The Modern Public Ivies

College Search & Selection
81

<p>To re-cap, the average class size distributions (as reported in the Common Data Sets) seem to suggest big differences between most of the Ivies and the “public Ivies”. Examples:</p>

<p>School … % < 20, % >=50 students
Columbia … 80.7%, 7.1%
Harvard … 78%, 8.1%
Penn … 71.5%, 8.6%</p>

<p>Berkeley … 64.2%,14.2%
Michigan … 48%, 16.8%
Wisconsin … 43.9%, 19.8%</p>

<p>However, when you look closely at introductory classes for popular majors (100-level, 200-level bio,chem,econ,polsci,psych) it appears that many of them (at both the public & private schools) enroll more than 100 students. I suspect this would be true for most pre-med courses at both public and private research universities.</p>

<p>At the public Ivies, big seems to get much bigger. I’ve noted lecture classes with over 1000 students at Wisconsin and many with 300 or more at Berkeley. That does not appear to happen so often at Princeton. But then, once you get beyond “mid sized” (50 or more?), the effects of this difference may be more psychological than pedagogical. The break-out sections appear to be somewhat smaller at Princeton (but I don’t know how consistent or significant this difference is across all the Ivies v. public Ivies). </p>

<p>It is hard to tease out the difference in exposure to professors v. TAs. Both the Ivies and the public Ivies use grad student TAs to lead the sections for large classes. Princeton, at least, has professors (sometimes distinguished full professors) teaching many freshman seminars. Harvard embeds senior faculty into residential life as House Masters. At these and other Ivies, I don’t think the prevailing attitude is that it’s a “waste of resources” to expose freshmen to senior faculty. But how effectively do the Ivies v. public Ivies v. LACs deliver good teaching in their many small to mid-sized classes? That is quite hard to assess and document.</p>

82

<p>

Chicago grad students get no teaching experience then?</p>

83

<p>Wisconsin has NO classes over 1000 or even close. I told you that data was tricky to interpret. It only shows total students for one course number. That class might have 2 or more separate sections. You have to go to the timetable for that term to see how many sections they had. Largest lecture hall at UW holds under 600. Now Cornell does have some that (1000) large.</p>

84

<p>And as to the “purity” of SAT scores–it is bad and getting worse all the time.</p>

<p>[Inequality</a> among students rises - Business - The Boston Globe](<a href=“Wealth gap limits equality of education - The Boston Globe”>Wealth gap limits equality of education - The Boston Globe)</p>

85

<p>^^^ Students in pre-med tracks, economics, or psychology may have had more exposure to TAs than I had when I was at Chicago; students in those (and other) programs may be getting more today. I really don’t know. </p>

<p>But look at the numbers I cited in post #62. Those introductory science and social science courses all have enrollments of under 50 students. In the Autumn 2012 Biology listings, only 3 undergraduate courses have enrollments of (barely) over 100 students. For example, BIOS/20186 (Fundamentals of Cell and Molecular Biology) has a lecture with 107 students (3 50-min periods/week). There also are 5 lab sections (each meeting 230 min/week) with 17-24 students. The same 3 instructors are listed for the lecture and lab sections. Gayle Lamppa and Akira Imamoto are Associate Professors; Tom Christianson is a Sr. Lecturer. There may well be TAs helping in some capacity with that many hours of class time.</p>

86

<p>Once you get much beyond 40-50 in a class a lecture is a lecture and it hardly matters if there are 75 or 450 students there. And now you have online classes which some see as educationally effective as live classes.</p>

87

<p>Re: University of Chicago</p>

<p>[University</a> of Chicago Time Schedules](<a href=“University of Chicago Time Schedules”>University of Chicago Time Schedules) for spring 2013 shows:</p>

<p>BIOS 20151: 72/- and 105/- with 13-20/- labs (quantitative biology basic)
BIOS 20152: 42/54 with 13-16/18 labs (quantitative biology advanced)
CHEM 11300: 154/286 and 141/174 with 10-15/16 labs (general chemistry 3)
CHEM 12300: 44/60 with 7-14/14 labs (honors general chemistry 3)
ECON 19800: 150/- (intro microeconomics)
PSYC 20400: 128/130 (cognitive psychology)</p>

<p>POLS (political science) at Chicago does not seem to have a specified set of “core” courses for the major, so there are no courses that are either large or have many sections in that department.</p>

88

<p>

</p>

<p>Chicago’s Core social science courses generally are not “political science” or “sociology” or “anthropology” courses. They are interdisciplinary courses such as “Self, Culture, and Society”, which might cover readings from Adam Smith, Rousseau, Marx, Max Weber, Durkheim, etc.</p>

<p>The Autumn 2012 Time Schedule shows:
SOSC / 12100 (Self, Culture And Society-1) with multiple sections of 8-19 students (all discussion classes, no lecture). Many listed instructors are “Collegiate Fellows”, typically Assistant Professors who earned their PhDs in the past several years ([Collegiate</a> Fellows | Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts | The University of Chicago](<a href=“Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts”>Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts))</p>

<p>[University</a> of Chicago Time Schedules](<a href=“http://timeschedules.uchicago.edu/view.php?dept=SOSC&term=452]University”>University of Chicago Time Schedules)</p>

<p>There are Political Science courses too, of course. A few of them (such as Intro to International Relations) enroll over 100 students.</p>

