Liberal Arts, but with Liberal Class Sizes

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
21

This might have been address upthread but . . .

“Just to be clear, the Admissions statement the Maroon writer complained about was that Chicago’s class sizes were comparable to those of peer LACs (presumably Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, et al.), not peer institutions like Harvard.”

Actually, the author herself draws that conclusion, because UChicago never made any statement comparing itself to an LAC. The author might be confusing “liberal arts education” - which UChicago certainly professes to provide - and “liberal arts college.”

IMO, UChicago has many attributes that compare it favorably to a dedicated liberal arts college at the undergraduate level, and we’ve spoken to many admitted students who were also looking at LAC’s in addition to Chicago. However, UChicago doesn’t consider itself a peer to LAC’s and it would be highly inappropriate for it to do so.

22

@Lindagaf - in this country we have a variety of post secondary education options. I happen to love the smaller LAC’s that my kids have rejected. I was just making clear that your statement “everyone here knows that professors send their own kids to LACs a lot of the time” is actually incorrect. Everyone here knows no such thing :smiley:

23

Also, just to point out something obvious but which has gotten lost in translation somewhere on this thread (again, sorry if it’s already been pointed out upthread):

The College IS, indeed, a LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE. I think we got sidetracked (my fault though I also blame @Cue7 :wink: ). The college bestows no professional or other “technical” degrees and it provides a liberal arts education. No good claiming it ‘really doesn’t’ due to the Bus Econ track or the ME or LLS majors because those are still liberal arts majors given the breadth of scope in your studies. For instance, the ME major is 1900 credits (last time I checked) which is less than 50% of the total credits needed to graduate. Professional degrees (as one example of a NON-liberal-arts degree) typically require 2/3’rds or more of the degree requirement being within the specialized field of study.

What the College is NOT is a dedicated stand alone college of liberal education (what we tend to deem an “LAC”). Those tend to be smaller and more limited in scope. However, they have also historically been quite academic and some are known to be PhD feeders. Every single one we’ve toured has provided research opportunities for the undergraduates, and Cue is quite correct that you are primarily taught by tenured and TT faculty, because they have a particular commitment to 'teaching.

These are obvious points but just thought they should re reiterated.

24

@Lindagaf said “Seems to me that UChicago is just saying whatever they think might get people to apply.”

Hah! Why would Chicago ever (in ways similar to other schools) want to entice students to apply??

As a tangent, and maybe @JBStillFlying has the data on this - what’s the delta in class profiles between the last pre-Nondorf class (maybe Class of 2012?) and the Class of 2023? I imagine the most recent class is more athletic, has somewhat higher test scores, is somewhat more diverse, and probably wealthier?

Has all this been worth the literally millions we’ve poured into advertising, recruitment, salaries, etc. for our Admissions machine? It seems to me the expenditures we pour into admissions isn’t worth the actual improvement in the class.

Put another way, if we indeed had a more “LAC” model of admissions (which, generally, is less resource-intensive than the grind of big numbers national uni admissions), would we take a big negative hit? Would our avg. SAT score be, say, 10 points lower? Would our class include 41% students of color, as opposed to 48%? We’d certainly get fewer applications (and not keep up with the Joneses), but would the end result be that bad and noticeable, otherwise?

We’ve invested tons of resources into recruitment, and I wonder whether we’ve entered the area of diminishing returns.

25

I think the crux of the student author’s argument was this:

The author isn’t panning her experience with the University of Chicago, just complaining that the school uses disingenuous language in its admissions materials.

26

There are classes without office hours? That’s possible?

27

@Cue7 at #23 - FA data for Fall 2018 hasn’t been posted on the NCES site yet (that I know of) and 2023 won’t be for another year. The Maroon stopped doing the Class survey with the Class of 2022. So we simply don’t know much about “wealth” at this point.

