Smaller classes are primarily a function of the size of the school, at least for a school that isn’t resource constrained. Take Caltech, a school that is smaller than most LACs, as an example, the sizes of its typical classes, other than those of the core courses that nearly every student is required to take (and probably a few CS classes), are likely smaller than those at most LACs.
Smaller schools, on the other hand, tend to offer fewer courses, or certain courses less frequently, and/or they have to spend more on instructional resources per student (e.g. Caltech spends significantly more per student than any other school, if I recall correctly).
I’m sure one could rightly take issue with whatever criteria they use for this, no different than for the primary ranking which gets all the attention in the media (and here). Regardless, if you’re a prestige whore, prepare to have your head spun a bit.
FYI, there’s just one criterion for this list, and it’s 100% “peer assessment.”
The rankings for Best Undergraduate Teaching focus on schools whose faculty and administrators are committed to teaching undergraduate students in a high-quality manner. College presidents, provosts and admissions deans who participated in the annual U.S. News peer assessment survey were asked to nominate up to 15 schools in their Best Colleges ranking category that have strength in undergraduate teaching.
The Best Undergraduate Teaching rankings are based solely on the responses to this separate section of the 2022 peer assessment survey.
Interesting finding and observation. IN our house, I went to a LAC and DH attended a big U. Neither of our kids wanted to attend a big U. One attended a very small U (as in a few thousand) and one attended a midsize U. But the familiarity with the schools definitely came into play.
Totally different survey groups though. Students providing opinions about their own schools vs college administrators providing their opinions of other schools.
But both the Princeton Review and USNWR survey categories mentioned in this thread recently will make the heads of the “prestige whores” spin.
You can all read the paper and draw your own conclusions, but it doesn’t seem to me from this data that faculty families are rejecting research universities for their childrens’ education. Even LAC faculty families are sending plenty of kids to research universities.
But note that Harvey Mudd, a LAC that is probably the most attractive LAC to students who would consider Caltech, has a ~200 student introductory CS course. The other LAC in its consortium that has CS, Pomona, is apparently rationing space in its CS courses, with no assurance to students that they will be able to get into the introductory CS courses needed to get into the CS major.
I provided the link to the full paper originally, so there was no need to dig around.
And the claim was never made that faculty families were rejecting research universities, simply that they were choosing LACs at much higher rates than expected.
Yes, all types of faculty families were more likely to send their kids to LACs, compared to the non-faculty families in the study. Research faculty families were also more likely to send their kids to research institutions, compared to non-faculty families.
Here’s the table from the paper in which faculty family choices are compared to the choices of non-faculty families with advanced degrees.
In general, I would agree with the point made by @ucbalumnus that faculty families are simply more likely to know that LACs exist, compared to non-faculty families. Most people in the general population do not know anything about LACs. Faculty families are naturally going to be more aware of all the great choices out there for their kids. LACs are a great fit for some kids, research universities are a great fit for others.
One could argue that faculty parents are far more aware of the strategic admissions advantage of applying to great yet not well known colleges such as these LACs. It may or may not imply anything about “quality of teaching”.
CS is another anomaly, unrepresentative of other majors. HMC has been limiting access to its CS courses for a number of years of students from other campuses of the consortium. Registration for many CS classes is prioritized even for HMC’s own students (based on seniority, major, etc.), I believe.
The CS situation at HMC (and at Swarthmore) illustrates another issue with schools without significant research functions. They all have even greater difficulty attracting CS faculty than research universities.
But it doesn’t really make much sense to ignore all the large mandatory (or CS) classes, then pronounce the classes small, does it? You are ignoring the obvious counterpoint.
If a Caltech freshman has to take three classes a semester (math, physics, chemistry) of over 200 kids each, then it hardly seems a great example of a college emphasizing small class size.
However, CS overall is a more common major among all 4-year college students than Caltech or Harvey Mudd students are among all 4-year college students.
But note that registration prioritization in favor of those in majors who need the course, limiting access for cross registration students (where cross registration exists), etc. is not rare across colleges where some courses are more popular than the colleges’ departments have instructional capacity for. Sometimes, this is combined with restricting the number of students who can study majors that are more popular than the departments have instructional capacity for. Note that this can apply to any popular major, not just CS.
Not all its 230 or so freshmen take those classes (some of them placed out of those classes). Besides, Caltech offers multiple classes for the same freshman courses. For example, I just looked it up its freshman physics course. Three classes were offered last year (at three different time slots by the same instructor). If the students who took the course were evenly distributed, each class should have no more than 75 students or so (and probably fewer since some students were likely placed out of these classes).
The study goes into motivations in a lot of detail. It would probably be better to review that before offering hypotheses here that may or may not be valid. It’s pretty clear who is doing the reading.
