Does the relative size of a department indicate quality?

College Search & Selection
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<p>Prospective freshmen frequently ask: "How do you evaluate the quality of an undergraduate program in a particular major?".</p>

<p>Very few colleges are uniformly excellent in every major. Every college has strengths and weaknesses. Guidebooks and ratings address some majors but not all. Most applicants don't have the resources or ability to thoroughly evaluate the quality of a department. According to the College Confidential poll, the most important factor in selecting a college is "strength in my intended major".</p>

<p>In the interest of helping prospective freshmen:
Are there any readily available metrics or indicators that measure the quality of a particular undergraduate major?</p>

<p>I was toying with the idea of relative size. Maybe it could somehow be used as an index of quality. Based on a sort of business model, wouldn't the best departments (most popular, most respected, ??) at a particular college tend to grow and the worst departments tend to shrink relative to the overall size of the college. Free enterprise and natural selection among departments. Nationwide, student interest in particular majors waxes and wanes. Some majors are more popular than others. But all colleges are affected equally by the nationwide prevailing interest in a major. Percent differences between colleges in particular majors might reflect quality.</p>

<p>There was an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed about Earlham and the concept of "optimal size". Smaller can be better. On the other hand, I found an article on the web regarding NRC rankings, extolling the virtues of being big and being good (regarding the number of faculty).
<a href="http://merrill.ku.edu/publications/2001whitepaper/podgursky.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://merrill.ku.edu/publications/2001whitepaper/podgursky.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Take economics departments, for example.
If College A has 15% of its students majoring in economics and College B has 2% of its students majoring in economics, then College A has a better econ department than B. However, I think the quality of a department also depends on the quality of the students (SAT scores, for example). So multiply the percent relative size by the SAT 75th percentile to adjust for selectivity. Calculate this statistic for each college you are considering and compare.</p>

<p>Have I totally lost you yet?</p>

<p>Anyway, I had trouble finding out how many econ majors there were at various colleges so I had to use faculty size as a surrogate. I divided the number of faculty in a department by the total number of full-time undergrads at the entire college. These numbers were easy to find. I was assuming that the number of faculty is proportional to the number of students and that faculty teach both grad students and undergrads.</p>

<p>I picked some colleges. Here is my ranking for economics...just a crude example. I am not quite satisfied that it works and would like to hear what you think.</p>

<p>This is supposed to be for econ undergraduates.</p>

<p>school econfaculty totalugs percent SAT75th finalindex</p>

<p>Mass Inst Tec 39 4070 1.0% 1560 15.60
Swarthmore C 14 1487 0.0% 1530 13.77
Brown Universi 49 5660 0.9% 1500 13.50
Northwestern U 59 7797 0.8% 1480 11.84
Uni of Chicago 32 4261 0.8% 1470 11.76
U of Rochester 25 4359 0.6% 1400 8.40
Cornell Universi 38 13655 0.3% 1470 4.41
Boston Universi 41 16248 0.3% 1380 4.14
Uni of Michigan 75 23312 0.3% 1340 4.02
Bucknell Universi 8 3447 0.2% 1370 2.74
Un Texas Austin 49 34801 0.1% 1350 1.35
Penn State Univ 40 33400 0.1% 1300 1.30</p>

<p>Are large publics somehow different? LACs?
Does "natural selection" apply to college departments?
How can this index be improved?
Can the concept become useful or not?</p>

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<p>Size of faculty may not make much difference for undergraduate economics, where so much of the curriculum is relatively standard, and large numbers of graduate faculty might result in lower quality teaching, more TAs, etc. So there probably is such a thing as an optimal size. </p>

<p>It might different mightily, though, in what are generally smaller, more specialized majors, such as African Studies, or music (at a non-conservatory), or a foreign language, or art (history or studio) where the difference between, say, 4 full faculty members and 8 can be huge. (and really, more than double in difference, as if one of the four goes on sabbatical, that's 25% of the department!)</p>

<p>The best metric (not the only one, but the best) is student satisfaction with academic quality. The reason for that is simple: a large majority of students, whether LAC or uni, do not go on to Ph.D. graduate study, either in what they majored in, or anything else. Even at places like Reed, or Swarthmore, it is a very small proportion of the student population, and of that, generally the most academically inclined. But that wouldn't touch the "average" student, even at the very best institutions. There are two surveys that touch on this: the NSEE, which many schools (I think it is 700) participate in, though almost none of the so-called top ones (I think they are fearful of the comparisons); and the COFHE survey of 31 "top" schools, the results of which almost none of the schools will make public. (Harvard has, to their embarrassment, as they rank 26th.)</p>

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<p>can you provide links mini?</p>