Test scores have edged up slowly over time - a sign of “diminishing returns?” Doubt it. BTW, it takes money to continue to recruit even if number of apps and quality of the “typical” admitted applicant were to be at their peaks. That’s true for everyone, not just UChicago.

As to whether it’s been “worth it,” from a pecuniary standpoint the answer is “yes.” The endowment is up half a bil this year with something like a 6.7% return. Haven’t seen similar data for peer institutions so have no idea how that compares. But that return is pretty healthy for an endowment when compared to historical norms. They also surpassed their $5 bil campaign goal (which was raised half a bil from the old goal).

Since you don’t agree that Chicago is like an LAC, not sure why you would advocate for an “LAC model” of admissions.

28

@OHMomof2 at #25 - someone should fact-check that statement.

29

The Core requirements are:

  1. Humanities, Civilization Studies, and the Arts (total: 600 units/6 quarter courses)
  2. Natural Sciences (Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences) and Mathematical Sciences (total: 600 units/6 quarter courses)
  3. Social Sciences (total: 300 units/3 quarter courses)

Students are required to have at least 42 quarter credits to graduate and 42 divided by 3 is 14, thus it’s clear the college is including the science and math courses in the Core, which it claims caps classes at 19 students. Thus the author’s issue.

The earlier description of the Core seems accurate, the current description inaccurate, in that it implies that a third of a student’s introductory courses will be capped at 19.

Of course this says nothing about how many small upper level seminars UChicago offers. It appears to have a large number of small classes. The question one always has to ask (as at any school) is how likely a student is to be in one. IOW, if a school offers 99 individual tutorials and one class of 300 a student’s chance of being in a large class for one course is not 1%, it’s 75%. Without a deep dive into any school’s enrollment numbers it’s difficult to suss this out.

30

“IOW, if a school offers 99 individual tutorials and one class of 300 a student’s chance of being in a large class for one course is not 1%, it’s 75%. Without a deep dive into any school’s enrollment numbers it’s difficult to suss this out.”

True but here are some fairly representative examples:

As a history major, my D has found her courses to be primarily small seminar-style, including the lower-division courses. Her two required upper-div courses this quarter had enrollments of 20 and eight, respectively. Her winter quarter courses include two seminars of around 25-30 (one of them is in another department) and those seem to be at or near capacity, and one lecture course with 14 currently enrolled (capacity 25).

Natural sciences are is different: both Gen’l Chem (lower level) and Organic Chem (upper level) probably have among the largest sized sections for the lecture (200-300); however, they also have small-group lab sessions twice a week. A good number of the upper div Bio courses seem to be capped at 35 or so enrollees but don’t know enough about whether those are electives or required courses.

Math: Capped between 25-35 depending on the course. Basically true for all the courses, lower and upper.

Econ (the most popular major in the College): Upper-div required courses (so basically the entire major) seem to be capped around 30 - 50 enrollee (might depend on room location). Several this autumn quarter exceeded their capacity. These courses also have discussion sections but those aren’t small group.

“The earlier description of the Core seems accurate, the current description inaccurate, in that it implies that a third of a student’s introductory courses will be capped at 19.”

  • Agree; however, 1) I doubt it's intentional and 2) within the context of the entire page, it's not even inaccurate- it's just awkward and might do with a rephrase. Unlike the prior web-page design, which puts pretty much everything you could ever want to know about the Core on that one admissions page (hello new reader, here is a tutorial on The Core!), this newer version provides more of an overview and then also links to the additional detail (should the reader want to pursue further). I think that's actually more clear and helpful. And the explosion in application numbers over the years once Nondorf took over Admissions speaks to how crucial it was to be able to communicate what a UChicago education actually is in simple and matter-of-fact terms. No one trying to learn about UChicago and what makes it special should be sat down with a primer on Robert Hutchins back in the 30's and 40's. Most would like to know why it's relevant TODAY.

Also, the person responsible for communicating academic content is not the Dean of Admissions but the Dean of the College. I have no doubt that Boyer wouldn’t stand for some inaccurate depiction.

