<p>At Dartmouth the only TA taught actual classes are intro math classes. They also at times lead optional discussion groups for large intro classes. Also some lab sections in the sciences are led by TAs. </p>
<p>I personally never had a T/A while attending Dartmouth.</p>
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<p>Of course, nobody likes to admit being robbed of a real education. While TA would rarely qualify to teach high schoolers, it does not appear to be a problem to teach undergraduates. A reasonable command of English is also optional.</p>
<p>Oh yes, they do not really teach, they only lead classes and grade papers. :)</p>
<p>Slipper, that’s the same at any top university, including the larger ones like Cornell. Students who place out of Calculus I and II, intro to college writing and intro to a Foreign Language generally never have to take a class taught by a TA.</p>
<p>I think advocates of LACs think the no TA distinction is a real one, but schools that pride themselves on undergraduate attention pride themselves on undergraduate attention. My son who never had a teaching assistant in four years (also at Dartmouth, Slipper) was in a department without a graduate program, but he never had one in courses outside the department, either. I think interesteddad is such a true believer in LACs being distinctive that he has a hard time accepting this.
My daughter’s largest class her first year has 25-30 students and is team taught by profs, but breaks up into precepts (also taught by profs). All her other classes have had 8 to 12 students. This is at Princeton, which by the way has many more professors per student than Swarthmore. Hard not to make use of them. They are tripping over each other!
For universities like Dartmouth and Princeton, interesteddad is trying to make a distinction without a real difference.</p>
<p>Danas, a very good friend of mine attended Princeton. He majored in Economics, and he had large classes, some with more than 100 students. Those classes were broken down into smaller groups led by TAs. Perhaps your daughter is taking classes in a less-in-demand major, but I don’t think that intro-level classes in popular subjects such as Economics, History, Political Science or Psychology can limit themselves to 25-30 students, even at Princeton.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt you, Alexandre.
I am just relating the experience of two real students, which I am convinced is not at all unusual.
Again, a distinction without a real difference.</p>
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<p>Duuno about Princeton, but those specific intro-level courses at Dartmouth do not have TAs bcos Dartmouth does not offer graduate programs in any of them – thus, no TAs.</p>
<p>In addition to TAs leading discussion sections and labs, one of the key things to look for is TAs grading papers. That is not the same as an experienced professor reading student papers and providing feedback in writing, in individual student conferences, and even to the class when a widespread writing issue warrants.</p>
<p>These tasks are all part of “teaching”, no matter what semantic games are used.</p>
<p>I will be willing to be that anyone attending a campus tour at university this afternoon where the prospects are assured, “oh no, we don’t use TAs for teaching” can come home tonight and find either a manual for TA teaching or a report on TA teaching at the university’s website.</p>
<p>There’s nothing dishonorable about using TAs. Everyone understands it’s cheap labor and a way of giving at least a little personal attention in large lecture classes. My advice to universities would be to stop hiding it.</p>
<p>danas:</p>
<p>On things like class size, it’s much more reliable to look at the actual statistics, which are published in each college’s Common Data Set and can be quickly converted to presentation as a percentage of all class sections by size.</p>
<p>Princeton and Swarthmore do indeed have the same percentage of small classes (under 20), although Swarthmore’s tilts a bit more towards under 10 and this doesn’t include directed studies at Swarthmore that are one student/one professor.</p>
<p>Under 20 students:
73.5% Princeton
73.6% Swarthmore</p>
<p>This is logical. All schools have courses that simply don’t attract many students, especially as you move into the upper level electives for majors. These are never the types of courses where enrollment is an issue.</p>
<p>We start to see a divergence with the next group up, 20 - 30 students. These are “large” courses at Swarthmore – the intro science courses, etc. This is no-man’s land for Princeton, between the small course offerings and large courses:</p>
<p>**20 to 29 sudents **:
8.5% Princeton
19.3% Swarthmore</p>
<p>Both drop off in the next category:</p>
<p>30 to 39 students:
4.9% Princeton
3.9% Swarthmore</p>
<p>From there on up, the curves reverse themselves:</p>
<p>50+ students:
10.7% Princeton
2.2% Swarthmore</p>
<p>One out of every ten courses taught at Princeton is a lecture class of 50 or more students. So, these anecdotal stories of completing 32 courses at Princeton without ever taking one aren’t terribly plausible, on average.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that the large classes have a disprorpotionate impact on student experience. For example, it takes ten class sections of ten students to give 100 students a small course experience, but just one class section of 100 to give the same number of students a large lecture course experience. The stats would look very different if you measured as a percentage of student/courses taken rather than as percetage of courses offered.</p>
<p>BTW, Yale has slightly fewer large classes than Princeton does…but, both probably set the bar for research universities. In other words, for a college to have smaller classes than Princeton (with its per student endowment) is saying a lot.</p>
<p>I think if one were to chose between Swarthmore and Princeton, ability to have close relationships with your professors isn’t a meaningful difference.
For the record, my daughter liked Swarthmore very much still feels that there are some things she likes about Swarthmore better than Princeton. But she has literally had long one-on-one sessions with each of her professors (except for 2 in her team-taught class), and some of these people are the top in the world at what they do.
Re: Saving a buck with TAs. Princeton has an endowment of $2.2 million per student, or, at 5%, $110,000 per year per student throw-off. Not even getting counting the annual fund drive. Does Swarthmore even spend $110,000 a year per student, in total!
Look, both these places are rich enough to provide anything a student could reasonably need. I just think the TA issue is a big red herring here. Now if you’re talking Berkeley…</p>
<p>It seems to me that you can’t inflate a small LAC to 5-6000 students without losing the character of a small LAC. Conversely you can compact a large university into a small university and retain many of the positives that a large university offers. That’s what makes schools like Dartmouth, Princeton, Brown appealing. They offer a lot, but not the intimate and insular environment of a small LAC. </p>
<p>I’m not making a judgement, just pointing out than an LAC of 5000+ is a contradiction in terms.</p>
<p>Fordham? Bucknell?</p>
<p>Tufts is sorta a hybrid.</p>
<p>Apropos the discussion on class size at Swarthmore vs Princeton, I’ve just posted something along the lines suggested by interesteddad, based on Common Data Set info, that some may find interesting:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/508872-class-sizes-better-summary-measures-than-usnwr.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/508872-class-sizes-better-summary-measures-than-usnwr.html</a></p>