Are Small Class Sizes a Thing of the Past?
by Kim Clark
One of the ways affordable colleges are trying to keep their prices down is to pack more students into every classroom. In these hard economic times, colleges are laying off professors and admitting more tuition-paying students, so courses are getting even more crowded.
Many students worry that will hurt their education. It’s easy to get lost in 300-person lecture halls. And professors say they have to skimp on individual attention when they have hundreds of papers and tests to grade. In fact, studies find that while superstar professors can inspire students in the back row, typically, students do learn more in smaller, more intimate classes.
Luckily, there are still dozens of good and comparatively lower-priced colleges (tuition and fees of less than $10,000 for 2008) that offer lots of small classes. U.S. News found 30 colleges in our America’s Best Colleges rankings that students have a good shot of getting into and that say that at least 50 percent of their courses are small (with 19 or fewer students).
[ Two of the standouts: The University of Iowa and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
Someon the list achieve small classes by hiring lots of graduate students to teach. But at others, the small classes are led by professors. At the University of Colorado, where 50 percent of the classes are small, only 10 percent of the courses are taught by graduate students. And several of the State University of New York campuses on the list don’t have graduate student teachers.
Other colleges, such as some campuses of the University of South Carolina, have part-time faculty lead many of the smaller classes. Such reliance on part-time faculty isn’t always bad for students, research shows. In professionally oriented courses of study—nursing or business, for instance—experts who teach part time can be superior to academics isolated from the real world. But in standard academic classes such as history, students do better with full-time professors.
So students looking for face time with professors might want to use this chart as a starting point and ask schools what percentage of the small classes are taught by full-time professors. In addition, many other large or affordably priced schools not on this list offer lots of small classes.
Students at the service academies, for example, spend much of their time in small classes. And some very large campuses still have many small classes. Kent State, in Ohio, is one large school that says that 50 percent of its classes are small.
Jessica Lumpp, a Kent State senior majoring in journalism, says that while most of the core and introductory courses are large, her writing courses—both lower and upper level—have been small. She likes the mix: “Some days it’s nice to sit back in a sea of students and listen to a lecture, while other days it’s nice to gain individual feedback from my professor or work collaboratively with a small group of students.
“Class size is something students tend to forget about when looking for colleges, but it could be important,” she says. “Students from a small high school can sometimes be overwhelmed when walking into a packed lecture hall, and some require a lot of professor attention.”
