So uh... University of Michigan

College Search & Selection
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<p>If anyone bothered to read the article, here is a quote from then Provost Sullivan about the growth of lecturers at Michigan:</p>

<p>"Additionally, Sullivan noted that though there have been increases in the number of lecturers and professors, the largest spike has been in the number of clinical faculty. </p>

<p>“The big increase is the clinical faculty. That’s gone from 506 (in 2000) to 1,265 (in 2009),” Sullivan said. “That’s a 250-percent increase. So that’s where our real growth is occurring.”</p>

<p>The majority of clinical faculty members teach in the Medical School but a handful teach in the Law School and in the School of Nursing. </p>

<p>Sullivan said there has been an increase in the clinical staff because there has been an increase in the amount of patients at University hospitals."</p>

<p>As you can see, this bulk of this growth has little to do with quality of the undergraduate experience at Michigan. Btw, Provost Sullivan is now the the president of The University of Virginia.</p>

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<p>MidwestMom2Kids, I am not sure I agree. I only had one lecturer at Michigan (Janet Gerson) and she taught Intro Macroeconomics. She held regular and frequent office hours, taught exclusively at the University of Michigan, was very involved with undergrads and has been at the University since she received her PhD back in early 1980s. I am not saying she is the typical lecturer, but at a university such as Michigan, you will see many such lecturers. </p>

<p>But I will reiterate, lecturers are featured prominently at most universities, including the elite such as Michigan and Harvard.</p>

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<p>

Uh, no, of course there is a difference. My point is, USNWR has criteria of “classes below 20 students” and “classes with 50 or more students” and these cutoff points are rather arbitrary. Will you learn any better in a class that has 19 students versus 20 students? Probably not. But a school that has a class of 19 kids is rewarded under USNWR methodology, while a school with a class of 20 kids is “punished”…when there is likely very little difference.</p>

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Imagine that…a small LAC having a lecture with almost 100 kids. Even these small, highly resourced and high service LACs utilize economies of scale for certain classes.</p>

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<p>xiggi, wouldn’t you argue that using lecturers, who are more likely dedicated to teaching vs. research, is a good thing? ;)</p>

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<p>"I think that the lower a University’s dependence on lecturers, the better for an undergraduate student. "</p>

<p>I’ve been thinking for a while that it would really be useful for somebody to do a different sort of PA assessment. They should do some sort of statistically significant sample of students in particular majors at different institutions, look at who actually taught the courses they took- including the labs and recitations- during their undergrad careers, and then do an analysis of those people’s credentials. Including: internal status (lecturer, tenured full prof, etc), peer assessment of that teacher’s research, # classroom hours the teacher had taught prior to entering that student’s class, maybe teaching evaluations, etc.</p>

<p>It could well be that the relative PA scores of the people these undergrad students actually come in contact with are completely different than the PA scores measured mostly by research productivity across all listed faculty.</p>

<p>Such an analysis would disclose who is using migrant lecturers the most, including adjuncts and visiting profs, where TAs are doing more actual teaching vs.mostly just recitation sections, etc. It would be interesting to see, I think.</p>

<p>I think some differences may show up with LACs as well. It seemed to me that D1s LAC cycled in many newly minted PhDs and visiting profs, while at D2s LAC she had lecturers and adjunct faculty for some of her classes.</p>

<p>I think this is one of the many areas where US News falls short, and institutions are taking advantage because nobody is monitoring so they can get away with it. The people actually teaching undergraduates are not always completely identical to the people listed on the department website, who are subject of the PA responses.</p>

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<p>onecircuit, at the intro level, classes will be typically quite large. Whether we are talking 100-300 students at private elites such as Princeton and Columbia or 200-400 students at public elites such as UCSD or Wisconsin, the classes are not going to be intimate and undergrads are not going to be given the “personal attention” that so many believe are offered at private universities but not at public universities.</p>

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<p>Regarding class sizes:
To me, there are classes that are, and ought to be discussion-based, and classes where you are sitting there just listening to a lecture.</p>

<p>The classes that should be discussion based need to be small enough for this to happen, Whether it is 30 or less, or 20 or less, depending on the class, I don’t know where the cutoff should be, but it should be appropriate. </p>

<p>On the other hand, when you are just sitting there and the guy is lecturing, it really doesn’t matter that much whether there are 94 or 300 other students also sitting there in the lecture too. What matters much more is how good the lecturer is. Actually, in this type of class, interruptions for particular students’ potentially stupid questions can be annoying, to me.</p>

<p>The classes I’ve been in with above 40 students have pretty much all been lecture-type classes, from what I recall, they could have had 100 there just as well.</p>

