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State Research Universities and Undergraduate Education

Brian Leiter

In commenting on the latest US News rankings of colleges, I noted that state research universities like Illinois and Texas are ranked with or below schools that have much weaker faculties. But I also noted that such schools are big, which often counts against the undergraduate experience. And then I posed the question whether their bigness really meant the undergraduate experience was inferior to schools with less distinguished faculties.

Illinois undergraduate Lucas Wiman writes in response with one perspective:

“I’m an Illinois mathematics student…I transferred from Illinois State University in fall 2003, and I’ve taken 10 classes here (4 of which were graduate courses). The graduate courses were wonderful and fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from them. Taking graduate courses was my goal in coming here, so the school has certainly improved my undergraduate education enormously. However, it did so by way of its excellent graduate program. The undergraduate
courses have been jokes. Enormous lecture halls, ridiculous assignments, easy tests. In an Asian literature course, I got a B without reading any of the assigned reading, and going to class 50% of the time. There have been 3 courses in which I only went to tests and got A’s. I’ve heard that in CS courses, 60% is typically curved up to an A. That was indeed the case in one CS course that I took, and people still complained about how difficult the course was. One could even write ‘I don’t know’ to any question and get 25% credit.

“The truth about this school is that the undergraduate program is little more than a bureaucratic requirement. The resources are certainly there–if you were to go to class regularly, do all the assigned readings, and work hard on your own, you could get a decent education. But that is true at all universities, including community colleges. Here there is nothing in grades which substantially reflects learning, and since most students don’t care about anything but their grades, little learning actually takes place.”

I’ve opened comments, and invite other perspectives, especially from undergraduate students or graduates of state research universities. (Faculty are, of course, welcome to comment as well.) Is Mr. Wiman’s report typical of the undergraduate experience at places like Illinois? Please do not post anonymously and identify who you are (e.g., faculty member at Illinois, student at Wisconsin, etc.).

UPDATE: Many very interesting comments posted below–if you’ve read this far, do read the comments. Thanks to all who have posted as well.

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30 responses to “State Research Universities and Undergraduate Education”

  1. Frank Schmidt

    The warehouse aspect of undergrad education at large institutions is a convenient shibboleth. At my largish department (300 declared majors)in a largish (26,000 students, 19,000 undergrads) university, we have a variety of opportunities for students who wish to be more than a number. There are academic interest groups in the dorms, the Honors College, undergrad research programs, etc. This year, at the urging of faculty among others, we have Freshman seminars (<20 students) taught by ranked faculty (my section is reading Origin of Species, another is reading Thucydides' The Peloponnesian Wars) available to anyone.

    One can easily disappear at a large university, and some students do, even in my own majors' class of sixty-five. Taking advantage of opportunity may occasionally require initiative. But so does life.

    Frank Schmidt
    Prof of Biochemistry
    University of Missouri, Columbia

    Reply
  2. C Schuyler

    More anecdotage. My experience (as a junior faculty member at Penn State in the late 80s) is very similar to that of the University of Illinois student cited. Penn State, of course, was not, and is not, as good academicallly as U. of I. (I'm assuming U. of I. at Champaign-Urbana is meant here). But the huge lecture hall packed with students was there, as at Illinois, the normal venue for survey courses. I evaluated that mass of students with only multiple-choice exams. I had this frustrating experience: no matter how low the cut-off point for failing, no matter how dumbed down the exam, a significant fraction of students would always either flunk or earn Ds. They simply adjusted their efforts downwards as the standards dropped. Absenteeism was normal. I would joke when giving an exam: "It's amazing how many people this room can hold when it has to." A large number of students were actively (sometimes vocally) hostile to being presented information of any large amount and complexity. My first time out, I gave a comprehensive exam at the end of term. The odium I incurred led me to drop that idea the very next time around. I once received a student evaluation, the author of which complained that on the exams, I would quote passages not just from the beginning or end of an assigned reading, but also from the middle! I had good students, too (some very good ones), at least one of whom asked what a serious student at Penn State was to do, given the unseriousness of so much that passed for undergraduate education. I suggested one had to be to a very great extent a self-starter; on that, I think the U. of I. student would agree with me. The dominant goal, clearly, to which everything else was subordinated, was to suck as many tuition-paying bodies into the university as possible, and then create an environment that wouldn't frighten away the weaker students. Would I ever willingly send my daughter into such an environment? No.

