiently “small”, why spend more to drop it any further?