We just finished the typical reach heavy Ivy/LAC New England college tour. One thing that I wish I could get more information on what the actual class sizes are. Some schools said “our largest class is 70 but our average class size is 11” but then I would talk to students and they would say most of their classes had 30 people in them. Other larger universities would say only the intro classes are big, but then what do they mean by big and small?
How do we find this information, I couldn’t find it in the Common Data Set? Is this something he should just wait to figure out post acceptances? Am I thinking about this the wrong way?
I would be most likely to trust the opinions of the students. Colleges are going to skew statistics to make their school look good - students don’t really have an incentive to do that.
However it could fluxuate between majors, so it’d be useless to ask an engineering major when your kid is interested in political science. But as long as you ask a student in a similar major, I think that answer will be more accurate than cherry-picked statistics.
Here is an example of why average class size is misleading:
Suppose a college has 100 students, each of whom takes two classes. All 100 are in one 100-student class, but there are 5 each in 20 other classes of 5 students each. So the average class size is (100 + 20 * 5) / 21 = 9.5. But each student sees an average of (100 + 5) / 2 = 52.5.
That is because the bigger class, while it counts only once when calculating average class size, counts many more times from a student viewpoint because it has more students in it.
If the college has its schedule of classes on the web, and it shows the number of spaces in the class and the number of students enrolled, that can show you how big the classes really are. In some cases, the number of discussions or labs associated with the lecture can give you a hint about the class size when it is not shown on the schedule of classes.
Frosh/soph level courses taken by students in many majors, undecided students, or pre-meds (e.g. introductory biology, chemistry, economics, psychology, political science, math) tend to be among the larger classes at most schools.
Undergraduate class size data is listed in the Common Data Set under section I. However, ucbalumnus correctly points out the flaw with using the numbers to predict a student’s likely experience.
Agree with the posts above. Average class size can be very misleading. I attended an Ivy which boasted a 8:1 ratio at the time. Many of my first year lectures had some 150 students and one science class had almost 500 students.
To find the real story behind class size one needs to check out the classrooms on campus. Those with a lot of small classrooms and only a handful of lecture halls (LACs) will have smaller classes. Those with large classrooms and a large number of lecture halls will tend to have larger class sizes. Also you may want double check the school’s webadvisor or online course registration page. You can check out a lot of the lower and upper level courses and the number of available and filled seats. This will tell you a lot about the actual class sizes you will encounter at a particular school.
My son attended a school with a 13:1 ratio and had no class larger than 35 students with an average of 16-17 per class. My daughter attends a school with a similar ratio and had several lectures with 150 students and most classes averaging 50 students her first year. Both love their schools, so every student is different. Some need a more intimate classroom experience while others thrive in a large lecture.
Good luck with your college search.
Just asking random students may be helpful, but it’s not a very practical way to compare class sizes across schools.
Individual numbers may be misleading; the way to avoid that problem is not to stop looking at numbers, but to look at more (and better) numbers, starting with aggregate distributions and drilling down to the courses you care about most. If you consider consistently small classes a high priority, the best way to get that is to focus on LACs.
I looked at the physical classrooms and lecture halls. If I saw that every building had at last one lecture hall that seated 75 100, or more students, then students may have to take large classes at some point. If the college had only one lecture hall on the entire campus, then chances are the students had mostly small class.sizes.
The other place to look is the course catalog. They show maximum enrollment numbers.
You can also look at the numbers: what percentage classes have 20 students or fewer (= small classes)? What percentage classes have 40 students or more (= large classes)? Are there classes with 100+ students?
In my opinion, a majority of classes 20 and fewer is a good indication.
If you can check the schedule of courses, check out Economics, Biology, and Psychology: those are often the largest classes, and seeing how many students are enrolled in the lecture (or how many labs/discussion sections there are) is another big clue as to what your experience as a freshman will be.
As for Honors Colleges, the book associated with this website is pretty good at explaining average test scores and special features, so that you can compare those which are “the real deal” and those that are just sprinkles on top of the flagship. http://publicuniversityhonors.com/
Yes, “average class sizes” generally are expressed as distributions.
The US News entries express it in 3 pie slices (< 20, 10-49, >= 50).
The CDS provides a little more detail (7 ranges with the number of sections & sub-sections in each).
Even class size distribution is useless. Unless they are compared by department and level, class size comparison is nothing but the gimmick that it is. The way the US News, and CDS, compile the data is not very telling.
Alexandre, what measurements (if any) do you think ARE useful in comparing colleges?
Suppose that for College X, 2% of classes have 50 or more students, and for College Y 20% of classes have 50 or more students (differences that are fairly typical for LACs v. respected state flagships). Is this a meaningless difference? Assuming you care about class sizes at all, that is. Would an even bigger spread be meaningless?
Of course it might be best to laboriously go through the online course listings to find the enrollments for just the classes that matter most to you (say, pre-med classes). However, it is not very practical to do that for scores of colleges when you are trying to build an initial application list. I think it is reasonable (for purposes of that initial list-building) to assume that at College X in this example, pre-med classes are likely to be significantly larger than at College Y. Can anyone here show us some data that indicates that might NOT be true? Give a few examples of school pairs where College X (~2% of classes >= 50) actually have pre-med (or other high-interest, foundation courses) that are just as big as College Y (~20% of classes >= 50).
I’m assuming of course that most of the published numbers are reasonably accurate.
If we’re going to assume that many, many colleges are cooking their books, all bets are off.
I’ve gone through a few similar exercises, by the way, and posted what I found.
Some of the Ivies and other highly selective private schools with impressive class size averages (the ones presented in their CDS or US News entries) do in fact have some pretty large lecture classes for popular introductory/intermediate subjects (such as pre-med or econ).
@tk21769, @Alexandre is saying that you have to drill down (by major, etc.). For example, UIUC is huge, but Comp Lit and Classics classes (definitely upper-level ones) just won’t be big there, considering that the number of Classics or Comp Lit majors in each class is in the single digits.
Also, class size may be a bit of a fetish for some people. A 10 person seminar certainly is different from a large lecture class, but a 150 person lecture class may not be all that different from a 500 person lecture class (or even a 30 person lecture class, depending on the prof).
“I’m assuming of course that most of the published numbers are reasonably accurate.
If we’re going to assume that many, many colleges are cooking their books, all bets are off.”
Considering the very original, creative and self-serving way most private universities calculate their student to faculty ratios, I tend to agree…all bets are off!
Seriously, PurpleTitan’s post above summed it up nicely.
Furthermore, I do not believe such basic statistics as classes under 20 and over 50 are telling…not when comparing universities with dozens, if not hundreds of departments, offering thousands of classes taught by hundreds, if not thousands of professors.
As for many universities “cooking their books”, I think the student to faculty calculations reported by private universities (omitting thousands of graduate students altogether in most instances) proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is difficult to compare universities without significantly analyzing the data. Let us leave it at that.
