Agreed. I have people in my neighborhood who have gone to rank number 1 and rank number 100. The houses are valued comparatively. Incomes I would imagine are relatively in similar range though obviously you can never know. One of the most successful people I know went to Rutgers. My own school was a nothing school when I went back in the day and is now fairly reputable. No one cares at this point.
I expect that these effects might vary by subject. For example, foreign languages and freshman English are subjects where you would expect a performance difference, not just an “enjoyment” difference. Perhaps the “enjoyment” difference that your friend found would also be more or less marked, depending on the subject taught.
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However, in practice, colleges often have budgetary constraints that limit the number of tenure track faculty they can hire, so that (for example) the math department does not have enough tenure track faculty to teach 20 small classes of calculus for business majors (and numerous small classes of other service courses with large enrollment) and also all of the upper level courses it wants to offer to math majors.
However, is there a meaningful difference between 19 and 20, or 29 and 30? Some colleges were gaming the class size part of the USNWR ranking by capping class sizes at numbers ending in 9, because the brackets were 19-, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, and 50+, and setting up small lab and discussion sections associated with a large lecture as separate classes so that they can count as “small classes”.
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Perhaps the department could offer two versions of lower level courses, one for non-majors or other department majors that require the course which is done “efficiently” in a large lecture format, and other version for declared or prospective majors held in small classes with more in-depth and harder material covered.
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The Princeton Review chooses this method, such as in this example:
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One of my kids’ schools does this. The lecture sections of the courses required for students in the major are smaller though that’s in part because they are taught at a higher level so non-majors tend to avoid them. The courses designed as support courses for other majors or as general electives have much larger lecture sections. The tutorial and lab sections however all tend to be the same size for both, being considerably smaller.
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Why stop there? By the time everyone has eliminated all the factors and weighting that doesn’t favor their world view, you’ll have nothing left with which to rank. Maybe that’s the point.
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Yep ,and I find the Princeton student reviews useful. But even there, almost no students have any standard for comparison when they rate their schools - it’s like being a movie critic who has only ever seen one movie in her life.
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In the Princeton Review’s favor, it attempts to enhance the reliability of its student surveys by using techniques from modern social science, such as indirect questioning. In the case of classroom experience, this has produced reasonably consistent results since the first time I posted on this in 2020 (Reed Ranks First in 'Classroom Experience' by Princeton Review Survey). Reed, most notably, placed at the top then as well.
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This is true - and I suspect that the Reed classroom experience is phenomenal! And this sets the P.R. a few steps above “Niche,” in my mind. But even with indirect questioning and so on, I think that there is a strong “boosterish” element to the Princeton R. → measuring, for example, how happy students are with their school, rather than the absolute quality (though we should never discount the importance of being happy!).
Or, for example, students who are used to truly excellent cuisine in their homes might find a campus dining hall to be mediocre, while students who are used to whatever harried parents can put together in a hurry (thinking my home) might find that same dining hall excellent. The quality of the dining hall didn’t change, but the students judging it did.
So with classroom experience - students who go to an elite private high school might find lab facilities, or discussion sections, or the library, of their college to be “acceptable,” while a student from a typical public high school might find those same things to be “excellent.” And so on.
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As I said in the comment from which you quoted me:
- Not my problem to solve
- Upthread a viable structure was proposed that would enable us to compare (and rank by) class size, in a manner that makes gaming pretty much nonviable. The specifics matter less than that it’s possible.
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Holy smokes, 24 of the top 25 are LACs.
The lone university is a fairly selective private school, Emory.
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It is well apparent their rankings do not correspond to acceptance rates.
And a related category with a similar mix:
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Apropos Bowdoin being #2 on the accessible professor list, they have an interesting policy (which I doubt is the main contributor to this status but certainly doesn’t hurt). By default, the faculty are not provided free access to the campus dining halls – they have to pay for meals. But any faculty member who comes as a guest of a student eats free. They promote this fact and the idea is to encourage students to invite faculty members to eat with them and engage in conversations.
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Hopefully the food is good enough to actually be an enticement.
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Bowdoin food is said to be great! 15 years ago when my D was applying to UG, it was said they had lobster once a week. She chose another NESCAC that had food that was not so great.
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Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering (#2 on that list) is not normally considered a LAC.
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Malcolm Gladwell did a whole podcast years ago about who the food at Bowdoin is “too good” (and that it reflects them spending money on dining that should be invested into more financial aid).
This turns out to be a myth (which we heard at the time too). They do bring out the lobster for special events (including times when the families are visiting) but it was not a weekly thing.
Side story. Ironically my S23, who insists on mostly subsiding on burgers, actually considered the Bowdoin food a “con” whereas the place he did enroll has a nearly 24/7 on campus burger place on the meal plan. For every good thing in the world, there is someone for whom it is a bad thing…
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The upper class kids who populated Bowdoin in its early days would probably have complained about having to eat lobster even occasionally.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2009/07/31/living/lobster-history-you-may-not-know/ says that
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