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<p>I wouldn’t lump these schools together in this regard. What really matters here is the percentage of large classes, and just how big the big classes are. The percentage of small classes considered alone can be very misleading. That’s because, by virtue of their being small, it takes a lot of small classes to equal just one large class in the amount of time each category represents in student schedules. By the same token, just one big class requires a lot of student registrations to fill it up to the point it becomes a big class. Consequently, you can’t just look at the percentage of small classes and say that represents how much of the average student’s time is spent in small classes. That’s an optical illusion. </p>
<p>Consider a concrete example. At WUSTL, 10% of the classes are 50+ students. At Carleton, that figure is 1%. That’s an order of magnitude difference. With 10% of classes at 50+ students, it could easily be the case that the average WUSTL student spends as much time in large classes as in small classes. That’s simply not gonig to be the case at Carleton. Here’s why.</p>
<p>At WUSTL 70% of classes have fewer than 20 students, and 10% have 50 or more students. But if the average class size for small (<20) classes is, say, 12, and the average size of the 50+ classes is, say, 85, then on average WUSTL students would be spending slightly more time in large classes than in small classes. [For every 100 classes, 10 are large with an average of 85 students = 850 student registrations in large classes; while 70 of the 100 are small classes with an average of 12 students each = 840 student registrations in small classes; therefore, on average students are spending more time in large than in small classes]. </p>
<p>This is simply not going to be the case at Carleton where only 1% of the classes have 50+ students. Carleton actually has a lower percentage of small classes than WUSTL: 65%. But if we make the ame assumptions about average class size at Carleton as we did at WUSTLL, we get a very different result. Then for every 100 classes at Carleton, 1 is big, at an average of 85 students = 85 student registrations. But 65% of the classes are small, with an average of 12 students per class = 780 student registrations. At Carleton, then, the average student would be spending a little more than 9 times as much time in small (<20) than in large (50+) classes.</p>
<p>Chicago (5% large classes) and Northwestern (6% large classes) fall somewhere in between these extremes.</p>