According to US News Best Colleges 2019 Edition, these are the most prestigious schools (ranked among the top 25 LACs & National Universities by US News) with the most small classes (less than 20 students per class):
Columbia 82% of classes have less than 20 students
Not sure how the 29 & 39 are relevant; and who cares if schools are “gaming the system” by limiting classes to 19 students ? Seems like a benefit to all if schools feel the need to have small classes.
In answer to your question, I have no idea.
I do find it interesting that students graduating Princeton, Northwestern & Williams & Haverford also make the list for graduates with the least debt.
19, 29, 39, 49 are the highest class sizes for class size brackets (e.g. 20-29) used in ranking measures. So a college will benefit from the “small class size” measure by having one 19 student class and one 29 student class instead of two 24 student classes.
Northeastern is known for rank gaming. A look at its class schedule shows that 19 is a very common class size, but 18 and 20 are much less common.
Northeastern was not mentioned in any of my posts; and, yes, that school has a rep for gaming the system. Still do not understand the 29 & 39 because US News only considers per cent of classes under 20 students & percent of classes of 50 or more students.
I posted this because I read several threads over the past few years expressing concern over class sizes & seeking information on which schools offered the most small classes. Found most responsive posts to be guesses & to be inaccurate.
Interesting, but this thread only used the two columns “percent of classes under 20” & " percent of classes of 50 or more" as that was & is all that US News includes in their published magazine/book Best Colleges 2019 Edition.
If class size is important, accusing colleges of “gaming the rankings”, when they keep class size to the commonly defined “small” (20) is disingenuous. Not sure why that matters. All the other colleges (not accused of “gaming the rankings”) that have under 20 class sizes must have it because of luck I guess? Not because they limit registration counts? Come on.
By substantive considerations, class sizes that have been gamed bear little pedagogical similarity to class sizes that have been arrived at organically. A school that sets up classes with caps such as 26, 24, 20, 10 and 6 students has taken an entirely different approach from those schools at which enrollment caps may land on rankings-pleasing figures such as 19 and 29.
It’s not particularly instructive to look at the % of small classes without also looking at both the % of large classes and how large they are. For example, at two hypothetical schools, each with 8,000 students,
School A: 80% classes with under 20 students,
80 classes with 10 students each, 20 classes with 360 students. A student would have a 90% chance of any one class they’re in being over 300 students.
School B: 50% with under 20 students,
150 classes with 20 students, 150 classes with 33 students. A student would have a 37% chance of any single class having 20 students, a 63% chance of having 33 students, and a 0% chance of being in a class with over 35 students.
Publisher, universities that claim student to faculty ratios lower than 8:1 are most likely not including all relevant students in their calculations. More likely than not, they are omitting thousands of graduate students. In reality, graduate students monopolize the bulk of a faculty’s time and resources. As such, universities with a high graduate to undergraduate student ratio are in fact going to have faculty far less available to undergraduate students. So if one is to compare ratios accurately, all universities must adhere to the rules of calculating those ratios: including all students, undergraduate and graduate, in programs that enroll both undergraduate and graduate students (so no law school or medical school programs, or even MBA and other programs that only enroll graduate students), divided by the number of INSTRUCTIONAL faculty devoted to the programs that teach both undergraduate and graduate students.
Generally speaking, most private elites purposely omit graduate students from their calculations, hence their impressive 3:1-7:1 ratios. Public universities almost always include graduate students in their calculations. If all universities included graduate students in their calculations, the ratios would be far closer across the board, ranging from 10:1 to 16:1 at most elite private and public universities.
As such, I would take those ratios with a table spoon of salt.
The proliferation of classes with fewer than 20 students and low student to faculty ratios is a modern phenomena, unrelated with quality of instruction or classroom experience, but rather, entirely related to gaming the rankings. Until the mid 1990s, virtually all elite universities had similar ratios (usually in the 11:1-16:1 range) and class sizes (50%-60% of classes with fewer than 20 students and 15%-20% of classes with more than 50 students). That all changed when the rankings drew lines in the sand, and universities with the freedom to manipulate data started gaming the final outcome.
The loser in this charade is the end user. As they say, “garbage in, garbage out”.
There are rules for federal reporting that use a common definition of student faculty ratio for both private and public colleges, which is quoted below:
Note that graduate students are omitted for both public and privates, and faculty who primarily instruct graduate students are also omitted. However, many faculty do not have a strict division between undergraduate and graduate. They may be included if they teach an undergrad class, yet spend more of their time working with grad students. Using the federal student-faculty ratio definition above, some of the colleges with the lowest student faculty ratio are below.
Lowest Privates: 3:1 at Caltech, MIT, and VanderCook College of Music
Lowest LAC (no grad students): 5:1 at Sweet Briar
Lowest Specialty Public: 6:1 at UNC School of the Arts
Lowest Non-Specialty Public: 10:1 at Chicago State, Dickinson State, Governors State, and others
Lowest Highly Selective Public: 11:1 at Michigan
The rules for class size also have issues with undergrad vs graduate. If a class has all graduate students except for 1 undergrad, it gets included in the class size totals. So if there are small classes with mostly grad students and a few undergrads, they will pull down the average.
Data10, that is not how it works. A university should report all students (undergraduate and graduate), as well as all instructional faculty in programs that enroll both undergraduate and graduate students. At MIT, that number is roughly 8:1, which is still amazing mind you, relative to other elites. Just look at the 2010-2016 Best colleges editions. MIT reported an 8:1 ratio each of those years. Then, in the 2017 Best colleges edition, MIT’s ratio miraculously dropped to 3:1. Curious!
What I find fascinating is that we put such importance on small class sizes then complain about the cost of a university education. I think how many students are in the class would be irrelevant if the majority of those students are understanding the material. As a statistic I think it says more about the cost of the university than the quality of the teaching.
^If the number in the class is irrelevant then just put all the lectures online so that thousands can learn simultaneously. That would be much cheaper. I don’t think that most are happy to swap the residential college system for MOOCs, though it may be appropriate for some.
