What are the best methods/sites/etc to rate the strengths and weaknesses of departments at colleges? Specifically, colleges that aren’t in T20, so aren’t likely to have those programs listed on any easy to find “top program” lists. Some people will say things like “Oh, ______ has a great English program, but their math program is weak” - how is that determined?
The National Research Council rankings are a possible starting point:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-/124713
Older:
http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~jnewton/nrc_rankings/nrc41.html
There are sites that examine specific subjects and subfields, such as:
A. For subjects with major-specific accreditation that is considered essential (e.g. civil engineering, nursing), consider whether the major has it or is in the process of getting it. If there is a licensing exam associated with completion of the program, consider the pass rates.
B. Look at the breadth and depth of upper level course offerings and frequency of offering of each.
C. Find an expert in the subject to review the course materials to investigate the rigor and depth of the courses in the subject.
D. Find out if the major is additionally competitive beyond admission to the school, and how much more competitive if it is. A top quality program is not useful if the student cannot get into it.
Especially for LACs, I think it can help just to look at the faculty bios on the departmental webpages. At a top-quality large university like UNC and Michigan, most departments are large, and you are going to find excellent faculty. The trick there is in knowing what classes they will be teaching–grad or undergrad–and what classes TAs will be teaching.
With LACs, departments can be small, which is bad or good, just a factor. A small anthropology department with 6-8 excellent faculty members who focus on teaching and cover a breadth of areas could be great for an anthro major. A small department with a couple of all-but-retired profs and a couple who are not good teachers or communicators could be a nightmare.
Taking the anthro example, a student could go and look at who is on the faculty. Is anyone near retirement? Assistant professors and lecturers are probably not tenured and might be gone soon. Associate profs and profs will probably be around all four years, unless they are near retirement.
What are their areas of interest? Does that jibe with the students? What are their most recent publications? Are they of interest? Do they appear in leading journals, etc?
Also, look at rate my professors. There can be a lot of bad info there. But if you ignore reviews that are clearly grade motivated and evaluate with caution then it can be helpful. Are there six profs in a department and three have low rankings? Then if one of the ones with a higher ranking is on sabbatical, then pickings can be slim.
One last bit of advice: Students must take some classes. When they have latitude, though, I suggest choosing an outstanding prof over a more desirable class with a less success prof. The outstanding teacher will make their subject matter more interesting, and the student will most often learn more from a better teacher.
Good luck!
To the above, I’ll add that the degree to which you need to fret about the strength of your major varies a lot depending on your subject and career plans.
Hundreds of colleges have great programs in English, history, biology, and so on - they are the bread and butter of most four-year colleges. The drop off in quality is much steeper, however, in fields like math and classics, where a handful of colleges tend to dominate the field.
As for career plans, you need to focus on a department’s strength much more if you’re planning on getting a PhD than if you have any other career plans - say, heading to law or medical school, or going into consulting.
Also keep in mind that the majority of students change their majors at least once. Focus on finding colleges that seem like overall good fits, and then you can narrow the list down based on what you think you want to study.
In addition to the above great advice, look also at career or graduate school placement rates.
TAs usually are not the lead instructors even at big research universities. Usually, they run discussion or lab sections of a large lecture run by a faculty member.
TAs as lead instructors seem to be most common with lower level foreign language or English composition courses.
Students who may change major may want to check that all of their possible majors are good or at least acceptable in quality, and not highly competitive within the school to get into, so that it is less likely that they will need to transfer to a different school if they change major.
@ucbalumnus Yes, that’s an important clarification. Most often, TAs will teach smaller classes once a week, and students taking a class with TAs will usually have something like 2 lecture classes with the professors and 1 smaller discussion class with a TA in a typical week. TAs don’t often teach entire classes, which my comment suggested.
That said, I went to grad school at a top state flagship and was a TA for 4 classes. These included not only intro classes but also some 200/300-level lecture classes. An undergrad student in my department could easily have had a half dozen classes with TAs. Of course, some TAs are excellent, present company excluded.
I’ll just add that often senior profs at top research universities will teach grad students much more often than undergrads.
I was actually very impressed at Michigan, which I used as an example here. I believe I’m correct that all calculus classes were fairly small, with 30 or 35 students max. We went to Wash U right after, and it seemed like some intro classes would actually be larger there.
