WFU reports the same percentage of classes of under 20 students as the University of Michigan (about 57%).
Columbia, Chicago, & Northwestern all report about 80% of classes with fewer than 20 students. Lots of class discussion. Many classes actually had far less than 20 students.
I think I understand part of the point in the OP. Why call them Liberal Arts Colleges if they are more classified by the size and scope vs. the type of education they provide.
Yes, but the percentage of large classes is often a better indicator of the chances of a student taking a large lecture course since those enroll more – sometimes far more – students.
As an extreme example, let’s say a department offers four classes this semester. Three of the classes enroll 5 students each, and one is a large introductory course of 75 students. Sure, 75% of the classes in that department are under 10 students – but 83% of the students are in a large class.
Now let’s compare that to a department offering four classes, two of which have 18 students and two with 35 students. None of the classes are under 10 students, and only 50% of the classes have fewer than 20 students – but not a single student is in a large class.
I agree with @Publisher that LACs are conceptually the college version of boarding schools. They tend to focus on some of the core subjects in liberal arts and offer small and discussion-based classes. The sizes of classes, however, aren’t what distinguish LACs. Some “universities” offer classes in those subjects that are as small, and in some cases, even smaller (e.g. an upper-level history class at Caltech is likely to have less than half a dozen students).
Sure. And there also a number of schools that aren’t called and don’t call themselves Liberal Arts schools that do promote a Liberal Arts education.
Book…cover…judge…you know the drill.
I agree with trying to hit the sweet spot in terms of size. Our son is at one of the largest LACs in terms of enrollment around 3,200. There is also a Law School as part of the campus with around 600 students.
For us, it combines the best of both. The advantages of a small school with a nationally ranked program in his major along with resources equal to the majority of National Universities. His particular school has a big endowment in general and the endowment per student is higher than several Ivy League Schools.
His largest class size is 25 with an average size between 12-15 . Unless all the published stats are wrong, I do think class size is a distinction between this type of school and a national university. In high school being able to connect with his teachers before and after class was very important to him. Having access to his professors in college was a definite part of our decision-making. The classes are a combination of lecture and discussion-based.
Just one other comment that was made in the thread, that at a LAC you will have less of a chance to do research. Sometimes it may be the other way around where being at a LAC gives you more of a chance to do research. Even though there is less research being done the priority doesn’t go to Grad students to research as it would at most National Universities.
Buyer beware
To my mind, the biggest difference when comparing LACs and research universities –– beyond such things as the size of the institution, number of students, class size, student/faculty ratios, whether or not there are graduate programs and professional schools –– lies in the emphasis and ethos of the institutions: at LACs, the emphasis is on teaching, whereas at research universities, the emphasis is on conducting research. That doesn’t mean that faculty at LACs don’t conduct research nor does it mean that faculty at research universities don’t teach well, but the goals of the institutions are very different.
Another thing to keep in mind is that at LACs, most –– if not all –– of the classes are taught by professors, many of whom often have tenure or are in tenure-track positions; at research universities, classes and discussion sections are often taught by graduate students, lecturers, visiting and adjunct faculty, post-docs, etc.
This really hits it on the head, and is why LACs generally have little to know name recognition by the general public, as they are not typically mentioned in newspapers… By contrast, the top national universities are cranking out all the breakthroughs/discoveries/advances in scholarship that are considered newsworthy by the media…
With regard to the latter, it should be noted that those doing research and those doing the bulk of teaching (particularly lower level courses) are not always the same. Many if not most tenured professors who do research also teach courses, but not all instructors do research.
Many universities are increasingly dependent on lecturers and adjuncts for teaching, most of whom have little to no time or resources for research. Nearly 40% of instructors at Chicago are non-tenure-track, for instance.
The UCs are a prime example:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/0162373719882706
Re: percent of small classes.
