<p>At a place like Stanford or Columbia where the focus is mainly on graduates/research, do the undergraduates suffer? Or does the graduate focus/research-orient have no particular detriment to the undergraduates?</p>
<p>If you’re an undergrad who needs constant care and feeding, a research university is not the place for you. If you’re a normal person, you probably won’t notice anything out of the ordinary.</p>
<p>It also varies by school. For instance, graduate students tend to dominate the campuses of Harvard and Columbia. The undergraduate-to-graduate student ratio is more balanced at universities such as Northwestern and Duke (roughly 45% undergraduate and 55% graduate population). You have some large publics that enroll more undergraduate students but still operate like research-oriented institutions (Michigan, Berkeley, UNC, etc.).</p>
<p>It shouldn’t matter where you attend. If you need constant and individual attention, I do not recommend research universities.</p>
<p>It can also vary tremendously from one department to another. I’ve noticed that undergraduates in small departments like classics and geology tend to get quite a lot of attention. </p>
<p>Undergraduates in much larger programs like biology, however, are often left to their own devices.</p>
<p>As a general rule, lots of graduate students at a school has some foreseeable pluses and minuses for undergrads. The minuses are that it is much harder to get faculty time and attention: You have to reach out, and keep reaching out, if you want a faculty member to know your name, let alone know you well enough to write a letter of recommendation. When you do research, you are usually working with/for a grad student, not a faculty member-and a lot of the reasearch is pretty mundane stuff because the interesting part is being done by the grad student, especially in the first two years. Your intro classes are usually huge and divided into sections taught by grad students and your papers are graded by grad students, so again, if you want to know the prof, you have to make a lot of effort until you get to those advanced seminars. This is why so many kids choose to go to LACs or specialty programs in larger schools or to universities where the graduate students are in the minority.</p>
<p>On the plus side, you get all the benefits of being at a larger school, in most cases. More classes to choose from, more research opportunities to choose from, more activities, etc…And grad students can be helpful if you are planning to be a grad student yourself some day-they can help you understand the ins and outs of applying to grad school and point you to interesting programs, they can let you know when interesting talks are being given that you should attend, and if they like mentoring, they won’t hog all the interesting part of the research and get you involved in some of the higher level discussions related to getting work published. Also, some grad students are excellent, caring teachers, so that fact that they teach sections is not necessarily bad, especially if the professor isn’t a great teacher-which happens often because professors don’t get tenure because of their teaching abilities at large research-driven institutions. </p>
<p>Personally, I attended a large research-oriented school and I wish I’d gone to a LAC, but that’s based on hindsight and my goals at that time.</p>
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<p>At Harvard, the vast majority of graduate students are on different campuses from the undergrads. The undergrads all live in residential colleges that are totally undergrad except for graduate tutors and the faculty House Master. The presence of the grad schools attracts world-class faculty who would not be at a LAC and visits by famous people that are open to undergrads, but that doesn’t mean that undergrad access to or interest from faculty is diminished. My two daughters have had far more attention from and casual interaction with their faculty than I ever had at Wake Forest.</p>
<p>It very much depends on the school and department in question. I had attended a large state with a famous graduate program in my major , and worked very closely and easily with my professors (not graduate students!). Likewise I now teach at a large research institution and while I have a lab of graduate students, I know all my undergraduates by name and if they work in the lab, they work under me, not my graduate students. Its extremely easy to know the faculty, and our undergraduates just stop by!</p>
<p>starbright, I’m guessing that you were exactly the kind of student that I described in the first paragraph-one who had outstanding grades in your field and reached out more than once to faculty-and was therefore able to garner the attention you needed.</p>
<p>I would still maintain that that was the exception rather than the rule. What is noteworthy about the top LACs is that even the B students get faculty attention and the faculty reach out to them rather than waiting for a student to get up the nerve to stop by. </p>
<p>That isn’t to say you aren’t doing a lot more than that for your undergrads. But I also wonder how much of your interaction with them arose from them reaching out to you and if they aren’t also the top students who had the confidence to approach you. I may be wrong, of course-and you may be exceptional in this way. But my undergrad experience in a popular major at the large research university was, I think, more typical.</p>
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<p>At Columbia, the undergrads are completely separated from grad students, the college dorms are clustered, the main campus is dominated by undergrads. Our classes are small (some 6:1 student:faculty ratio), there is a heavy focus on undergraduate teaching and classes. Students get ample research opportunities and one and one interaction with professors after class and in office hours, many develop lasting bonds with their professors and will have class dinners years after the course has finished. I would expect the same from Harvard and Stanford. These cannot be some of the best undergrad institutions in the country, if they’re ignoring their undergrads.</p>
<p>Yikes, all this passive-aggressive hostility from large state school alumni makes LAC students seem like abnormal, insecure attention whores.</p>
<p>Can you blame us if we enjoy small classes and the privilege of being able to talk with our professors anytime? </p>
<p>I’ve lived in New York for 18 years of my life. I need a break from the stench of car exhaust and the need to forcibly push through packed crowds of people to get down the street.</p>
