There are lots of COE majors for which E7 and 61A are both technical classes so it’s not one or the other. And most E7 enrollees are people who are in COE or LS folks who dropped 61A after the weeder midterm.
Chinese value accomplishment in research and findings, not teaching or other things we think important for a young people’s coming to age. For the students pursuing a PHD degree, it is just a matching game: their personal interest, capability and target match a professor and a school’s offering.
Majors and classes are two different things.
In any event, it sounds like there is at least one context in which bigger is better, which seems to be you main point. I’m certainly not arguing that point. I was just surprised at the idea that Berkeley (or any non-tech college) had that many kids majoring in those areas.
2 Likes
I agree with that majority vs plurality comment but that poster was somehow implying that inaccuracy as somehow invalidating of the larger point. I agree with what you wrote.
In summary
- The vast majority of classes at Berkeley have <50 people
- The high enrollment classes are mainly for a couple of high demand lower divs which are very very popular
- They are so popular that a substantial undergrad population seek and take these classes even if they are not a major requirement
- And these large classes are popular for a reason because of the quality and reputation
- All classes are taught by professors, not TAs
- TAs and course staff handle discussions and labs
- The course staff is the cream of the crop and the diversity of that large staff contributes to the depth and breadth of these classes
- This critical mass is the reason you have so many upper div cLasses and cutting edge research labs
- All of this is the reason the CS program is rated on par with Stanford and CMU, and one spot below MIT and a spot above Harvard
- And if you buy this CS specific argument you can’t penalize the rest of the university for the class sizes #s negatively impacted by just CS and DS
As @tamagotchi pointed out even if you have budget you are not going to have 30 CS professors teaching an intro class. It’s just a ridiculous expectation given the demand.
1 Like
Back to the topic please, folks. I’m not in the mood to hide posts. Thanks!
Edit: I’m not in the mood to hide posts, but I just did. 
3 Likes
This is a highly misleading statement, as other posters have pointed out
No evidence provided for this claim: no summary of high-enrollment classes in other majors besides the CS/EE majors, which make up less than 20% of undergrad majors. Earlier you had stated that only one class in the department that you are most familiar with exceeds 1,000 in enrollment, which is not true. I don’t know why we should trust your generalizations about other departments.
This claim does not appear to be true.
No, the vast majority of students are taking them because they are required.
The course staff are undergraduates who are paid less than graduate TAs would be. What sort of training has this “cream of the crop” had other than having taken the course themselves previously?how much at each compensated per semester? How does their relative lack of expertise in the subject field compare to the grad TAs at other colleges and universities that do not use this Cal model?
2 Likes
Northeastern does $75 charge for most applications, with occasional fee waivers.
Anyone could use the code MaximizeNU2023 last year and not pay the fee.
8 Likes
I’d suggest in general, the “rankings” of top PhD programs in any field are usually pretty stable, and changes are driven by specific events. So-and-so moved from University X to University Y, that helps Y’s department, hurts X. Except then X steals another so-and-so from Z, and the “rankings” basically don’t change much anyway.
That said, I am not sure published rankings play a huge role in PhD program selection in the US. Like, usually you are going to be getting pretty specific guidance from your college professors, right down to your specific subfield interests. Like, who cares how they “rank”, X is a good department generally and a top department for subfield 7, Y is also good generally but not particularly in 7. And you are interested in 7, so your professor explains to you X is a better choice for you given your interests. In that sense, the published rankings are usually not specific enough.
But might it matter more to non-US students looking at US PhD programs? From what I know, probably not for at least Canadian and UK students, because again my impression is they get similar sorts of detailed subfield guidance from their professors, because those professors know about and indeed regularly interact with US departments in their field.
But I guess in some fields, in some countries, maybe these rankings matter? I admit I wouldn’t know.
Reminder that CC is supposed to be welcoming and friendly, and not a debate society. Take it to PM if you find yourself going back and forth with one other poster, or just move on.
1 Like
This is an interesting question. Not willing to pay money to USNWR for a deep dive, but since Hillsdale doesn’t accept federal $, wouldn’t that mean that they have no data for all of the Pell categories? would that then mean that USNWR came up with a special calculation just for them? I would think that their reputational score among peers would not be terribly strong…
2 Likes
I think you and others who continue to pose this question in various guises are missing the point. I am not an administrator of higher education, so it is not “on me” to make this determination 
I am however a consumer of higher education, so it’s “on me” to make my choices based on, among other things, how school administrators answer this question. And 10/10 times I’ll choose the schools which find a way to meet demand from the student body with sufficient staffing of full profs to ensure small(ish) classes taught by same.
