<p>Hopefully this will debunk the stereotype that Harvard and Columbia are big schools where undergrads get lost on campus and all professors use megaphones in massive auditoriums to conduct lectures.</p>
<p>10</a> Universities With the Smallest Classes - US News and World Report</p>
<p>NOVA SE University has over 12,000 undergraduate students. USNWR has them reported at under 6,000. So much for the accuracy of this report. Honestly, does the USNWR check out carefully any stats that private schools like to throw out?</p>
<p>
Citation, please. [url=<a href=“http://www.nova.edu/admissions/nsufactoids.html]Nova[/url”>http://www.nova.edu/admissions/nsufactoids.html]Nova[/url</a>] reports 5,413 undergraduates. [url=<a href=“College Navigator - Nova Southeastern University”>College Navigator - Nova Southeastern University]IPEDS[/url</a>] similarly reports 5,867 undergraduates for 2009. </p>
<p>As for the ranking of smallest classes, I would be much more interested in seeing it broken down by discipline. How many courses in political science, psychology, economics, or biology have fewer than 10 or 20 students?</p>
<p>Overall percentages are unimpressive. When you have upwards of 15% of undergraduates crammed into a single department like economics, course enrollments can be quite high while nevertheless making up only a small percentage of all courses – departments like, say, folklore and Celtic Studies balance it out. At Yale, for example, a mere 7 departments account for over half of all students.</p>
<p>except that you have three stereotypes rolled into one sentence, SmartGuy. The first two is true, depending on your definition of “big” and whether it includes grad students (particularly for Columbia which has 2x as many grads as undergrads). The second can be true. But, quite frankly, I’ve never heard the third. Harvard is known to be so frinkin’ rich that is will not cancel any class as long as ONE student shows up. Get a few of those one-student ‘courses’ and the mean drops quite fast.</p>
<p>Harvard and Columbia are:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>big schools</p></li>
<li><p>where undergrads get lost on campus and, </p></li>
<li><p>all professors use megaphones in massive auditoriums to conduct lectures.</p></li>
</ul>
<br>
<br>
<p>If Harvard undergrads are getting “lost” on campus it’s mostly because the central campus is being overrun by tourists and admissions tour groups, not by grad students. Many of the grad students spend most of their time off in more remote parts of campus or other parts of town. The Business School is over on the other side of the river. The Law School is located over on one side of the main campus. The medical and dental schools are each located off in other parts of town - miles away from the main campus. Same for many of the grad students getting masters or PhDs in the various biomedical disciplines. Often they are located across town in one of Harvard’s several big teaching and research hospitals.</p>
<p>Here ya go warblersrule86:</p>
<p>[Nova</a> Southeastern University - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Southeastern_University]Nova”>Nova Southeastern University - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Nova has multiple locations throughout the Ft. Lauderdale area. I assume these numbers are based on the one campus in Davie.</p>
<p>“At Yale, for example, a mere 7 departments account for over half of all students.”</p>
<p>That’s true, but that’s by choice. For a very focused student who cares about small classes, there are related majors that allow the student to study the same material in a more graduate-school-like environment. Some examples from Harvard include Social Studies instead of Government, Applied Math instead of Economics, History & Literature rather than English, Neurobiology rather than Psychology, etc.</p>
<p>Majoring in Sanskrit works, too, but you don’t have to abandon your field of interest in order to choose a smaller department.</p>
<p>The bigger point to be made about why overall percentages are useless is that it tells you nothing about what a given student’s actual class sizes will be like over 4 years, even accounting for the departmental variation in class sizes. That’s because larger classes affect a large number of students, and of course smaller classes affect a small number of students, so you need more of the latter to give students a significant number of small classes. Sure, a university can boast that it has 75% small classes, but when it offers several thousand of them, that means 25% of them aren’t small, and those classes are the ones that affect the most students. The larger the student body, the higher the number of total classes; the higher the *number *of classes that are large, the higher the proportion of large classes in a given student’s 4-year curriculum. In many cases, 75% of <20 classes means that the average student will have only 20% of their classes that are small, and 40% that are huge (depending on the actual numbers of large/small classes and the average # courses taken per student per term).</p>
<p>Of course variation by department factors in regardless, but even percentages there still tell you very little. It’s one of those times where absolute numbers (i.e. # of small/large classes) are far more informative than proportions, though the former does require more number-crunching to interpret them.</p>
<p>Does a recitation/discussion/lab section count as a “class”?</p>
<p>Actually, I do know someone who studied Sanskrit at Harvard.