Yes, certainly focus on the larger fit at a particular school AND do pay attention to the department as you whittle it down to a final list, especially if a young person has a passion for a subject, and some small schools are on the list. I know a student who was interested in a particular sub-field within a department. They really liked a very strong LAC, which seemed like a great fit. They looked up the one professor who taught that subject at the school on rate my professor. They had lots of reviews and an overall rating of about 2.1, so it was likely that that would not have worked out well.
Yes, it is certainly possible to find TAs in many classes, including higher level ones, as secondary instructors.
But is that necessarily a bad thing? Sometimes, having two (or more) instructors is better than one, if they have different ways of explaining a concept, increasing the chance that one of the ways is more understandable to the student. The idea that “TA = bad” that seems assumed on these forums is an odd assumption.
Does Michigan have enough math faculty for them to teach that many small sections of calculus 1 (instead of a big faculty led lecture with TA run discussions), or does it use TAs as lead instructors for them, akin to how it is sometimes done with the lower level foreign language and English composition courses?
I am married to a professor, and we spend a lot of time around other faculty, so have some thoughts about this. First, you’d be surprised at the schools which are, actually, top departments in specific fields. For instance, top Philosophy departments in the country include Rutgers, Pittsburgh and NYU. Top Archaeology programs include Univ Cincinnati and New Mexico. So, don’t assume that, for instance, Philosophy at Wash U – just because it is a higher ranked university – is a stronger department than at Pitt. Again, reasonable minds can differ, but I do think that strength in graduate programs, at the university level, generally overlaps with strength in undergrad, because in many (but not all) instances, faculty who teach grad students are also teaching undergrads. The big exception to that is in sciences where faculty may be exclusively research faculty, and not engaged with undergrad teaching (we know some folks like that).
At the LAC level, look at department web sites to see breadth and depth of faculty specialties and course offerings. One challenge in really “digging” into this info is that department pages often list all courses in rotation, rather than identify which courses, or how many, are generally offered each semester. So that fascinating course in an obscure historical field might only be offered every 10 years, but still appears as a “course offering.” Usually at private schools, one needs to have a student ID to access the list of actual offerings each semester, while at public institutions, that information is generally freely available.
I agree with getting a sense of looming retirements or heavy reliance on adjuncts/visiting faculty. At the same time, at many LACs these days, folks are hired into multi-year visiting positions which are then converted into tenure track positions, so don’t be scared off by visiting profs in general. However, a warning signal might be if there are only a couple “regular” faculty and then a rotating crew of visiting faculty who are teaching most of the courses. Some fields do rely on visiting or adjuncts heavily, including foreign language instruction, music performance, and sometimes fine arts. Read department announcements to see if faculty are getting plum fellowships or awards for their research, or are presenting their work at national/international conferences. Sometimes a department’s fame is tied to a journal operated out of the school – Kenyon’s English dept, for instance, is linked with the Kenyon Review, an established literary review, which also has outshoots for post-doc funding, summer programs for high schoolers etc.
Another way to assess strength is to see what departments announce about their undergrads – are they getting good jobs, graduate school placements etc?
No one size fits all, but these would be ways to dig more deeply into department quality.
I like @warblersrule’s post, which points out (I think) that worrying too much about departmental strength isn’t that important at the undergrad level. The exception is for majors that are not, to use @warblersrule 's wording, “bread and butter” majors. Another exception might be very small colleges. For instance, Ripon College (which I highly doubt is on your radar) has one tenured physics professor. That might make me hesitant to study physics there.
Undergraduate studies are broad (“broad” does not mean “not strong”), and I see too many students worry about departmental strength, faculty degrees, etc. Even The Fiske Guide to Colleges states that worrying about perceived departmental strength should not be an important priority. After all, the university department might be filled with academic superstars who are far more interested in research/scholarship (and graduate students) than they are with undergrad teaching. That department might be filled with faculty who are lousy in the classroom. That department might be filled with faculty that you will never meet or never get to see, even if you do get in one of their classes.
So, sure, look at departments. Look at faculty if you wish. But it should be at best a tie-breaker between schools. These matters certainly wouldn’t prevent me from enrolling somewhere that I love.
Thank you for the input, @Hapworth ! I actually am using this only as a sort of tie breaker between some schools on the list (unless, of course, there’s a major red flag that should come up)
Also look how many professors are listed for the department. A CS department with 3 professors is not going to be as strong as one with 10.