I also take issue with the way the threshold judged to be a “small” class magically got moved to 50 by some commenters here, from the original “under 20” in prior rankings, and the 30 posited as the section size taught by TAs in groups broken out from the 1000 person class.
IMO for class size there’s a difference between 20, 30, 40, 50. Somewhere in there the shape of the quality curve bends meaningfully in the wrong direction. And it’s closer to 20 than it is to 50 IMO.
To me class size is an important metric, and one which matters. A lot. And I’d argue that it’s not just for higher level courses. I’d hate to not pursue a major in XYZ because of a meh experience in an intro course of 1000 kids with a largely inaccessible prof, “taught” to me mostly by an under motivated TA who is there by virtue of funding requirements.
Yes class size can and has been gamed in the past, and so I appreciated the idea floated upthread as to how to measure and include (rank) it, but in a way that discourages gaming.
So we circle back to different strokes for different folks. And that’s fine.
6 Likes
If class size is a matter of different strokes for different folks, maybe it is indeed appropriate to leave out of the general rankings, then?
It would be nice if the rankings had checkbox / slider options, though, for those who put high priority on something specific, like small class size. (It’s of little importance to S23, but I anticipate that this is going to be an important factor for D26 when the time comes…)
I had an economist friend who conducted a study in intro microeconomics courses she taught over several semesters. Some she taught in smaller courses of 30, and some she taught in larger courses of 100-120. Same material. Same lectures. Tracked student performance, entry/exit surveys, etc. She found that the performance by the students was statistically the same whether they were in large or small classes. But the students’ perception of their enjoyment of economics was massively different, with students in smaller sections reporting more enjoyment with the course and material. Her department now only teaches smaller sections.
It occurs to me that if you goal is to move externally motivated students through material, sure the large lectures can work. But if your goal is, for example, to diversify a field by attracting in underrepresented populations (whether women, URM, firtst gens, etc.), then small courses might be better.
11 Likes
That is incredibly interesting. And maybe it explains why small section sizes are less important to some kids who are already positive about their major and/or focused on a certain preprofessional fields.
I enjoyed small seminar style courses as a student and tended to tune out in larger lectures. It didn’t necessarily make me do poorly in the giant classes, but it did mean that I enjoyed them less and that ultimately I had to work a lot harder to learn the material since I had difficulty paying attention in lectures. So I was essentially not really digesting a lot of the content during lecture and then learning it through sections, office hours, and grinding out problem-sets. To my surprise (and hers), my D22 has liked her very large lectures, and she has loved that they are recorded (probably because she considers it license to sleep in some mornings 
).
4 Likes
I don’t think that’s the reason they removed class size. USNWR says one of the reasons they removed class size was “to rely on data universally reported by schools or obtainable from third-party sources.” I think this means they are reacting to the Columbia debacle, with Columbia being caught lying about their class size and other metrics. Columbia said 83% of classes were <20, and the professor who manually analyzed found ~65% of classes were <20.
USNWR can’t externally verify class size from IPEDS database, CollegeScorecard database, or similar; so they have to rely to colleges being accurate in their self reporting. Even when truthful, class size is one of the more easily gameable metrics Colleges may choose to include or exclude certain types of classes from their calculation. Some colleges cap class sizes at numbers like 19 or 29, that are one below the USNWR threshold.
2 Likes
Well I mean the primary focus of this thread has been the changed parameters/formula and resulting changes in rankings. So, no, I don’t think it should be left out of the rankings. There are however plenty of inputs to the formula I think are completely irrelevant. (And to be clear, all that is separate from the fact that I think these rankings are useless and ludicrous in general).
Nice point. Frankly I think all benefit from that environment, but very much agreed that it’s especially helpful in the way you describe.
2 Likes
Always disappointing when decisions are made based upon the poor form of cheaters. It would be better to let the small number of cheaters cheat, and offer the consumer something of value.
5 Likes
I’m all for smaller course, but do you have any research that indicates that underrepresented populations do better in small courses?
1 Like
Nope. Haven’t looked for that - could be out there? - but my assumption was that if smaller classes yielded greater enjoyment for material, as found by my friend, it would be more likely to attract any students in the course to take further courses in the field, whether they were UR populations for that field or not, as opposed to large courses, for which the experience might lead “on-the-fence” students to decide to do something else.
And note that my friend did not find a performance difference b/w large and small courses. She found an “enjoyment” difference.