When you say, (oh, dear, USNWR again,) that 46.2 percent of classes, on average, have fewer than 20 students it doesn’t reflect a full view. What makes 20 a magic number? Many schools cap class enrollment at 21-30, still good sizes. Also, it’s the size of freshman or intro classes that is the problem. A friend quoted freshman history at 700, at the school where he teaches. Numbers usually drop as you move through your major. </p>
<p>IMO, a greater challenge than 30-40 kids in a class, to some students, is the size of dorms. Or, how long it takes to manage some administrative details- you wait in longer lines to speak with someone or wait to get a phone call returned. Btw, 6000 undergrad is small compared with 23,000 or more.</p>
<p>I agree with ^phan that more analytical info is required to see the impact. I worried more about the number of courses available in my first kid’s major- and the number of faculty specialists. </p>
<p>I do want to point out that social studies is different than government, applied math is different than economics, and so on.</p>
<p>ps. beware taking too seriously anything from USNWR, NYT, WSJ, etc. They feed on creating some frenzy. Explore the particulars at your school choices.</p>
<p>To be honest, I’ve found that when the class size goes beyond 10-15, there’s a steep drop-off in the quality/advantages that a small class can give. 20 is pushing it. Anything beyond that might as well be a class of 30, 40, 50 - doesn’t really matter. It ends up being a lecture anyway.</p>
<p>Basically, it’s a seminar or a lecture. Seminars are the “true” small classes. There are different kinds of seminars (tutorial-style, small seminar of 5ish, medium seminar of 10, large seminar of 15 - all of which offer the advantages of a small class), but lectures (anything beyond 15ish) are really all the same.</p>
<p>Now, when the classes get larger, it does become harder to interact with professors outside of class, there’s less consistency in grading among the TAs, people show up to class less, grade distributions tend to come closer to a bell curve, etc. so logistically, there are differences in lecture sizes. But when it comes to class instruction/activities, interaction with your peers, discussion, etc. seminars are the only real “small class.” Lectures are lectures, no matter the size.</p>
<p>That^ can be true. I basically agree with phan, just not on all the details. To some extent, it matters how much of the material is discussable, whether learning depends, to any extent, on hashing out ideas. Or, whether a particular class is more about being exposed to the subject matter. Art history, eg, can be as big as anyone wants, IMO. Pay attention and you learn. In contrast, philosophy benefits from discussions. Math benefits from being small enough to get individualized response to questions. </p>
<p>But, part of my point was that, even at schools with many small classes, the intro’s can be huge. And, IME. most schools have lower class sizes after the intro level- with many jr and senior level major classes being smaller. So, USNWR is offering a percentage without further info. I’d love to see how class size diminishes as one goes through the major to senior year, even at a really big U.</p>
<p>This is a figure that easily manipulable, and pretty meaningless. For example, a school can increase its percentage of small classes by consolidating a number of moderately large classes into a smaller number of enormous mega-classes. Suppose (purely hypothetically) a small department starts with 3 sections of its intro-level class, each with 60 students; 2 middle-sized intermediate-level classes of 35 students each; and 5 small advanced classes of less than 20 students each. Thus it’s got 50% “small” classes (5 out of 10 are < 20 students) and 30% “large” classes (3 out of 10 are >50). </p>
<p>Then suppose under pressure from the administration to boost the school’s US News ranking by changing class sizes, the department simply consolidates the 3 60-person intro-level sections into a single mega-class of 180 students. Now it’s got 62.5% small classes (5 of 8), and at the same time it’s reduced its percentage of large (>50) classes from 30% to 12.5% (1 in 8). Looks good in US News, right? But is anyone better off? There are not more small classes than previously; those opportunities are unchanged, despite the more flattering statistic. Meanwhile, the moderately big intro class just got very big, and is now offered only once instead of 3 times, making scheduling more difficult for students. The professor teaching the mega-class has more exams and papers to grade and far less time to devote to individual students; and the class of 180 probably needs to be taught in an all-lecture format rather than a mix of lecture and discussion which may be more doable in a 60-person class. What’s more, the number and percentage of student-hours spent in large classes hasn’t changed. Think about it; in the original configuration for every 180 student-hours spent in “large” classes, there were 70 student-hours spent in intermediate-sized classes, and <100 hours spent in small classes. In the revised configuration, despite a higher percentage of small classes, there were 180 student-hours spent in large classes, 70 spent in intermediate-sized classes, and <100 spent in small classes. In short, in either case more than half the student-hours are spent in large classes, even though in the revised configuration there is only 1 such class, even though the reported percentage of large classes declined from 30% to 12.5%, and even though the reported percentage of small classes increased from 50% to 62.5%. And in either case, barely over 1/4 of the student class-hours (< 100 out of 350) are actually spent in small classes, despite the seemingly (and misleadingly) favorable ratio of small to large classes.</p>
