<p>Interesteddad, in one of his Swat threads, compares Brown's class sizes with those of LAC's. Do those of you with kids at Brown, or other knowledge of Brown, think the class sizes are off-putting? I think my son, whose graduating class is about 42, would like the experience of near-anonymity at some point, but I wonder if most of the classes really are too large to allow for student-faculty contact. Thanks for your thoughts!</p>
<p>Here are some stats I collected by going to the college websites rather than USN &WR.</p>
<p>Swarthmore: 1500 students, 163 faculty (1:9)
Williams: 2000 students, 286 faculty (1:7)
Harvard: 6,562 undergraduates, 3,638 in GSAS, 672 faculty (1:14) .
Brown: 5,701 undergraduates, 1,568 graduates, 510 faculty (1:14)</p>
<p>For Brown, I am subtrating 118 faculty in life/medical science and not including med school students. The faculty: student ratio (1:14) seems comparable to that at Harvard. What may make a difference is that at Harvard, students have to satisfy CORE requirements, leading to large enrolments in some courses (eg. Ec10) whereas Brown does not have distribution requirements. However, at Yale, which has distribution requirements but no mandated courses, some are still large (e.g. Jonathan Spence's History of China, which draws 300 students annually). By virtue of Brown's larger student body, there is more likelihood that a larger number of students will flock to popular courses than at Swarthmore.</p>
<p>Hi Marite,</p>
<p>Thank you for the informative post! I can certainly see that the reputation of certain faculty for good teaching at Brown would result in some classes being on the large side. And I have a feeling that under those circumstances, since kids really can choose their curriculum at Brown, the choices would be more tolerable: "I knew what I was getting myself into!" Thanks again.</p>
<p>I think the student faculty ratio can be a little misleading at a lot of schools especially research universities because a lot of faculty don't necessarily teach a lot of courses. Maybe better to check with the regitrars site because they often list the max number of students in a section.</p>
<p>Also small classes can be a little over-rated. I think they are important when you have technical subjects that need explanation and concepts can be tough to grasp but popular courses like the History of China can seem pretty intimate when the professor knows his stuff and is a good lecturer. Plus there's always office hours.</p>
<p>The other problem with small classes is that popular sections can get closed out in a hurry and the same course taught by two different profs can be worlds different.</p>
<p>My experience at Brown was that it really depended on the class. You could choose large or small classes. (BTW some of the large ones were really excellent and some of the small ones were only so so.)</p>
<p>Most LACs with even smaller ratios will still have 100-200 kids in big survey or gateway courses like Psych 101.</p>
<p>If you want more intimate class sizes at Brown, do an honors concentration-- you can take Honors Seminars in your department, virtually all with <20 kids in them.</p>
<p>Upper division courses in general tend to be quite small. Used to be that a 4 or 5 in an AP would qualify as the "gateway" class in a discipline and place you into upper division in that subject.</p>
<p>A couple of the best profs' classes were large-ish-- yet they managed to teach so well that they felt very exciting & even intimate.</p>
<p>I totally agree that large classes in and of themselves are not bad. My S has audited or taken some large classes already and some have been truly excellent. He's also taken a smaller class taught by a first-year prof whose inexperience was made up by her enthusiasm.
The nice thing about Brown is that students choose the classes they take. It makes them enthusiastic for the classes they are in. My S was impressed by how happy the students were when he visited. The downside of the lack of requirements is that ill-advised students can flounder among so many choices.</p>