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<p>Neither the NSEE nor COFHE surveys, in aggregate, are available to the public. Stats for individual schools are made public at the school's own discretion.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2005/03/29/student_life_at_harvard_lags_peer_schools_poll_finds/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.earlham.edu/publicaffairs/content/excellent/nsse.php%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.earlham.edu/publicaffairs/content/excellent/nsse.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NKR/is_2_87/ai_88581415%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NKR/is_2_87/ai_88581415&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I don't think the size of a department indicates anything about quality. If anything, it indicates a general lack of interest in that department. Expanding on what mini said, take Brown's Egyptology program as an example. It has about three professors and what, three or four majors a year? However, it's an internationally recognized program. Also, fields like biology, political science, etc. are going to be the biggest departments at almost any school. </p>

<p>Instead of the size of a program, I think course offerings is a better measure of quality.</p>

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<p>In my original post,
department quality score=(enrollment in department/total college enrollment) X SAT 75th percentile for the college</p>

<p>Can these "quality scores" be compared BETWEEN colleges to tell which department is better? I think maybe yes, but not sure.</p>

<p>It isn't departmental size alone but relative size...departmental enrollment relative to the total enrollment...the percent enrollment in a particular department. This adjusts for the overall size of the college, its "capacity". </p>

<p>The departmental percent, by itself, doesn't mean much. It simply adjusts for the scale of the college. You have to go a couple steps farther. </p>

<p>Multiply the percent/proportion by SAT score. This adjusts for the ability level of the students who enroll. You need to know how good the students are, not just how many there are. Better departments generally attract better students. This results in a "quality score". Finally, you have to compare this number with the scores from similar departments at other colleges. Departments with higher scores are "better" because they compete successfully for students.</p>

<p>Higher education is a sort of marketplace. If higher ed follows the principles of a free market, and if consumers of higher education make rational choices, then colleges and departments that have the most to offer will succeed in attracting not only the best students but the most students (relative to the scale/capacity of the college).</p>

<p>Colleges are a little like restaurants. People eat where the food is best, other things being equal. If you had four Italian restaurants on the same block with the same menu and with the same seating capacity, the restaurant with the best food would attract the most customers.</p>

<p>Similarly, the best economics departments, for example, would attract the most students (that is, when you adjust for other things). </p>

<p>My idea is to come up with a rating number for specific departments that makes "other things equal" and somehow captures "quality". I was also looking for statistics that are readily available to the general public. Mini is probably right that the surveys he mentioned are best but the general public does not have access to them. </p>

<p>In my example above, I had trouble finding the student enrollment numbers in economics departments so I used the number of faculty as a substitute number, thinking it might be proportional to student enrollment, but I really wanted undergraduate student enrollment.</p>

<p>Warblersrule, if Brown had 5 egyptology majors and an imaginary identical college only attracted 1 egyptology major, I would guess that Brown had a better egyptology program, assuming students made rational (not random) choices.</p>

<p>I know the method is flawed, but I find the concept very interesting: a sort of economic/ecological/evolutionary model of departmental growth with dominant (best) departments proliferating at the top of a "food chain". </p>

<p>It would be nice if there were an easy and objective way to estimate the strength of a particular undergraduate major at a particular college. But, maybe there is no good substitute for checking the published rankings, asking for the opinions of knowledgeable people on CC, and researching the department.</p>

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<p>Size of department is hardly equal to quality. It's more important to see what and how many advanced classes they offer. Also, it helps to snoop around the department webpages. Try to find course webpages for a couple intro classes and see how rigorous it is.</p>

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<p>Adding to Mini's resources for the NSSE: About 200 schools, including research universities, LACs and masters universities, agreed to let US News & World Reports publish some of their NSSE numbers.
<a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranknsse_brief.php%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ranknsse_brief.php&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>However, by themselves, these numbers are only partially useful. To really know how a school does, you need to look at the overall results of the NSSE research, which includes 700 schools and over 250,000 students. For that, go to the NSEE site, click on "research and reports" and then "annual survey" --- it makes very interesting reading, and there are some real surprises in there about the differences between types of schools and student experiences if you really look at the details.
<a href="http://www.indiana.edu/%7Ensse/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>I also think it is false thinking to use size of department as the only criteria for measuring quality. All that does is tell you how BIG the department is, it tells you nothing about the actual quality. </p>

<p>Consider this: If you wanted to rate the quality of automobiles, would you use SIZE as the sole criteria? I don't think so, because that would not tell you anything about their performance, customer satisfaction, style, gas mileage, safety, etc. You'd end up saying all Minivans are better quality than jaguars just because they're bigger.</p>

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<p>IMO, relative size of the department, in isolation, means very little. Post #5 above by Warblersrule gives an excellent example.</p>

