I learned just fine in either- but if you wanted the mega-star professors, that usually meant a big class. As a Freshman it’s easy to think “oh, just some overrated academic” until you actually show up and hear how they interpret the material.
One of my kids took a Freshman intro class from a Nobel prize winner- just the luck of the draw-- who turned out to be such a phenomenon that the students regularly invited him to meals, parties, etc.
Sometimes people are famous for a reason. And a university lucky enough to have these folks on the faculty aren’t going to start limiting their teaching load to “15 students max” as long as there are hundreds of students waiting in line!
It depends on many factors. For example, USNWR says 68% of Stanford’s classes are <20 students, and 12% are 50+ students. Seeing this a Stanford student might expect that the the bulk of their classes will be small and few will have 50+ students.
However, actual classes sizes will vary wildly. CS is by far Stanford’s most popular major. If that student is a CS major, then they can expect regular class sizes of 100+ throughout their time at Stanford. It’s not every class, but CS classes that must be taken by majors and/or are popular will generally have 100+ students. This includes upper level courses, as well as grad courses (that can be taken by undergrads). If rather than CS, the student majored in a less popular field, classes of <10 students might be the norm. In some unpopular fields it’s fairly common for classes to be cancelled because no students enroll for the course.
Huge classes is not necessarily bad for teaching quality/environment and does not necessarily mean little personal attention . For example, Stanford’s largest class is non-accelerated intro to CS in default language (CS106A) . For fall 2022, the enrollment was 549 students. That sounds very high. However, the course enrollment also notes that there are 123 sections, suggesting an average section size of 549/123 = 4.5 students per section. Having small sections with only 4-5 students, gives students the opportunity to ask questions or get a lot of personalized attention, in spite of being a large lecture with 550 students. It’s sort of like having a class size of 4-5 students, in spite of the official class size being 550 students.
This level of nuance isn’t captured by the USNWR class size weighting in formula for best college. There are also ways of gaming this metric, which some colleges do. An example is a college allowing a max of 29 students to enroll in typical classes, which USNWR treats differently than a class size of 30 students in their formula. The smaller class size isn’t helpful for the 30th kid who’d like to enroll in the class.
Like other metrics, if having a small class size is important to you, it’s best to look up what typical class sizes are in your planned classes/field of study at the college. Choosing a college ranking formula that includes % class size is far from an adequate substitute.
Which begs the question. If Yale wanted to admit more diverse and lower stats applicants to provides a more diverse student body they could have been doing it for the past ten 10 years.
Harvard Med School withdraws from USNWR rankings. I wonder if we will ultimately get to undergrad schools pulling out…we can only hope.
George Q. Daley, dean of the faculty of medicine at Harvard University, wrote in a message to the school that the ranking system creates “perverse incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data,” sets flawed policies or diverts financial aid from needy students to boost rankings.
I would argue that the example you provided - an attorney fighting to right a wrong because police/prosecutors abused the system to convict an innocent man - was not activism. It was righting a wrong within an existing legal system. Activism is trying to change the system itself. For example, working to change the mandatory sentencing guidelines, or abolishing the death penalty is activism.
While getting my MBA at a Big10 school the dean told us that some of us may receive USNWR surveys and asked that we present the program in a favorable light. He argued that this would be in our best interest since we benefited from the program being highly ranked. He then went on to describe how some schools gamed the ranking system with their data submissions. For example, some schools included the math portion of standardized tests, but not language sections, for foreign students. Some schools boosted their employment numbers by including recent graduates who had jobs unrelated to their new degrees, like administrative or food service jobs.
Colorado College withdraws from undergrad USNWR rankings.
At CC, we aren’t afraid to take courageous actions to support our vision and mission. We were the first higher educational institution to implement the Block Plan (1970), the first to implement an Antiracism Commitment (2018), and the first institution in the Rocky Mountain region (and the eighth in North America) to achieve carbon neutrality (2020). None of this was easy, but we don’t settle for easy at CC.
Today, I’m proud to announce that we will once again be at the forefront of taking bold and courageous action in service of our mission, vision, and values. After extensive deliberations and surveys of our students, staff, faculty, alumni, and parents, the sentiment of our community is clear. Colorado College will no longer cooperate in the deeply flawed U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” ranking.
We are pulling out of this ranking because it privileges criteria that are antithetical to our values and our aspirational goals. Here are a few examples.
U.S. News’ flawed methodology still equates academic quality with institutional wealth and continues to rely heavily on the infamous questionnaire asking institutions to rank each other’s reputation, a non-objective process subject to gaming.
It continues to equate academic rigor with high school rank and standardized test scores, a metric that creates perverse incentives for schools to provide “merit” aid at the expense of need-based aid. This metric is also inconsistent with our belief that the educational experiences we provide transform our students regardless of these class rank and test scores, which is why we went test-optional in 2019.
Further, U.S. News & World Report’s methodology, weighing the proportion of students with debt and the total amount of debt at graduation, creates incentives for schools to admit wealthy students who can attend without incurring debt. We cannot reconcile our values and our aspirations with these metrics or the behaviors they motivate.
