I find that some parents are stuck on reputation and prestige when they walk into my office and start talking about colleges. I try to remind them that they are buying not only the reputation, but the educational experience for four years.
I also try to talk to them about class size and accessibility of professors, [...]
Read full post...Princeton Review’s Guide to the Best 368 Colleges is a best seller. For good reason. It can be very helpful in elucidating some of the key features of the colleges lucky enough to appear between its covers.
But it can also be something of a tease: check out my post yesterday for titillating [...]
Colleges cite their student-to-faculty ratios and average class size as indicators of the intimacy and quality of the educational experience they offer to students. Rankings systems, such as those employed by US News & World Report and Newsweek, include these statistics among their variables. I’ve been writing about these statistics and what they [...]
Read full post...A couple of my previous posts have focused on student-to-faculty ratios and class size averages as indicators of educational quality.
By and large, my conclusion is that these statistics are not all that helpful in uncovering the quality of the educational experience for a prospective undergraduate.
So what to do? How can we compare and contrast [...]
When a client asked me the other day about the importance of student-to-faculty ratios, I got to thinking about other supposed indicators of educational quality.
The other oft-cited statistic when visiting an admissions office is “average class size.” As with student-to-faculty ratios, the size of the classes at a college is assumed to reflect the [...]