<p>As an undergraduate alum of an elite LAC and the largest state flagship in the nation, I believe one’s undergraduate experience is entirely a function of what you make of it. As a philosophy major in the state flagship, I (and the other 20-some philosophy majors) got constant attention from the professors, as suggested by IBclass06. Attention was also easy to gain at the LAC. At both places, however, some degree of initiative was required. Folks have a lot more say in determining their undergraduate experience than many believe.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t say that’s completely true about graduate students being completely separated at Columbia. I’m a graduate student there. Housing-wise, yes; most graduate housing is separate from undergrad housing. But many upper-level classes are mixed grad/undergrad classes; in research labs, graduate students mentor the undergraduates, and many classes have graduate teaching assistants that do the main interaction with undergraduate students instead of the professors. That’s not to take away from the individual interaction most undergrads get here with professors; they do get it. We’re just not kept as separate in many departments.</p>
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<p>Interestingly point. I just don’t think a student who got into a ‘top LAC’ is not going to be able to stand out in a large public U which tends to be less selective and more academically diverse (a kid attending a top LAC has initiative, wants to speak in class, and probably is pretty darn studious wherever they go… the same kid who’d have no problem working with their professors at big state U). In a top LAC everyone wants the profs ear…meaning much more competition in that regard (in contrast to a large public where only a subset of kids are interested in doing so).</p>
<p>I honestly think this whole LAC thing is highly overrated. Lots of mythology and stereotypes about professors. It is simply not hard at all to meet your professors, at any school.</p>
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<p>upper level classes are mixed, although only like 10% of classes that a Columbia undergrad student will ever take are mixed. Likewise I’ve been taught by a grad student in 2/40 classes (both times they were awesome). Research labs probably vary by department, but I worked in an engineering research lab for a couple of years and I only did work directly for my prof, who guided and supervised me.</p>
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<p>So is the implication that anybody who goes to a LAC not a normal person?</p>
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<p>*“You’d be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching,” said Mr. Billings, …</p>
<p>“It’s well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience,” said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. “Amherst is always pointed to. Harvard should be as great at teaching as Amherst.”</p>
<p>As Professor Skocpol put it, “People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.</p>
<p>Joshua Billings is majoring in German and the classics. He says he has been fortunate to learn from great scholars who are also great teachers. But he also says that he did not learn much from two large lecture courses he took to satisfy requirements. He was one of about 500 students in one social sciences course led by a junior faculty member whose lectures, Mr. Billings said, were “disorganized, repetitive and incredibly reductive.”</p>
<p>“We read good stuff, but I don’t think the lectures added anything,” he said. “People were sitting there doing e-mails on their laptops.”</p>
<p>He worked hard, he said, to get into small freshman and graduate seminars taught by renowned scholars.</p>
<p>Those seminars, and the level of engagement they offered with professors, were transforming, he said. His best teachers, he said, “all committed to making me a better thinker, and challenged me to improve.”</p>
<p>But, he added, he believes his experience is “not the norm” for Harvard undergraduates. “I think many people spend a great deal of their time in large lecture classes, have little direct contact with professors, and are frustrated by poorly trained teaching fellows,” he said.</p>
<p>There are plenty of excellent teachers at Harvard, Professor Skocpol said. But some receive little reward for their exceptional talent in the classroom, save for the occasional teaching award. To win tenure, junior faculty members strive to distinguish themselves through research as the best in their fields.</p>
<p>Professor Skocpol’s report quotes one graduate teaching fellow, a scientist, who won the prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize: “I earn high praise (and more money) for every paper or academic achievement while every teaching achievement earns a warning of how I should not wander off research.”</p>
<p>Until now, there has been no systematic effort to tie salary levels to teaching performance. “When we made presentations to businessmen about this, they couldn’t comprehend that teaching wasn’t connected to salary,” Professor Ulrich said. *</p>
<p>*Advising programs at Stanford have generally been weak and inadequate; *</p>
<p>[Advising</a> must improve](<a href=“http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1020244]Advising”>http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1020244)</p>
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In my experience both as a student at a research university and as a graduate student at a different research university, this hasn’t been true.</p>
<p>I have an undergraduate who works with me – not for me – and we also work with another graduate student. The three of us are a mini research group with several projects going on, and none of the three of us gets to hog the interesting science. There’s more than enough to go around.</p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/776474-college-comparison-vii-class-sizes-classes-20-students.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/776474-college-comparison-vii-class-sizes-classes-20-students.html</a></p>
<p>Harvard and Columbia both have a greater % of classes under 20 than Williams and Amherst, 77% for HC, 74%,70% for WA. While they also have a greater % of classes over 50, 8% for HC and 3% for WA. So if you want to be in small classes state schools are bad, but Harvard, Columbia and Stanford are comparable to LACs. It is also a myth that grad students teach classes at H,C,S. For most people at Columbia less than 10% of their courses are taught by phd students, these are usually small seminars like university writing and most will agree that their phd students are great teachers.</p>
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Yeaaaahh…that’s what I implied, sakky. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Allow me to clarify my statement:
If you’re a normal person, you probably won’t notice anything out of the ordinary, such as more attention being showered on grads at the expense of undergrads.</p>
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Most every elite research university, public or private, is set up the exact same way.</p>