<p>Another example: using that metric alone, a school like Clarkson will always show up higher in engineering than schools like Cornell or Michigan. Simply because the latter two schools, though they have outstanding engineering programs (Dare I say better reputed that Clarkson), have a lot of other people studying a lot of things besides engineering, and Clarkson doesn't. This type of metric rewards lack of diversity in the student body, which has no (positive) bearing on the quality of any particular program. This is the main issue I have with the % PhD statistics in particular fields that keep cropping up here.</p>

<p>I do think that the # courses available to undergraduates in a particular field is relevant.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Simply because the latter two schools, though they have outstanding engineering programs (Dare I say better reputed that Clarkson)

[/quote]
</p>

<p>You're going to get flogged for that comment!</p>

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<p>not sure what you mean, but there was a typo; should have been "than Clarkson". No offense to Clarkson.</p>

<p>I think absolute size of a department is more useful than relative size, because then you're not penalizing a multi-faceted university for being multi-faceted. To the extent that size is important.</p>

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<p>Yes, looking at syllabi can give you great insite into class quality, I believe -assuming the teacher is quality. For instance, some classes are heavily research and inquiry based. These classes, which demand student participation and independent creative thinking, tend to be very good at building critical thinking skills with quality professors. Other classes can be a lot of reading and homework, but if they are simply geared towards memorization of reading material, are you truly getting the most for your $? Classes that are good for people who anticipate graduate study emphasize reading of professional literature as opposed to just textbooks, and learning skills such as research and writing of papers in a style appropriate to that discipline. If you are not interested in graduate school, you may prefer a more straightforward textbook approach to learning the material.</p>

<p>Something also to keep in mind is that departments at different schools are organized differently. Some departments at some schools place more emphasis on specialization, whereas others build general knowledge and skills. At some schools, an emphasis on collaborative and inquiry-based learned approaches is institutionalized and encouraged for every teacher in the dept (natural sciences at Carleton, bio at Swat) -other departments give the teacher more freedom to be as creative or boring as they please (I feel Smith science ran this way).</p>

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<p>"Instead of the size of a program, I think course offerings is a better measure of quality."</p>

<p>"IMO, relative size of the department, in isolation, means very little."</p>

<p>"I do think that the # courses available to undergraduates in a particular field is relevant."</p>

<p>I am a bit perplexed by the above comments. It seems that the posters who value the number and depth of classes also seem to think that the size of the department is not relevant. Well, considering that someone has to TEACH the classes, I am not sure how a school with a very small departmental faculty could offer many classes. Other elements are the size of the classes, the absence or presence of TA, and the availability of the teachers on campus. I may be wonderful to have a superstar on the faculty, but unless he lowers himself to teach or advise undergraduates, there is no great value for students. This means that, in addition toc heck the course offering, it is very important to try to find out the identity of the teacher. Again, paying a small fortune to be taught by a foreign graduate student who lacks teaching experience and the adequate mastery of the english language, is a seriously dumb proposal, no matter the reputation of the school. </p>

<p>There is one issue about the size of a department: it is a clear representation of the committment of a particular school that a given field. Since the original poster mentioned Economics, it would be obvious to anyone who does a modicum of research that there IS a VERY clear relation to the size of the departments of economics and their reputation for quality and depth.</p>

<p>Schools that have a department with a faculty of fewer than a handful members are simply not competitive, and one of the reasons is that they cannot offer the specialization nor the breadth offered by larger programs. The example of a wonderful but minuscule Egyptology department is simply not relevant to common majors such as Economics or English.</p>

<p>Lastly, it is also very important to analyze the impact of the political leaning of particular departments at different schools. Students who expect to receive a Chicago-style instruction may be radically disappointed by the course selection and the strong bias of the faculty at different schools.</p>

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<p>There is something to be said about size of a department -I'm not saying it's irrelevant. I know that at least at LACs, however, faculty often teach a few different courses, whereas at universities they may only teach one in their specialty. Being required to teach a variety of courses may in its best cases result in faculty who have broad knowledge bases and are very capable of conveying the "big picture" of an academic field to students. In its worst cases, it results in classes being taught by someone who does not do research directly in that field, so the classes may not be as in-depth or up-to-date. The size of a department at universities may indicate it is a strong department that turns out lots of groundbreaking publications. But whether or not the curriculum offered to undergraduates is solid and whether or not undergraduates can participate in the research in a meaningful way, is a horse of a different color.</p>

<p>BTW, what do you mean by a "Chicago-style" instruction?</p>

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<p>I do not think that department size is an indicator of the relative quality of a department. DS is in the smallest, but also one of the best (and under recognized) departments at his huge university. There are less than 500 total students...undergrad, grad included. It's small, but very highly regarded. It's also more selective than some of the larger departments because of the small size.</p>

