“Average Class Size”
When colleges advertise their “average class size,” they are obscuring a fact. Many of the classes you will take as an undergraduate will be large lecture courses like this one. Just because a university like Harvard or Yale offers a lot of small classes does NOT mean that the average size of the classes an individual student ordinarily would take would be small. Or even that the majority of the classes will be small.
This noise about average class size is a way that colleges and universities inundate you with statistics. To give you the impression that you will have a very personal, very intimate educational experience. At most places, this is malarkey. Most classes an average student will take at a medium-sized (like the University of Rochester). Or large university will be much larger than the average class size at their high school.
And if they continue to insist upon it, ask them to prove it. Ask to see the class schedules for a randomly selected group of students in freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior year. And let’s really see what proportion of the average student’s classes are large and what proportion are small (say under 25 students). Not every college fibs, but many stretch the truth.
Why do they fib (or stretch, as the case may be)? Because this statistic is a proxy for intimacy and personalization and it is a vital statistic used by US News to determine its rankings.
If you want to read more about average class size, you might want to take a look at these links:
Student to Faculty Ratios: A Bogus Statistic You Should Ignore
Adjunct Faculty and Student to Faculty Ratios
Student to Faculty Ratios: Unintended (Negative) Consequences
Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant