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  3. Jason Wyckoff

    I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an undergraduate in the mid 90s, and I have a somewhat different perspective than the student you quote here. It's true that I had more than one class that met in an enormous lecture hall, and that attendance in such lectures was pretty much optional. I had, for example, an introductory course in microeconomics in which several hundred students were enrolled, and I stopped attending the lectures during the second week of class and still received an A in the course. I did, however, attend the weekly discussion section of about 25 students.

    But those types of courses were pretty rare. I double-majored in philosophy and history, and almost every course I took in those two disciplines was quite small, often about 20-30 students and rarely more than about 75, I would say. And in those courses, in which grades were based on papers more so than on exams, it would have been very difficult to succeed without some degree of content mastery.

    In my experience (and I would assume that this is true at most large universities), mid- and upper-level undergraduate courses tended to be much smaller than introductory courses. This was fine with me; I learned as much entomology, economics, and Greek mythology as I needed to know in order to be a well-rounded university citizen, and was able to do philosophy in smaller classes with more opportunity for discussion.

    At the end of the day, I think that the resources available at a university like Illinois are more than enough compensation for the possibility that one might get lost in the herd. I certainly had a much wider range of course options than many friends who attended smaller schools, and the libraries and computer resources are among the best in the country. I do not have children, but if I did, I would not hesitate to send them to U of I.

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  4. Nick Bacarisse

    As an undergraduate student at UT I agree with much of what has been said. The large lecture classes here are, indeed, jokes. However, it is possible to get a very good education at UT, I think, but only if you really want it. Ms. Wiman has had the luck of taking graduate classes, which greatly improved the experience for her. I don't think, however, that the undergraduate program at UT ought to be altogether discounted. By researching the classes I take each semester I have been able to find many more challenging, more interesting, and smaller classes that have greatly enhanced my experience.

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  5. Michael

    My best friend went to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. He seldom – and in some cases never – went to class and yet obtained very good grades. He was able to so this was because there is/was a company who would pay students to take notes during class. The company would then sell these notes. Since everything on the test would be on these notes, he could study for 8 hours and still hit an A- or above.

    When I would go visit him, I was always disappointed with the intellectual life of the school. The party life, however, was very good.

    However, I don't think my friend's tactics would have worked at the Engineering Department. The students there worked very long hours. Indeed, the Eng. Dept.'s library was the one open latest on campus.

    Reply
  6. Paul Flynn

    On a slightly different note, I'd be curious to hear more from Dr. Leiter not about why state schools are being undervalued by U.S. News, but instead about why it is "preposterous" to rank Duke and Penn "on a par with, or ahead of, Stanford and MIT and Columbia?"

    I agree that the U.S. News rankings don't reflect the unvarnished empirical truth about the quality of undergraduate education available at various universities. I also agree that their importance is overstated, especially from a student's perspective.

    The point I'm most sympathetic to is that beyond a certain point, it's difficult to compare the "quality" of undergraduate education. Cal Tech and MIT deserve their reputations, but in no way is their excellence comprehensive. If you are thinking of majoring in Classics or Comp Lit, you'd be much better off going to Harvard or Yale. Furthermore, by putting Harvard over Princeton, U.S. News seems to suggest there is something about the undergrad education at Princeton that is lacking, that you could get had you gone to Harvard. Which is an assertion that pretty much all Princeton's undergraduates (past and present) would dispute.

    Applying a precise empirical methodology to necessarily fuzzy experience (i.e., how good was your undergraduate education) yields unsound results. Which is not to say that we can't differentiate. Clearly there is a difference in quality between Columbia and, say, Penn State (random example based on a previous poster's comment- I know little to nothing about Penn State).

