<p>What percentage of the classes are taught by professors in the first years.
And what opportunities are there to do research at an Undergrad level in the live sciences/zoology/ecology field.</p>
<p>I can’t speak for the disciplines you mention, but MU overall is all about the undergrad education. They have grad students, and yes you’re going to get a grad TA sometimes, but the stats on the percentage of classes taught by tenured or tenure-track professors is really high, especially for a mid-sized public university. The US News rankings consistently put MU in the top 3 (with Dartmouth and Princeton) for undergrad teaching. One of the things that sold us on Miami (our S is a first year) was this commitment to quality teacher contact - they’re not going to come find you but the student:teacher ratio is good and they make a big deal about being available and accessible. That usually translates to research opportunities because faculty don’t have legions of grad students to choose from. Other schools our S had to choose from had a much larger % of their enrollment in the grad schools. Miami has nearly 16,000 undergrads and only 2,400 grads. It’s what they do.</p>
<p>We toured last week and were told full profs teach everything but TAs often lead discussion/study sessions. So for a large intro class, say Econ 101, you might have a 150 student lecture with the full prof on Mon and Wed but a Fri session with 25 kids and a TA.</p>
<p>After the intro level classes get smaller.</p>
<p>My child has never had a class taught by a TA. Always Professors.</p>
<p>The same as in post #4
"My child has never had a class taught by a TA. Always Professors. ".
More so, one of her class was taught by 3 profs in a classroom at the same time each teaching his sub-specialty.<br>
I do not know if all, but some classes have SI (supplemental instructors). TAs were only involved with labs when my D. was there. D. herself was hired by Gen. Chem prof. as his SI. She ran scheduled sessions completely outside of normal class schedules. Her sessions later were reaching 40 kids in class and usually were filled before exams. She had this job for 3 years and many kids loved it, they told her they she has helped a lot. Again, these were not any substitution for regular classes. But D. had to be familiar with the current class material. So she had to sit thru the regular class lectures for 3 years, which was part of her job.</p>