They are actually pretty close: on the most recent CDS UT is 5% OOS and UF is 8.4. UF swears that they don’t have a cap, and I will never, ever believe them as long as it’s that low.
If they have different norms to evaluate, they could have OOS numbers that low, and not have a cap. It doesn’t mean all Florida kids are that good in head-to-head comparison with a national pool. Unless there are very few OOS kids that apply into Florida.
Choice of major also matters. Students in majors that are more popular at the given school will often have large classes than those in majors that are less popular at the school.
Yes, if you really wanted to provide helpful information for students who cared about class sizes, they could compare colleges based on average class size taken by actual students in their major.
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That type of granular data is going to be impossible to compile accurately for hundreds of majors and thousands of colleges. If it’s not in the CDS, it’s not going to happen.
Overall student/faculty ratio and the current breakdown of class sizes is the best available info. General conclusions can be drawn from those.
What I’m saying is that these numbers (overall student/faculty ratio, and the number of small vs large classes) don’t actually tell you how large any given student’s classes are likely to be. The numbers could look very favorable, even if the majority of students are actually being taught in huge lectures. So, no… I don’t think that general conclusions can be drawn from these numbers.
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Is class size really that important? Or is it only important to a small subset of students in a subset of majors? Seems like there should be more important metrics.
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If the class size is not sufficiently small, I have zero interest in paying over whatever I can pay for my flagship public. It is really important. At least to me, as I tell my kids what I am willing to pay for. They are on the same page.
Class size is necessary but not sufficient for me to pay up 85k.
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Same with Wisconsin, Illinois, Washington… which also have higher program/major rankings than Florida, but are below them in the rankings. that is tough to reconcile – shouldn’t academic quality be the #1 variable in any ranking?
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Curious as to why class size is so important. Is a small class with inferior prof preferred over a large class with a premier prof?
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Just because the data isn’t as granular as we’d like, its absurd to state that there are no conclusions that can be drawn.
For example, look at the following data from some top-ranked (according to US News) public universities. There’s a clear correlation between high student-to-faculty ratios and percentage of classes with over 50 students. At you saying that this data is highly manipulated by all of them and it means nothing?
Individual experiences will of course vary depending on major, but that’s the case for any of a wide variety of metrics. And whether this particular metric matters or not to someone is for them to determine, but my take is that these are metrics that speaks more directly to the actual undergraduate educational experience than many of the other measures US News uses.
I added William & Mary’s data at the end. With the lowest student-to-faculty ratio of those shown and also the lowest share of classes with more than 50 students, is it a coincidence that they are also ranked #7 overall (among privates and public universities) by US News in “Best Undergraduate Teaching”?
Fewer than 20 students/ more than 50 students/ student/faculty ratio
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University of California, Berkeley: 50.5%/19.6%/20:1
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University of California, Los Angeles: 47.8%/22.8%/18:1
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University of Michigan–Ann Arbor: 53.9%/18.5%/15:1
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University of Virginia: 51.9%/16%/15:1
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University of Florida: 54.6%/9.9%/17:1
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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: 40.7%/12.7%/16:1
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William & Mary: 45.8%/7% /13:1
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I’ll take a stab at this.
All professors being equal, there’s less demand at the professor’s office hours, easier to ask questions in class, reduced time to post results from quizzes and tests, professors get to know the names of individual students, less demand for positions on professor’s research project(s), easier to get LOR’s, etc.
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As I said small class sizes are necessary. Not sufficient. Anyway once you get into the university, you will shop around for the best taught sections. But the small class size is a good place to start from. Now that we have two kids that have seen different places — big and small, they feel like night and day.
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Also – small classes are more interactive, less strictly lecture-based, so there’s more opportunity for active, participatory learning and engagement. Professors can assign papers and projects for which they can devote more time to grading and evaluation. Exams can be more qualitative in nature rather than just multiple choice. And you get the professor’s feedback, not a TA’s (because there’s no TA for small classes).
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Now you’re mixing apples and oranges - why not throw in large class with inferior prof?
If the student is confused on a point do you think they’re going to raise their hand in front of 200 kids to ask a question? How about in front of 18 kids? So in a smaller class higher likelihood that they are going to have a question answered and therefore learn the material.
If class size doesn’t matter why not just have everyone on remote/zoom classes - no reason to actually be in front of the teacher either.
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No, I do not think the data is manipulated. I just think that these particular numbers, and the way they are used by US News, can have little to do with actual student experience.
Let’s compare UC Berkeley to Cal Poly SLO for example, since these are two schools that my son actually compared and considered attending.
| School | Fewer than 20 students | more than 50 students | student/faculty ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| UC Berkeley | 50.5% | 19.6% | 20:1 |
| Cal Poly SLO | 17.3% | 11.2% | 19:1 |
The listed student/faculty ratio is almost the same between these two schools.
Although the percentage of classes with more than 50 students is higher at UC Berkeley, the really dramatic difference here is the percentage of classes in the smallest size category (fewer than 20 students), which is much higher at UC Berkeley. Note that this is the category that gets the highest class size bonus, according to US News metrics.
The actual student experience at these two schools, in (for example) an engineering major, could not be more different. At UC Berkeley, my son can expect to be in large lectures with hundreds of students for the majority of his lower division classes. At Cal Poly, he would have been in relatively small classes from the beginning to end of his undergraduate career.
My son chose UC Berkeley, but for someone who learns better in (or prefers) small classes, Cal Poly would have been a better choice.
I really don’t think the raw numbers tell the story here, especially since the posted metric by US News gives the biggest bonus to tiny classes under 20.
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I haven’t seen that old article linked here on CC in quite a while. Once you get past the clickbait headline it is a very positive article about what Northeastern had done up to that time. The major “gaming” Northeastern did was to convince USNews to use the 6-year graduation rate instead of the 4-year rate.
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I think it depends mostly on the kid and to a lesser extent on the class. To be honest, most of the classes that our S attended (CS major) were probably larger than 50 students. Some of the non-CS classes (German Poetry, Buddhism, etc) were quite small. Some of the more popular CS courses were huge. But even in the largest class he attended (Andrew Ng’s CS229) he was able to ask questions, engage with fellow students and the Prof in lively discussions, meet with the prof during office hours, etc. To this day that huge class is one of his fondest memories. I guess, my point is, class size as a metric is sometimes misleading,
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That seems to be what the data shows, with Cal listed as having about 2x the number of large classes as Cal Poly. Some majors are also going to be more impacted than others. Unfortunately, Common Data Set info doesn’t break things down further (such as by major or by year in school.
US News’ particular ranking/use of the data might over or underemphasize certain portions of this data (and now they’re apparently moving away from it), but I don’t think that means the data is useless. I think it’s more useful than their overall rankings.
For undergraduate education, for example, I would argue that a majority of potential students would be better served by Cal Poly’s model than Cal’s, regardless of the latter’s higher ranking (a lot of which is driven by faculty publication output and grant funding for graduate-level research—directly relevant to peer reputational rankings) and “prestige”.
Both of my boys attend(ed) a public university with 20,000+ students.
The student/faculty ratio is 16:1, the average class size is 25 students, 88% of classes have less than 50 students and 98% of classes are taught by professors.
It’s 6-year graduation rate is virtually the same as Wake Forest, Ohio State and UGA, but better than several of the UC’s.
It’s ranked >150.
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