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<p>It seems that the posters who value the number and depth of classes also seem to think that the size of the department is not relevant."</p>

<p>That's not what I , for one, said, or at least intended to say. I said the RELATIVE size of the department is not important. I said the ABSOLUTE size of the department may be of some importance.</p>

<p>Xiggi do YOU think UC Berkeley is worse than Clarkson in engineering? I'm quite sure that, relative to the university as a whole, Berkeley's's engineering school is smaller as a % than Clarkson's engineering school is to Clarkson as a whole. But I bet on an absolute basis that Berkeley's engineering school is bigger than Clarkson's. (I haven't looked at any numbers though)</p>

<p>I see absolutely no contradiction in the three excerpts you cited.</p>

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<p>Ecape, my post discussed Departments of Economics. This may help:</p>

<p>
[quote]
The University of Chicago is home to an unusually innovative department of economics. The proportion of new ideas in economics over the last forty years that have emanated from or become associated with Chicago is astonishing. Any definition of the "Chicago School" would have to find room for the following ideas (in chronological order from the 1940s to the present): the economic theory of socialism, general equilibrium models of foreign trade, simultaneous equation methods in econometrics, consumption as a function of permanent income, the economics of the household, the rationality of peasants in poor countries, the economics of education and other acquired skills (human capital), applied welfare economics, monetarism, sociological economics (entrepreneurship, racial discrimination, crime), the economics of invention and innovation, quantitative economic history, the economics of information, political economy (externalities, property rights, liability, contracts), the monetary approach to international finance, and rational expectations in macroeconomics.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>MoneyDad, I cannot comment on Engineering at Berkeley versus Clarkson. My comments were targeting Economics. In this regard, I do not think that one could compare the Economics Department at schools such as Reed or Oberlin with the larger Economic Departments at LACs known for their Economic Departments. I understand that you make a difference between relative and absolute sizes. Regarding my comments, a departmental faculty of 4 to 7 is small, be it relative or absolute.</p>

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<p>Michigan's SAT 75th %ile is 1410, not 1340. And I do not know how you can compare a schools like Michigan, where only 5% of the students major in Economics, to a school like Chicago or Harvard, where over 10% of the students major in Economics. I think your formula is flawed.</p>

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<p>If you read the link to Harvard COFHE rankings I posted above, you'd find that students in the smaller departments (classics) ranked the academic quality at H. higher than those in the larger departments (economics). Again, this suggests that there is something to the notion of "optimal size". Too small, and there isn't enough diversity of offerings, the department is at risk of losing important personnel, there is too much chance of a student not finding her unique niche, not enough majors to form a sufficient peer group, fewer role models among both students and faculty, and not enough upper level course offerings or enough variety. Too large a department and a student could get lost in the shuffle; introductory courses could get shortshrift; research faculty might be more inaccessible; mentoring opportunities might be relatively fewer per student; too much concentration on the departmental student superstars rather than the average student; and, in a research university, fewer research opportunities for the average student (the superstar will do fine wherever she goes.)</p>

<p>I think the quality of a department (or school) should be measured by the education received by its average student which, in virtually every case, means one who is NOT going on to graduate study in her major, and that the college experience is the capstone.</p>

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<p>Alexandre,
I included U Michigan in my small sample because I knew it had an outsanding econ program with 75 faculty members. Yes, I know my ranking system had flaws and Michigan did not seem to come out right.</p>

<p>To get the 1340 SAT 75th percentile for Michigan, I converted the ACT of 30 listed for Michigan in US News using an online conversion chart. I did not actually know the SAT scores for Michigan. </p>

<p>Another flaw is that I did not take the time to ascertain the undergraduate enrollment in Arts and Sciences, which is where economics is housed. I used the overall undergrad enrollment in the denominator which erroneously lowered the percent of students in economics at colleges like Michigan and Cornell with a lot of non-arts/sciences students (such as engineering). </p>

<p>Yet another flaw is that the SAT should be the SAT for the department of interest, not overall.</p>

<p>If I were the applicant applying to 10 colleges, I would take the time to get the right numbers. If I were to make a more serious attempt at this, I would make the phone calls or whatever and get the right numbers. My effort above was just a crude attempt to demonstrate the concept which I still think has merit. Better departments, over time, attract more students and better students relative to the scale of their home college. I am just not sure how to quantify it or whether it can be successfully quantified.</p>

<p>Thumper-
Yes, small departments (in absolute number) can be excellent. The idea is to compare the department percent relative to other colleges. Yes, small departments can be very selective. Selectivity is also an indication of the department's strength/competitiveness. That is why relative size must be adjusted for selectivity.</p>

<p>Very interesting discussion. I hope prospective freshmen get some ideas that will help them assess the strength of a college in their intended major.</p>