Finally, of all the issues that prospective students might have with UChicago, this issue isn’t one of them. Most are far more concerned about the workload itself which is independent of course enrollment size.

31

“if a school offers 99 individual tutorials and one class of 300 a student’s chance of being in a large class for one course is not 1%, it’s 75”

Sorry if this is off off off topic but it became a mental exercise for me…

Something is off with this statement.

If youre looking at 1 student’s options before enrolling to 1 class, then yes 99% of your options are small classes. Moving forward in the timeline, a student who enrolls in the 300 student class , will have 0% chance of enrolling in a big class ever again.

If you are asking the proportion of students, post-enrollment, who attend a big class, then yes 75%.

But that is not “chance”.

The numbers don’t make sense in general because, its unrealistic.

well… what happens to the 300 students who took the big class? 201 of them will not have any class to attend in the next quarter because the single person classes will all be full!

32

@FStratford, I simplified it for the sake of clarity, but you’re right that if these were all the courses offered it wouldn’t work mathematically.

My point was that % of large vs. small classes doesn’t mean a lot unless you know the actual size of the classes. If you want to know a student’s chance of ending up in a large or a small class, instead of dividing the total number of classes by the number of large classes you need to divide the number of total seats by the number in any one class.

Take UCB’s monster 1000-student CS course, for example. It’s only one out of the plethora of classes offered at UCB, but if the course is offered once a year an average UCB student would have a one in eight chance of being in this one class during their undergrad years. If it’s offered in both the fall and spring the chances rise to one in four.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with some large classes, and I don’t think smaller necessarily means better. I’d rather be in an English or philosophy discussion with fifteen students than three. It’s also not random. A CS, economics or psychology major is more likely to end up in large classes than a Russian or religion major.

33

@JBStillFlying - in post #26 you discussed the U’s endowment and fundraising, pointing to them as having fairly good performance recently.

The endowment return this year was fine, not that notable compared to peers:
https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2019/11/20/uchicago-endowment-8-billion/

Further, Chicago’s endowment position was actually better 20 years ago compared to now. In 2000, Chicago was the 12th wealthiest university (ahead of UPenn, Duke, and Northwestern). In Jan. 2019, Chicago was the 15th wealthiest university (surpassed by those three schools).

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d01/dt357.asp

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Which-Colleges-Have-the/245587

So, the financial position has regressed a bit over about 20 years.

Re fundraising, I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but in about the time it’s taken Chicago to raise $5B, other Us have raised far greater sums of money. And remember, other schools have shortened time in between major campaigns, raised more money more quickly, and/or sought much larger figures. If you want I can find the data for Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Hopkins, etc., but I doubt the stats would put Chicago in a particularly favorable light.

Chicago is trying to do more with less, and I wonder if they could’ve cut Admissions spending a bit, but still retained classes that were just as strong. I think the only big hit if they cut out the big money they spend on marketing would be pure number of applicants.

34

The Maroon piece struggles mightily to discover a “willful obfuscation of the status quo” and speaks vaguely of large class sizes and related matters having “a serious impact on the undergraduate experience”, but this is all a lot of huffing and puffing about nothing much: it is the writer herself and not the the description in the materials that makes the link to the LACs. Nevertheless, there ARE many small classes at the U of C and many somewhat large classes at the LACs, as many commenters have pointed out. Likewise that large lecture-type classes can be both efficient and entertaining and a pleasant respite from the intensity of smaller seminar ones. It has always been that way at the U of C. I myself took several such large lecture classes in my day - one in Vertebrate Biology, two in History (American and English), an Eng. Lit survey course, and Joshua Taylor’s “Philosophy of Art”. They were all taught superlatively well. The faculty who taught them were no doubt chosen for those skills. In some cases it was their very popularity that swelled the numbers. If those classes had a “serious impact on [my] undergraduate education”, it was all for the good, as the writer herself halfway admits in her own case.