<p>Perversely, emphasis on percentage of small classes may actually create incentives for colleges to consolidate large entry-level classes into ever-larger mega-classes. I’ve heard of introductory lecture classes at some Ivies holding as many as 1,000 (Penn) or 1,300 (Cornell) students. My initial reaction was one of horror, and wondering what this did to their US News class size percentages. Until I figured out that these mega-classes could actually help their US New rankings, because under US News’ obtuse ranking system a class counts as 1 “large” class whether it has 51 students or 1300.</p>
<p>'Art history, eg, can be as big as anyone wants, IMO. Pay attention and you learn."</p>
<p>I disagree with this. Unless it’s an intro survey course, the point of art history isn’t to learn facts about paintings any more than the point of philosophy is to learn the viewpoints of philosophers. You have to practice formulating and defending ideas about art, and you don’t do that in a lecture. Coming up with ideas and subjecting them to challenge is the fundamental skill of a liberal arts education in any field (including math/science).</p>
<p>Sorry, I realized later that I didn’t say intro or survey course.<br>
But, my point is about that level- not classes for majors.</p>
<p>
I don’t know whether there are actually any classes at Penn with 1,000 students in them–or if there are, how many–but Penn’s Common Data Set provides a more accurate and meaningful picture of the predominant class sizes (see bottom of page 29):</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.upenn.edu/ir/Common%20Data%20Set/UPenn%20Common%20Data%20Set%202010-11.pdf[/url]”>http://www.upenn.edu/ir/Common%20Data%20Set/UPenn%20Common%20Data%20Set%202010-11.pdf</a></p>
<p>Out of 2,615 undergraduate classes offered in the fall of 2010, 937 classes had 2-9 students, 934 classes had 10-19 students, 324 had 20-29 students, 127 had 30-39 students, 68 had 40-49 students, 173 had 40-49 students, and 52 had 100 or more students.</p>
<p>In other words, 35.8% of the classes had 9 or fewer students, 71.5% of the classes had 19 or fewer students, 83.9% of the classes had 29 or fewer students, 88.8% had 39 or fewer students, and 91.4% had 49 or fewer students. On the other hand, only 8.6% of the classes had 50 or more students, and less than 2% of the classes had 100 or more students.</p>
<p>Clearly, smaller class sizes are the norm, not the exception.</p>
<p>bc:</p>
<p>fwiw: the famous (infamous?) class at Cornell with over 1,000 kids is extremely popular. The prof is so awesome (and perhaps an easy grader?) that students flock to his course; a WL to get register is typical. From a practical matter, once a lecture hall has more than 75/100 kids, it really doesn’t matter how much larger it gets…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No doubt. And just doing the math quickly, it’s probable that even with those numbers, Penn undergrads on average spend close to 40% of their class time in classes with 50+ students.</p>
<p>Look, I’m not knocking Penn; this is going to be true everywhere. I just think “percentage of classes with <20 students” is a VERY misleading statistic. You can have 71.5% of your classes with <20 students (as Penn does) and still have students spending significantly more time in large classes than in small classes. That’s because it takes 10 times as many 10-person classes to fill up as much time in students’ schedules, in the aggregate, as a single 100-person class. So when you see a figure that says 71.5% of the classes are <20 students, don’t make the mistake of thinking, “Oh, that means more than 7 of every 10 classes I’ll take will be <20 students.” Mathematically, it doesn’t work out that way. Using the figures 45 Percenter supplied for Penn, it’s likely Penn undergrads spend, on average, only about 1/3 of their class time in classes of <20—even though 71.5% of the classes at Penn are that small. </p>
<p>Do the math yourself. It’s eye-opening.</p>
<p>
I don’t see how you come up with that fraction. Moreover, this is really dependent on the courses and major chosen by each student. For example, Wharton and required pre-med classes will be larger, on average, than humanities classes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, I’ve heard the course (Intro Psych) is popular. Nothing wrong with that. The professor, by the way, claims the enrollment is 1300. </p>
<p>I’m not sure I agree with your statement that there’s no qualitative difference between a 75- or 100-person class and a 1300 person class. In a 75- or 100-person class there’s a good chance that the professor will grade papers and exams herself. No way in a class of 1300. There’s also a good chance that in a class of 75 or 100 the professor will get to know some significant fraction of the class, at least to the point of being able to recognize them, address them by name, have some recollection of their classroom contributions, and be able to write a recommendation that says something more than “this student took my class and earned a grade of X.”</p>
<p>That said, I have no objection to schools offering, and students taking, the occasional mega-lecture. And many top schools do. The intro economics course at Harvard, Ec 10, drew 640 students in 2008. That’s a huge class. It’s also supposed to be a great class. Assuming it’s about the same size every year, that means nearly 40% of Harvard undergrads take that class, in batches of 640 at a time. Amazing. More power to 'em! Other mega-lectures at Harvard that year: Positive Psychology, 587 students; Literature and Arts C-70, The Bible, 433 students; Life Sciences 1b, Genetics, 378 students.</p>
<p>My only point is that when schools offer classes that large, the figures on percentage of classes <20 (or percentage >50) are pretty meaningless. Think about it. It would take 136 classes of 15 students each to fill up as much time in student schedules as just those 4 mega-lectures at Harvard. So the fact that large classes represent only a small fraction of the total number of classes offered at Harvard doesn’t mean students aren’t spending an AWFUL lot of time in large classes.</p>