89

<p>

</p>

<p>By “core”, I meant core for the major, not the University of Chicago Core. For example, a political science department may have a major “core” of American politics, comparative politics, political theory, international relations, and quantitative methods courses that everyone in the major has to take (or take at least some of). If that is the case, then these courses will either be large, or have numerous smaller sections. This is analogous to biology and chemistry majors requiring general chemistry as part of their majors’ “core”.</p>

<p>University of Chicago’s political science major appears to be organized differently.</p>

90

<p>UC certainly has detailed policies for TAs that sound like those for TAs everywhere.</p>

<p><a href=“http://chemistry.uchicago.edu/content/uploads/filesTAguide.pdf[/url]”>http://chemistry.uchicago.edu/content/uploads/filesTAguide.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>[Current</a> Students | Division of the Humanities](<a href=“Students | Division of the Humanities”>Students | Division of the Humanities)</p>

91

<p>This thread will get nothing accomplished. There isn’t, and never will be, a fair way to determine this, or any other rankings for that matter. For every reason X school should be higher, there is Y reason why it shouldn’t or another school should be.</p>

92

<p>

</p>

<p>A person’s thinking about, discussing, and writing about important and difficult ideas is in no way limited by the size of a classroom.</p>

<p>I think you’re putting to much emphasis on the professor-student interaction as a part of the college experience. In college, you’re exposed to new ideas that may be too politically questionable to discuss in a K-12 setting (e.g. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.) A big part of college is being exposed to new ideas that were previously unknown to you (e.g. difference between sex and gender) and important people you’d never previously heard of (e.g. Gottlob Frege.) </p>

<p>It’s also about meeting and interacting with people who may be a different race than you, richer/poorer than you, and come from a different part of the world than you. all of these factors help shape their beliefs about the world, and thereby diversifies your collegial experience in discussions with them both in and outside of the classroom.</p>

<p>I don’t think large class sizes really hinder discussion. I’d imagine that in most classrooms, there’s a set of students who want to discuss a topic, and a set of students that don’t. Perhaps Chicago attracts more of the former, but i doubt that’s the case for most other universities. If a student doesn’t want to speak, then his education is enhanced by those that do. A student may be too afraid to ask a question in front of other people, and so another student asking the same question he was wondering helps that student and enriches his education.</p>

<p>Ultimately the best university for a student is the one that meets his particular needs. And perhaps those needs are small classrooms with lots of discussion. I’m not going to try to claim that there weren’t students who complained about their experience at UCLA. I’ve heard complaints about both a lack of personal interaction, and difficulty getting desired classes. But just because a university isn’t perfect for you, that doesn’t prevent you from thriving at the university. Many people finish their time at UCLA and go on to have fruitful careers, just like a number of other universities.</p>

<p>What i will say is a point in your favor is feedback. In my experience, TAs generally provided poor feedback to students in their papers and students just had to keep writing until they became better writers. But students could always go to TAs office hours or make appointments to discuss their papers (many of us did this.) And professors could always be talked to at office hours, after class, or also by appointments.</p>

<p>Lastly, TK, I think you’re overemphasizing the amount of importance of small class sizes to the student body. When I was majoring in philosophy, about half of the major was filled with pre-law students who simply wanted to learn how to write analytically and think logically so that they could get a high score on the LSAT and from there get into top-ranked law schools. And for people, like myself, who were genuinely interested in the subject matter, large class sizes were outweighed by access to top scholars. (UCLA was ranked 7-11 in my time there.) Would i have been better served by a school like Harvard which would have provided me both? certainly. But i don’t think i was hindered by my time at UCLA, and i certainly don’t regret my time there.</p>

93

<p>I understand that class size isn’t (and shouldn’t be) equally important to everyone. However, many people (rightly or wrongly) do consider this an important factor in choosing a college. When people ask whether it’s worth it to pay a big price premium for an Ivy if the alternative is a “public Ivy”, what are they concerned about? The biggest concern after cost no doubt is career outcomes (or prestige, as it relates to employment). The “big classes” issue probably follows fairly closely behind for many students and parents. Students admitted to both an Ivy and a public Ivy more often choose to attend the Ivy (presumably, in most cases, despite higher cost). So it’s worth decomposing the perceived differences to see if they have a rational basis.</p>

<p>Actually, what I take away from this discussion (and my own searches) is that average class size probably should NOT matter very much in this choice. The typical pre-med or econ major is going to sit through some pretty large classes whether at an Ivy or at a public Ivy. At either one, smaller sections taught by TAs will complement big lectures taught by professors. Whether the lectures have 150 or 450 students, they’re still lectures. </p>

<p>This is one reason I tend to prefer LACs, especially for students who say they are very interested in getting a doctorate. Based on my own arithmetic against NSF and CDS data (“trust but verify” :)), a biology/life science major at Carleton, Reed, or Swarthmore is about 3x-4x more likely to complete a doctorate in bio/ls as a biology/ls major at Berkeley or Michigan. The delta between those LACs and the Ivies is a little smaller. I suspect (can’t prove) that this is partly attributable to a higher level of student-faculty engagement at LACs, which leaves many students more motivated and prepared for creative academic work. Whether that’s really true or not, I just happen to prefer a smaller comunity.</p>

<p>However, if you’re a prospective computer science, engineering, or business major, or pre-med … or if private school would leave you in major debt … I think the first school almost any good student should be looking at is the in-state flagship (especially if your state has one of the “public Ivies”.)</p>