One could argue about which of the versions in the Admissions materials is preferable. I liked the greater detail of the earlier version and the historical framing of it in the figure of Hutchins, though the text was not very elegant. The later version is snappier, making me half-wonder whether someone with an advertising background was involved in the writing. That would explain the conflation of class sizes as between the HUM-SOSC components of the Core and the Science portions, although as some commenters have pointed out, that is not a perfect description either. The words actually used would have benefitted from a qualifier. However, I doubt anyone who read them was substantially misled. And, yes, there are certainly important elements of the LAC atmosphere in the curriculum and classroom experience at the U of C, if not the overall small scale of the operation or the devoted core of non-researcher teachers. That comparison was being claimed for it in the sixties when I myself was reading the College catalog of the day. Even more importantly, then and now, was the “idea itself of a liberal education”, represented by the Core. That is an idea that Chicago has remained faithful to since the days of Hutchins, while almost all the ostensible LACs abandoned it if they ever embraced it at all.

35

Following up on @FStratford and @Sue22 comments above, we can see that colleges like to quote GIGO stats because it makes them looks good. A much better stat would be something like “what percentage of your four-year academic experience will be spent in large classes.” If that’s important. I’m not sure it is as long as there are smaller discussion sections to hash out some of the questions.

I’ve also been in plenty of “Socratic” classrooms that technically had large numbers of students. Law and Business can run a good number of those (or did in my day). As long as the professor has the roll-book and knows how to use it, and the class is well prepared (a reasonable expectation) you can have a pretty decent discussion, even if the subject requires a good number of equations. I had a few large accounting and finance courses that were both interactive and well-taught. Quality of instruction does, indeed, matter, as @marlowe1 has pointed out. I’d say it matters a lot more than actual class size.

For the student who craves the smaller, seminar style, I always thought UChicago was a particularly good fit. On the Stanford vs. UChicago History Course thread, it was pointed out that, unlike UChicago, Stanford actually requires you to attend certain lecture courses in the subject. Is that because History is a more popular major at Stanford than at UChicago? Nope; according to 2018 NCES data, UChicago had twice the number of history majors graduating despite having 20% fewer graduates overall. So UChicago’s academic departments are considering other factors besides popularity of the major when determining class size.

36

@Cue7 at #33 - it’s getting off topic to start comparing endowment sizes. My earlier point there was to address your question as to whether it’s worth it. UChicago will always have to do more with less. That will probably never change.

37

@JBStillFlying - although, losing ground financially will eventually inhibit Chicago’s ability to offer components of a LAC experience (like having smaller classes taught by top flight ppl). The problem is, now, Chicago is trying to do more with even less than 20 years ago. At some point, there’s only so much you can do with less, right?

Honestly, the regression financially is a threat to the entire U. In the past 20 years the college has surged, but they’ve dropped in the wealth standings.

I also am not sure why they dropped. Chicago had a much more enviable position 20 yrs ago, but their endowment returns then generally lagged behind key competitors for years. Not good.

38

@Cue37 at #37 - wow. Are you worried about the College backsliding?

Edit to add: fail to see how that could possibly impact their ability to teach small courses. They were doing that even despite running a deficit for several years.

39

@JBStillFlying - no, i’m not worried about the college backsliding - as I’ve said before, I’m worried about (institutionally) peers simply surging too strong.

Remember also, I went to Chicago when the student faculty ratio was even “better” (4:1, I think? Something absurd like that), and the college was even smaller/“cozier-LAC-like”, but I don’t think the college was better.

Institutionally, finances seem to be a big issue, and will impact all parts of the U.

40

Student faculty ratio is now 5:1 per US News so not much worse, and the academic experience has notably improved in the meantime.

If peers are surging “too stong” how is that not equivalent to the college backsliding? After all, the way you are telling it, the hurrier they go, the behinder they get. What’s the end result?

Finances are a big issues with every institution of higher ed.