National universities often “game” the system, by having a of of small, upper level classes available, given by senior faculty who only teach one of two tiny classes. However, the majority of the required classes that a student will take will have 50-1,000 students, and those will be the majority of the classes that a student will take in their first two years, and likely as a Junior as well.
The big difference is really in those intro classes. At a LAC and at a small number of universities, intro classes are also 50 or fewer, and are taught my TT or full time, long term faculty. At many of the “top” national universities, required intro and gen-ed classes are very large, and/or are taught by adjuncts or grad students.
So yes, the English department has 25 or so 300 and 400 level courses with 2-10 students each about some really interesting topics, but only English majors will take them, and they will only take two or three. On the other hand, the intro Lit and composition courses that every student needs to take as part of their gen-ed requirements are either in classes of 300 students, or are being taught by adjuncts who may or may not be there during the next semester. The same for Bio classes, CS classes, etc. So, on the books, there are 10 large classes, and 25 small classes, but, on average, each student has taken 3-4 large classes and 1-2 small classes.
The same thing is true for biology. The intro series for bio majors, which takes up more than 1/2 of the required bio credits for bio majors are classes for 200-1,200 students.
For example, a bunch of Harvard’s first year courses have enrollments in the 100s.
It is really all a matter of size of the school. Harvard has 1,600 students in a cohort, and 6,000 or so overall, so the largest class that they have is CS50: “Introduction to Computer Science” which, in 2019, had 735 students enrolled.
A colleges like Williams, with 2,000 students, does not really have enough students who are taking any course as a requirements to have more than 100 students in a class.
So, if you compare Number of Class Sections with Undergraduates Enrolled
in the CDS between Harvard and Williams, about 10% of all of Harvard’s classes have over 50 students, While, for Williams, the percent is 2.6%. Harvard has 34 classes with over 100 students, Williams has only 1 (Harvard has 946 classes total to Williams’ 575).
All Harvard College students have to take around 12 gen-ed courses, and many overlap. I am willing to bet that those every student’s 12 gen-ed courses is mostly made up of those 34 100+ student courses with a few 50+ courses as well. A few electives and a few of the concentrations are also likely in the 100+ and the 50+ classes.
At large publics, like U Mich, UIUC, Arizona, etc., the percent of large classes is even larger, and the sizes are bigger (I TA’ed for the intro Bio sequence at UIUC, and they were anywhere between 800 and 1,200 students).
Now, for a national university, having 50% or so of one’s classes being under 50 is great. However, it is not “the same” as a liberal arts college. Most, as I wrote, have their students attending the majority of their classes with > 50 of their peers.
Students at Williams will take 9 classes as gen-ed, and only 1 class has more than 100 students, and only 16 have more than 50. So most students at Williams will never take a class with more than 100, and likely take only a couple with more than 50.
Furthermore, one should look also at subsections (labs, discussion groups, etc).
At Harvard, again, of the subsections, 22% have more than 50 students, and 10% have more than 100 students. Almost 50% have more than 20 students, and 31% have 2-9 students. At Williams, again, only 10% have 20-29 students, and 43% have 2-9 students.
Of course, at Harvard, most of those subsections are being taught be graduate TAs, while all of the subsections at Williams are being taught by faculty.
I chose Harvard, because Harvard is a wealthy college which can afford to provide the most personal, individualized undergraduate education that is possible.
So, no, National Universities do NOT provide the same level of “small class” experience that LACs do.
The main reason is that at National Universities, TT and Tenured faculty are not expected to put as much time into teaching as at LACs, even when their teaching load is nominally the same (2/2). That means that:
A. TT and tenured faculty they are more likely to get courses in their small specialization, which have low enrollment, so intro courses are piled up on a smaller number of faculty
B. For faculty who teach intro courses, it is more time and labor efficient to have these as very large courses, with a lot of the individual interactions being left to graduate student TAs. That costs the university the price of one course by a FT faculty and a few TA salaries, versus the price of three or four FT faculty courses.