<p>IMO, ideally what one should best look at are the sizes of upper level courses that should be relatively small for discussion, to see whether they in fact are, or are not,of appropriate size.
And not get that hung up on whether an intro survey course has 100 students, or 400.</p>

<p>IMO a potentially negative situation is when LAC classes get very large, because those profs are not assisted by graduate student TAs. I recall D1 had one such class, where the prof. gave what I thought was shockingly little work, no papers just a couple exams, in my opinion because she would have had to grade it all personally.</p>

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<p>Yes, I would agree with having as many qualified instructors who are dedicated to teaching. The caveat is what defines “qualified” instructors and lecturers seem to fit that category as opposed to the peer “instructors.” However, isn’t the motto on CC that GSI, TAs, or whatvever fancy term they carry are NOT teaching anyone, since all they do lead lectures, grade papers, establish the curriculum, and other mundane activities. Back at you with a ;). </p>

<p>Regarding my earlier post, I provided the link because I had a hard time reconciling Warblers’ numbers:</p>

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<p>I am not sure what “Michigan graduate-only faculty: 348” means. Does this intimate that 15,000 or so graduate students are taught by about 350 FT faculty? Also, I read somewhere that the total faculty at Michigan is around 6,000. </p>

<p>Not that it matters very much because we all know that the numbers on students/faculty are one of those fluid lines. Aren’t there stories of schools listing 90 years-old professors who have not been on campus for years as faculty? Or was that only for those NAS rankings. As far as I know, a school could have a very low ratio and not be that great for student/faculty contacts.</p>

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<p>The 6,000 figure includes Medical school faculty. </p>

<p>Most of the 2,487 FT faculty teach graduate students, but of those, 348 teach in graduate-only programs, such as Law and Pharmacy.</p>

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<p>I am still confused … excluding the medical instructors, how large is the factulty that is teaching the 15,000+ graduate students? Can it be 348 only? </p>

<p>Or does it mean that the 2,139 teach BOTH the graduate students and the UG students on a full-time basis --meaning that the 2,487 FT faculty are teaching more than 40,000 students?</p>

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<p>

I think that’s your motto, xiggi. GSIs and TAs lead discussion, lab and recitation sections. I would say university lecturer = LAC professor.</p>

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<p>^^ Yep, leading lectures was a lapsus linguae. They lead discussion sections. Now, did you remove grading by omission or design? Are you saying that only professors do the grading? </p>

<p>As far as tenured professors vs lecturers, if it’s important for you to make that distinction, so be it. Considering the positive contributions to STUDENTS of tenure from K-12 through college, perhaps a world with fewer tenured educators should be a good thing. That and a lot fewer untrained and unqualified assistants!</p>

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<p>“Are you saying that only professors do the grading?”</p>

<p>Are you saying that only professors do grading at LACs? Because there are some people who have posted otherwise on CC. In fact, they said there were courses where mere undergrads served as TAs there and did grading.</p>

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<p>If the lecturer is only a lecturer at your school and not flitting from school to school to try to put together a full-time salary, the impact is not as bad.</p>

<p>If the lecturer owns a home near the city where your college is, the lecturer is more likely to be around for more than the one semester you have him or her.</p>

<p>The lecturer has no time, zero, allocated for his or her research, no paid time to keep up on topics in his or her field. I sure can’t see this as an advantage. There are new developments in every field.</p>

<p>I am not at all saying that the lecturers aren’t great teachers, but I would advise both of the two kids to try to avoid sections taught by lecturers whenever possible.</p>

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<p>

By design, because I agree that some GSIs are heavily involved in grading, but with the caveat that it depends on the class.</p>

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<p>“Or does it mean that the 2,139 teach BOTH the graduate students and the UG students on a full-time basis --meaning that the 2,487 FT faculty are teaching more than 40,000 students?”</p>

<p>Xiggy, 2,139 faculty instruct students in departments and programs that have undergraduate and graduate student. There are roughly 33,000 undergraduate and graduate students who belong to that group, hence the 15:1 student to faculty ratio reported by the University of Michigan. It is important to remember that many of those (roughly 3,000 or so) are in their final 3 years of their PhD programs, no longer thaking classes but rather, assisting faculty with research and with discussion groups.</p>

<p>There are roughly 6,500 graduate students in programs and departments that do not offer undergraduate degrees (such as Law). Those students are taught exclusively by 348 faculty.</p>

<p>Finally, the 1,000 or so Medical students are taught by the 3,000+ medical school faculty and researchers.</p>