    So to get back to the original point, apparently Dr. Leiter feels that it's absurd to Penn on par with Columbia. Why? At this point, I should reveal that I graduated from Penn not less than a year ago. I'll readily acknowledge that Columbia has more academic cachet than Penn. But what does that represent? And does that translate to a qualitatively better undergraduate education. Claiming that ranking Penn above Columbia is one thing. But your earlier post seemed to suggest that ranking Penn above Columbia is cause for throwing your copy of U.S. News out the window, which is a much stronger claim.

    I'm not simply saying "Rah Penn!" I liked my undergraduate experience there, but I wouldn't herd my children there above all others. I'm simply curious to see what evidence you would supply to put Penn in a qualitatively different category from Stanford.

    Plus, while Penn (like other schools, notably Wash. U. in St. Louis) is exploiting the weakness of the U.S. News rankings, I would be surprised if they were actually falsifying data.

    Reply
  7. Ken

    I've taught at two large research oriented State Universities (Rutgers, Maryland) two small liberal arts colleges/universities (Middlebury, Wesleyan), and an elite private research university (Stanford). Everywhere I've taught I had many excellent colleagues. Several places I've taught I've had superb undergraduates. Two places I've taught I've had excellent graduate students. So I've about seen it all, give or take a bit. I found teaching in each of them to have its unique rewards.

    But my thoughts about large state universities are the most divided. One thing is that there is often a mismatch between the quality of the faculty and the quality of the undergraduate student population, especially taken as a whole. The Rutgers faculty in philosophy is clearly world-class. The graduate students are also world class. I do not think quite the same can be said for the undergraduate student population there.

    I think this mismatch between the relative quality of the students and the relative quality of the faculty (and graduate students) often affects the faculty's (including graduate TA's) attitudes toward the undergraduates, which in turn affects student's perceptions of their place in the university and their importance to it.

    Stanford, where I now teach, has about 6,000 undergraduates. They are, taken as a whole, an extremely able and motivated group. Moreover, on the whole, the faculty has a high degree of respect, even admiration for the students. This shows up in lots of different ways and is crucial, I think, to student's life-long identification with Stanford after they leave the place.

    From my days at Rutgers — which are now about 8 years out of date, so I'm speaking about the past — i'd guess that there are probably five or six thousand undergraduate students there who who could be admitted to some highly competitive liberal arts college or private research university or some out of state major and highly competitive state institution like Berkeley. So there are many excellent undergrads there. But for one reason or another they aren't in such a school. Maybe they've simply chosen to stay near home or their parents can't afford to send them elsewhere or nobody encouraged them or something. This core of students is very good, very dedicated, very reachable. The faculty admire and respect them, at least when they get to know them. And when I was director of undergraduate studies at Rutgers, I thought we should do as much as we possibly could to attract such students into our classes.

    The problem is that these excellent students are often surrounded by a rather vast sea of lesser students, either less able or less motivated or simply not at a place in their lives where they really are ready to be in school at all.

    From my experience, even some of the most distinguished faculty at places like Rutgers happen also to be very able teachers. And some of them actually care a great deal about reaching and motivating as many students as they can. But I do have to say that some teach mainly to the "cream" and are indifferent to the rest. Others avoid undergraduate teaching like the plague. Students can pretty much sense the distance between themselves and (some of) the faculty. It adds to their alienation. Their alienation adds to some of the faculty's disengagement from the care and feeding of undergraduates.

    Again, I think it is possible to get a very good education at the leading state universities. Many have superb, world class faculty in one or more departments. The very best, like MIchigan or Berkeley, are filled with world class departments. But I think there is no doubt that it's more of challenge for a student to do so — and not only for the reasons listed above.

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  8. Brian Leiter

    In response to Mr. Flynn's query, above: the quality of the faculty at Duke and Penn is very good, but not in the same league as at Stanford or MIT or (to a lesser extent) Columbia. There are individual faculty and departments that are, but not across the boards. I'm inclined to the view that the quality of the education does depend on the quality of the faculty. If Duke and Penn are, in terms of faculty quality, on a par with Wisconsin, Northwestern, Texas, UCLA, etc., and they are otherwise indistinguishable in terms of student-faculty ratio etc. from places like MIT and Stanford which have much stronger faculties, then it does not seem to me that US News provides honest information in ranking Penn or Duke on a par with MIT and Stanford.

