Average Class Sizes at University of Rochester

students sitting in classroom
I just watched a video that was referred to me by a friend on Facebook. I often ignore these links, but this one clearly had a college theme and my friend thought it was hilarious. So I clicked on it.

It was hilarious. And you should watch it for the entertainment value.

But you should also watch it for an inside view of the lecture hall at the University of Rochester for Chemistry 131. This is the introductory course in Chemistry at University of Rochester.

“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

 

Truth Revealed: US News Rankings Mean Nothing–and Everything

Doug Lederer and the folks at Inside Higher Ed bring us a story today of Clemson University and how it manipulates data to help move itself up in the US News & World Report annual rankings.

These ranking bug me.  As an educational consultant, I am constantly having to explain that these rankings are at best imperfect measures of institutional quality and at worst amount to a completely misleading popularity contest.  Just today I am having to respond to a client’s whining that the universities I am suggesting are “too far down the league tables” (to which I might respond:  “so how come you didn’t think of that when you were preparing for your algebra final”).  My client doesn’t want to listen to any reasoned argument that the quality of education that an individual student received in the classroom has little or no bearing on the the league tables presented in US News.  Needless to say, it’s going to be an interesting day.

What has me looking up, however, is the fact that a former institutional researcher at Clemson gave a presentation at the Association of Institutional Research that revealed in great detail the strategies that Clemson administrators were using to lift Clemson in the US News rankings.  And the participants–other institutional researchers from other universities who also report data to US News–where shocked.  Shocked, I say.

You can read the article yourself:  Doug Lederer is a great writer and the article is balanced.

The funny thing (okay, well, it’s really not so hilarious–it’s more funny-peculiar) is that colleges and universities bash the ratings when they’re  down, and then post them on their websites anytime their name is mentioned favorably in those same rankings.

Everyone wants “proof” that the quality of their educational product is somehow good–better than their peers–more worthy of your consumer dollar.  Yet colleges and universities know that the measures developed by US News are flawed.  They know that they measure institutional inputs and not educational outcomes.  They know that statistics like student-to-faculty ratios are misleading.

Still, the college administrators slavishly report their data to the magazine editors–with or without manipulation or “influencing” the data.  They know it’s a stupid game, but they play it anyway.  And clearly Clemson has the rules down pat.

As Marcellus uttered in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, something is rotten–not in Denmark–but in American higher education.

I do understand this quest for some sort of evaluation system that will help us compare one college against the next so that we can make better decisions about which college is best for which kids.  But we don’t need US News & World Reports.  We need Consumer Reports.


Mark Montgomery
Educational Consultant




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