You are exaggerating a bit. 19.6 is only 1.75 x 11.2, not 2x…
However, you are also ignoring the much bigger difference in the numbers. UC Berkeley has almost 3 times as many small classes (under 20 students). This is the size category that US News has been weighting the most heavily in their size metric.
It really depends on the student, I think. Some students want to be at a school where they can take large lectures with world famous professors combined with small sections taught by TAs/GSIs (some of these can be great teachers too). Others prefer small lectures with more direct interaction with the professor.
Correct - depends on the student and the class… and depending on the class a lot of these are taught as large group lectures and then break out to smaller groups with TA’s.
Which is why the rankings are only semi-useful, one data point among many. If we remove class size from the formula the schools shuffle some (just as they do every time USNWR reformulates). It’s unfortunate if someone is making a decision based on pure rank and not using underlying information to see how it might apply to their situation/program/child/etc.
I’m impressed that you would think I would know (or be concerned with) who Andrew Ng and CS229 is.
All else being equal, smaller classes would surely be better than larger ones. But all else aren’t equal. Moreover, how much extra benefit a student can derive from a smaller class depends on each individual student and on the specific subject of the class.
Sure, my son will have both of those types of classes in his freshman year as well. For fall he’s looking at a lecture with a limit >500 (plus discussion sections limited to 28), a lecture with a limit of 100, and two smaller classes that are limited to 18 students.
However, I know that some people really want to avoid any large lectures with hundreds of students. There’s a big difference between 50-60 and 500-1000 students! Unfortunately the US News or CDS numbers don’t give you that info… all classes over 50 are in the same category.
Totally agree. While most students will likely benefit from smaller classes, I’ve known some very smart students for whom class size really didn’t matter.
The stats about % of classes <20 or student faculty ratio are nice, but what matters is the size of the classes you will take, which are likely to completely different from the averages. At a larger college, a student who chooses an unpopular major might the vast majority of in major classes with <10 students. And a student who chooses a very popular major might have the vast majority of in major classes with >100 students. Overall averages do not reflect this level of detail. The also do not reflect if the small classes are dominated by seminars, research, and similar, rather than in major classes. Things like section size are also relevant. An intro to … class of hundreds might have sections of <10 students, giving students an opportunity to ask questions and get personal attention. Or it might have large/no section, with no such opportunity. % of classes with <20 students in isolation is not a particularly useful metric.
Many colleges do provide enrollment numbers for specific classes, which can be reviewed. Some example numbers for Stanford fall quarter are below. Class and section sizes are all over the map, with a good correlation to major.
CS 106a (intro CS part 1) – 549 students (6 students per section)
CS 106b (intro CS part 2) – 579 students (34 students per section)
CS 106x (accelerated intro CS) – 50 students
CS 148 (graphics and imaging) – 477 students (no sections?)
CS 251 (cryptocurrencies) – 305 students (no sections?)
CS 261 / Statistics 161 (counting/sampling) – 13 students
CLASSICS 1G (Beginning Greek) – 8 students
CLASSICS 40 (Greek History) – 6 students
ENGLISH 1C (Comics) – 4 students
ENGLISH 68 (Mark Twain) – 11 students
Over 100 students in a class and you’re not really doing anything different than what is available for free at MIT (MITx, that is). I guess grade pressure and peer pressure are responsible for the greater learning compared to a free online course. Even if a student gets one or two chances to interact with the professor, the class is no longer going to be a dynamic conversation adapted to the needs of that particular group of students. I know, this doesn’t always happen in a small class either, but very little chance of it in a big class. Back in my day, the big classes had students reading the newspaper and drinking beer in the back rows. Not a great environment to learn physics!
May be a difference between “back in day” experiences and large lecture classes today. Some of the other factors might be:
Class topic- engineering and math seem more amenable to large lecture classes
Experience - some schools simply appear better equipped to handle the logistics of large classes
Students - some students need more personal delivery especially in the early years of college. Some students won’t have a chance in larger classes regardless of quality.
I’m not sure about other majors, but if your student is interested engineering ( especially CS) and is unsure about large classes they should avoid most of the highly regarded programs/schools.
With respect to magazines and college rankings, U.S. News had at least one quasi predecessor. While Life did not attach a specific numerical ranking to colleges in this 1960 article, it did place those it selected into tiers based on SAT profiles:
There’s a lot of disagreement about what “diverse” means.
Some think it means increasing the percentage of under-represented minorities. They might think of Howard as being diverse.
Others think of it was being representative of the population as a whole
And in many fields, diversity is calculated by using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index. This would consider diversity maximized when all groups have the same percentage (e.g. White % = Black % = Asian % = Hispanic % … ). I suspect that your USNWR diversity link uses this metric, based upon the rankings shown there.
I wonder what it will mean to USNWR’s revised rankings. The likely answer is whatever they think will maximize clicks.
I think it’s important for people to understand how a course works in terms of schedule, place, and population. I’m assuming UW-Madison and Stanford and (maybe most?) other universities work this way, at least for survey courses.
These are personal anecdotes from UW:
Psych 101:
Lecture, twice weekly, about 200 students, large lecture hall
Discussion, once weekly, about 25 students, classroom
Chem 101:
Lecture, three times weekly, about 150-200 students, large lecture hall
Lab, once weekly, about 20 students, small lab classroom
And then there were some mid-level electives, like:
History 200-something - The Age of Jefferson & Jackson
Lecture, three times weekly, about 40-50 students, larger classroom
…and then into my major, Journalism:
Advertising Media Planning
Lecture, three times weekly, about 20 students, classroom
What I wonder is, when they’re figuring average class size, do they count the smaller group sessions for survey courses (discussions and labs…), or do they only count the lecture size?
Completely and totally off topic (so sue me!), Albert O. Hirschman (he of the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index) was, in my estimation, the original “The Most Interesting Man in the World”: Albert O. Hirschman - Wikipedia
(Even just that picture of him in his 20s interpreting for Anton Dostler is fascinating.)
Ok, I’ll desperately try to tie this into the theme of this thread (high ranked and low ranked colleges) to avoid getting deleted by the mods due to being so off topic: Albert O. Hirschman, as Jewish teenager, fled Germany for France. In France, the highly ranked universities were closed to him, so he attended a rather low-ranked technical school where he had to major in something he wasn’t even interested in (business economics) Despite that, he applied himself to his studies, and learned enough to, as an undergrad, publish a paper about Italian policy on the promotion of reproduction (increased family size) that totally pissed off the fascist Italian government and made him an enemy of the state. He learned enough Italian in the process of researching and writing this paper (along with French, English and Spanish) that some years later he was able to act as the interpreter for the Dostler trial–the trial that set legal precedent for the Nuremberg Trials.
USNWR’s statement says “Increased weighting on a schools’ success in graduating students from different backgrounds” (rather than diversity per se that would be measured by any of the ways above). This could mean graduation rates of demographics that historically tend to have lower graduation rates (e.g. those with Pell grants), whether in an absolute or relative sense.
Probably includes discussions and labs, since there are large lecture courses with many exactly 19-student discussions and labs at Northeastern (the school that was gaming the class size measure of the USNWR rankings).