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  9. Jonas!

    i am an undergraduate majoring in philosophy at a large state research university that is very very very good at philosophy. and i think what ken said is basically right, presently. there are certain students that care, and are also decently intelligent, but the rest are just like whatever.

    i disagree about professors teaching the cream of the crop though. even in a 400-level metaphysics course taught by a really amazing metaphysician, the course feels dumbed down, and way too much time is spent on just making sure that everyone understands (at a very basic level) the readings. i think it's really good of the professor to make sure that everyone gets it, but it does make the course a lot less demanding. (i've looked at cian dorr's syllabus for a 400-level metaphysics course at pittsburgh, for example, and they are required to write much more and read much harder material than we are.) the papers, consequently, usually require only exposition.

    perhaps it is because i am not good at motivating myself, i feel the lowered expectation leads to lower-quality work. and that is where the undergraduate education suffers.

    but i do think if someone is decently motivated, they can still use the top faculty to their advantage, by going to office hours, writing more ambitious papers, do extra readings, and taking graduate courses.

    so i guess in a large state university environment, the smart, motivated kids actually do benefit, but the average ones suffer from size.

    Reply
  10. Carlos

    Although I did not attend a large, public, research university, I did attend Washington University in Saint Louis as an undergraduate student. After reading over a number of the comments already posted, I thought it might be worth pointing out that at Wash U it would have been very difficult to actually graduate with a decent GPA and not receive at least a decent (if not excellent) education. Although some of the introductory classes were large (75 – 150 people), almost all of the classes I took after my freshman year had fewer than 40 students.

    Furthermore, I found that I actually had to work quite hard for a B+ much less an A or A-. Overall, my experience was that any class offered would be challenging and engaging, at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels.

    The other quality I would like to point out was the flexibility of the curriculum. Besides knowing numerous students who were able to design their own majors and their own curriculum, I was able to double major and combine my interest in American Studies and Economics in selecting a thesis topic. Although I was unsure how to combine these interests at first, I was never at a loss for advice and support from any number of faculty members.

    Finally, Wash U provided me with nearly limitless resources to pursue my own interests. Whether extracurricular or academic, money and support were never a problem. Throughout my college career, I received significant and much needed support to pursue my own research, created a new freshman seminar, and was even paid to stay on campus one summer so I could develop a new orientation program.

    While I don’t know (from my own experience) to what extent such educational opportunities are available at large state universities, my impression from colleagues is that my experience at Wash U was at least somewhat unique. In fact, as a current law student at Penn, my impression is that my college experience may have been unique even among top private universities.

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  11. Jason Stanley

    I graduated from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which is a solid state university (though not as distinguished as e.g. Illinois, outside certain areas such as physics). Since then I have had the good fortune to attend and teach at both elite private research institutions and elite state universities. Looking back at my own experience and those of my peers, my view is that the undergraduate experience at a large state university with good educational resources is too difficult to compare to the undergraduate experience at (e.g.) an elite private research university or college to allow for simple comparison. There are too many pluses and minuses to each choice.

    I would guess that the satisfaction level of undergraduates at certain institutions (in particular, the very wealthy private ones) is high. For example, at Stony Brook, the lack of resources combined with the size of the undergraduate population posed numerous obstacles. For example, in applying for graduate school, my documents were mishandled, and there was little recourse for complaint. As Ken points out, there were many students who probably shouldn't have been in college at that point in their lives (though, having read reports of our president's undergraduate experiences at Yale, I hazard to guess that this is true even at the most august institutions). Because of the fanatical elitism of certain portions of American higher education, excellent students from Stony Brook have a considerably more difficult time getting into elite graduate programs. Extremely large lecture courses fostered anonymity (I remember when I entered graduate school, as was the custom at Stony Brook, I signed my papers with my student ID rather than my name, and was soon informed that this was not necessary). If I cared at all about developing a social network of wealthy and connected people, I don't think I could have formed one there. And so on.

