<p>Which “Yale” are you referencing that has “big complaints” about huge lecture classes w/disinterested profs and not enuff disc-based classes?</p>
<p>Here’s what Yale has on its website:</p>
<p>QUESTION: What is the average class size?
ANSWER" “Average” can be a very misleading term. Classes at Yale range from one-on-one tutorials to a small seminar to a lecture course of several hundred students. 75 percent of classes enrolled fewer than twenty students; 29 percent enrolled fewer that ten. Fewer than 40 courses, out of approximately 1000 offered, had enrollments of 100 students or more."</p>
<p>On what are you basing your assertions that the Ivies across the board are dealing w/large class sizes? It certainly wasn’t my experience. Can you enlighten us?</p>
<p>There were huge numbers of freshmen seminars when I was an undergraduate 20+ years ago. The only large lecture classes I took were those with very popular “celebrity” profs. My intro Econ class had 5 students.</p>
<p>Sounds like a business opportunity: build three dozen more Harvards to satisfy demand. But you’ll need to do it in such a way as not to dilute the brand, so quality has to be fiercely protected. These should be built where most of the underserved students are located: the west and south. There’s plenty of need and land everywhere from Nevada to Arkansas. Over the last sixty years, how many new top-100 colleges have been created? Only a handful. In the meantime the population has doubled. Probably the number of Ivy quality students has doubled as well.<br>
Three dozen more Harvards should do it. Naturally it would cost many billions and take several years. I’m not sure if it would turn a profit but it would be of great benefit to the country.</p>
<p>First of all, space is definitely an issue. Secondly, they wouldn’t make more money - it costs them more to support a student than the student pays - the money a school makes comes mainly from the endowment.</p>
<p>T26EF - the Yale University that kids from cozy prep and boarding schools go to and find all their intro classes to be those “lecture courses of several hundred students.” Lately they have been instituting a flurry of freshmen seminars capped at 20 students, to combat the problem of disappointed underclassmen and to get higher on the USNews Ranking of schools with small-class sizes (which counts the percentage of classes with 20 or less students).</p>
<p>However, clearly Yale is no UVA either. One of the standout factors from all the HYP schools is that its incredibly easy (and possibly required?) to do a senior thesis encompassing a one-on-one with a thesis advisor. But Yale is not expected to compete with state schools in this regard, they compete with the other Ivies and often top liberal arts schools + UChicago (which actually do manage to pry a few Ivy-bound students away with temptations of more small-class intellectualism, better relations with professors etc)</p>
<p>I base my information off of a smattering of Yale Daily Herald articles and people I know who attend the school.</p>
<p>T26E4: Notice how carefully phrased that is. Yes, 75% of classes might be small. But the couple huge ones take up a disproportionate amount of the student body.</p>
<p>Ex. even if only 10 classes had 100 students in them, that’s already 10% of the entire student body enrolled in those classes.</p>
<p>What makes them so prestigious is, I guess, partially their low admission rates. If they accepted over even 30% like many other colleges do, they would lose prestige. PLus, their student/teacher ratio would increase, which could affect a lot of things.</p>
<p>I guess the government could step in and give “free money” to support these select few to expand despite the myriad of taxpayers who will never see the benefit. Maybe the government could even tag along some guidelines for using that money including a more aggressive stance towards affirmative action. </p>
<p>In short, if the government gave money to PRIVATE universities it would defeat the whole purpose of being PRIVATE and all that entails. Furthemore, as a law-abiding citizen i don’t see much that the government does effectively: in fact it seems that they have a curse where almost everything they touch becomes dilapidated and ruined. To have them place their clumsy hands on my education!? I should think not.</p>
<p>“What makes them so prestigious is, I guess, partially their low admission rates. If they accepted over even 30% like many other colleges do, they would lose prestige. PLus, their student/teacher ratio would increase, which could affect a lot of things.”</p>
<p>Chicken and egg argument here: the so-called “top” schools did have ~30% admit rates a half-generation ago. They still carried the prestige. What has changed is the doubling and almost tripling of applications they now receive. The fall in admit rate didn’t make them prestigious. Their prestige attracted more apps which drove the admit rate downwards.</p>