C. It allows the university to dump these courses on non-TT/Tenured faculty, since these are not specialized, and most people with a PhD or even an MA/MS in the field can teach them. These cost less per hour than a TT/Tenured faculty member.
BTW, except for the replacement of TT/Tenured faculty with PT and contingent faculty, I do not see the national university model of large intro classes as being worse or better than the LAC model. Each work better for different types of student. Besides, the large intro classes are the tradeoff for access to large research labs.
However, “Small Classes” have become a selling point for private colleges (gotta justify the $50,000 tuition price tag, I guess), so they play that game of counting the number of small classes offered, rather than the number of small classes that a student actually takes.
I had edited my original comment for precisely that reason.
However, “Small Classes” have become a selling point for private colleges (gotta justify the $50,000 tuition price tag, I guess), so they play that game of counting the number of small classes offered, rather than the number of small classes that a student actually takes.
I can only speak from our own experience Our son’s lecture classes have topped out at 25 and his regular classes at 15, exactly as advertised by his private college.
Just to play devil’s advocate: For basic classes such as organic chemistry or multivariable calculus, not sure why the class needs to be small. It’s the same information (nothing terribly controversial or worthy of debating), and probably could even get the lectures online these days…
Because your kid is at a liberal arts college, and small classes are part of the mission statement.
I should have written “private universities”, rather than “private colleges”. The whole point of LACs was always small classes, even when the cost was much lower, relatively. However, when the relative cost was much lower, and parents were less involved in their kids’ college selection, private universities neither used that as a selling point, nor did they try to keep classes small.
Yes, it’s a fallacy that students at LACs have a harder time getting research opportunities. They aren’t competing against a lot of grad students or upperclassmen. Many kids at my D’s LAC did research. D was offered two research positions, one with a prof at her college, and the other, at a large R1 uni. In the first case, it was handed to her on a plate. In the second, she sought it out by “cold calling” various professors of interest, then she was awarded a grant after getting that position. She only approached three outside profs.
True, but the research that matters for getting into grad/med school (ie. leading to publications) is really going to be limited to the universities that are pulling in substantial federal funding (NIH, NSF, DOE, etc)… That would mean that LAC students would be limited in their research, mostly occurring over the summer and would not have the same longitudinal experience (ie carrying out research during the school and summer) as their competition who goes to universities…
I’m not going to give away where my D or her graduated classmates work (not all employed at the same place.) I’ll just say that the “competitors” she and several of her friends currently work with went to colleges that are in the top 5 of the USNWR. Maybe that’s just my kid and a number of her friends, but I don’t think so. I will say unequivocally that students at the best LACs are doing research, finding opportunities, getting into competitive grad programs and finding jobs at the same places that students at top universities are.
It all goes back to the person. There are kids at Williams and Harvard who will get nowhere. I don’t think a lack of “the same longitudinal experience” is a disadvantage.
And there are tons of students who get amazing jobs that have nothing to do with research. Not everyone needs or wants to do it in order to be successful in life.
That’s not true. Med schools could give a crap about undergraduate research. People pursue research for a lot of reasons, but getting into med school has got to be near the bottom of their motivations.
I’m not sure why the OP’s question is so difficult. I seldom hear the term “liberal arts school” when it isn’t referring to - a liberal arts college. And, thanks to USNews, families with children on track to attending college have become more familiar with the idea that LACs are different from research universities.
How different? We can debate the pedagogical differences forever and whatever you say is true of one can probably be found to be true at some subset of the other (small classes, open curriculums, technical and business courses, research, etc…)
But, in the end, liberal arts schools are just small universities. They do fewer things (no teaching hospitals and dental schools; no veterinary schools; no nursing, hospitality or labor relations schools) in return for a smaller community with fewer competing missions. If you crave being lost in a crowd, don’t go to a small university or college.
D’s LAC has 1-2 “large enrollment” classes every semester, usually an intro-level science class that is taken for a GE distribution requirement. “Large” is relative with the number of seats being in the neighborhood of 60.