    On the other hand, given the choice again, despite all the faults, I would certainly still choose a public institution such as Stony Brook over any private institution. I do not believe that the lessons I learned at that young age about other human beings could be learned at a private institution. I sat in class with 40 year old single mothers working two jobs, who still made it to classes and sat in the front row filled with questions. I saw very clearly that people from all sorts of socio-economic backgrounds and ages had prodigious intellectual gifts, and, if they had only had been given better opportunities, would have flourished in any walk of life. I recognized that people who, because of language limitations or exigencies of socio-economic background, were burdened with vocabularly limitations, nevertheless were capable of understanding arguments at the highest possible level of complexity, and that the function of complex vocabulary was often to obsfucate rather than illuminate. Most importantly, I have felt my whole career a profound sense of luck and gratitude that I was able to achieve as an academic, given the multitude of incredibly talented people there are everywhere, who haven't had the luck that I had.

    Obviously, there are numerous people who attended Stanford or Harvard as undergraduates, who, because of family circumstances and background, have internalized similar lessons to the ones I acquired at Stony Brook. And the great majority of people I know who did attend elite private institutions certainly know how to give lip service to egalitarianism (as well as knowing how to spell it correctly without checking in a dictionary, as I must do). But one purpose of elite private institutions is to instill the belief in their students that they are superior; that they are the elite. I suspect inculcation into this mind set can have negative effects even on the most well-intentioned of us all. It can lead people to believe that what they have gained out of good fortune and hard work is due instead to intellectual superiority. I think this can have bad effects on one's work ethic, one's character, and one's enjoyment of life's successes.

    As Ken pointed out, there are a substantial group of students at any decent public university who are the equal of students anywhere. Furthermore, as he also said, every such university has faculty who are extremely eager to work with talented and motivated undergraduates (e.g. my wonderful professors at Stony Brook). Of course, since the assumption that the undergraduates are the 'elite' is not part of the culture and background assumption of every conversation, you need some toughness to convince them that you are worth the effort. But it's easily done, if you're willing to put the effort in. Together with the more ephemeral considerations I've mentioned, despite the obvious advantages inherent in a wealthy, private institution, it isn't obvious to me that there is a disadvantage to a public education.

    Reply
  12. lael

    Based on my own experience as an undergraduate at the University of Washington (in the not so distant past), I would say that the "bigness" of large state universities certainly doesn't prevent one from having a good undergraduate education. However, it does mean that if one wants to have a good undergraduate education, she will need to work harder to make that happen. If the measure of a good undergraduate institution is that all undergraduates are given the means to push themselves and maximize their potential, then large state universities will fail in this regard. While motivated students can and do thrive in the large state university, less motivated students easily fall through the cracks.

    A friend of mine who was a pscyhology major (one of the largest majors at Washington) was still taking multiple choice exams and attending 400+ student lectures as a senior. I don't know that she ever wrote a research paper for a course in her major.

    I think this was often true in the sciences as well, but there was a large effort there to encourage undergraduate research, which I think went a long way to improve the quality of undergraduate education of many students. I think this was one of the most powerful resources Washington, as a large research institution, had to offer to its undergraduates. The university is clearly aware of this, and did (and still does) a great deal to encourage undergraduate research as a means of engaging students actively in their learning, and keeping them from being mere passive information receptors. http://www.washington.edu/research/urp/

    As for my own experience…I majored in political science and philosophy. The undergraduate program at Washington in philosophy is wonderful — very close knit, very intimate — which, besides the passionate instructors, must have been in part due to the small size (relatively speaking) of the undergraduate program (I believe I graduated with about 30 students in philosophy, well over 300 were in my senior class in political science). The faculty knew most of the undergraduates, there was an active undergraduate philosophy club, they sent undergraduates to conferences and to ethics bowl, and so on.

    Political science is a much larger major. I had the fortune of making it into the honors program, so my experience was unique: intense 10 student seminars my entire junior year, working closely with my faculty advisors my senior year as I took graduate seminars and worked on my thesis. But this was not, I'm afraid, the typical experience of political science majors. Although many smaller courses were offered and available, students could and did opt for the anonymity of larger classes, where they could go through the term without ever talking to their professor or even showing up for class, for that matter. Fortunately, students did have to write term papers in most of these classes, so at least their learning was more active than the psychology majors doomed to spend their career at Washington taking multiple choice exams.

    Having been involved a bit with the administration, I do feel that Washington is genuinely concerned about the quality of education its undergraduates receive. Their greatest challenge is figuring out how to implement strategies that have worked in other programs (philosophy as a prime example, and many of the sciences) into both larger programs (psychology) and into disciplines that don't lend themselves as easily to integration of undergraduates into research programs (most humanities programs, larger social sciences programs).

    I agree with Jonas that the biggest problem is for the "average student" who suffers because of large class size and all that brings along with it. Motivated overachieving students can and do thrive (I'm living proof!). But sometimes the motivated students have to work awefully hard to create a challenging program for themselves where the infrastructure doesn't exist.

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  13. Andre Ariew

    In response to Professor Schuyler:

    I was an undergraduate student at Penn State University in the mid-1980s and then transfered to the University of Arizona to finish my last two years of undergraduate education (I am currently an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Rhode Island). Professor Schuyler does not indicate in which department he or she taught but I'm guessing it was in the Humanities. If so, I wonder if there are (or were) two academic realms at PSU. In the department of computer science I experienced the opposite curving schemes that Professor Schuyler describes. Our course grades were often based on a strict bell curves and there were several incidents in which scores in the mid-90s counted as a low-B. The students in computer science and other classes that computer science students were required to take were, in comparison to Arizona, top-notch (which might just be an indictment against Arizona). A large percentage of PSU computer science undergrads were foreign students on scholarship from their countries. The atmosphere was serious, intense, rigorous, yet intimidating and isolating.

    As with all undergraduates I had my share of coursework in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Here I echo everything that Professor Schyuler wrote about the poor quality of education. However, I lay much blame on the professors themselves. One popular philosophy course with the title "Existentialism" featured some texts that have no immediate connection to the topic. When asked, the professor said that he chose those texts because they were books he had wanted to for a long time and hadn't had the chance until now to read them. Lectures were rambling. I don't know anyone who did not receive an "A" or a "B" in the course. Many of us were told that our term papers were worthy of publication. It didn't take long to realize how disingenuous such remarks were. I have similar stories to tell about logic courses that amounted to going through Copi's text one page at a time. No wonder attendance was so poor!

    Andre Ariew

    Reply
  14. Tom

    It feels like a tangent, but I'm provoked by Mr. Leiter's response above: "the quality of the faculty at Duke and Penn is very good, but not in the same league as at Stanford or MIT or (to a lesser extent) Columbia." My recent experience has be doubting most measures of faculty quality.

    I did my undergraduate work in Computer Science at UC San Diego (after the school of engineering there got high quality but before it got known for it), graduate work at UNC Chapel Hill, and now teach at UNC Wilmington, a mid-sized state school (10,000) and a small department (50 graduates/year). I believe any externally-visible "faculty quality" measure would report that the faculty at Chapel Hill are better than the faculty at Wilmington. Publication? Outside service? Where they got their degree? But the median faculty member here in my department does a significantly better job at teaching undergraduates than the median faculty member up the road at the "flagship university".

    Perhaps the discrepancy is because I'm somewhere smaller than a state research school? I wasn't paying enough attention to other people in my own undergraduate years, when I was at one, to see if they were getting away with slacking or not. 🙂

    Reply
  15. C. Schuyler

    Professor Ariew's guess that I was teaching in the Humanities is exactly right: Classics, to be exact. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that what I saw at Penn State must have held good everywhere in the University (my "anecdotage" remark was intended seriously). For example: I found every Penn State engineering student I came in contact with to be smart, hard working, and quite capable of dealing with unfamiliar material. Having met such students, and having heard nothing but good things about the academic quality of that department, I assumed that the specific courses it offered must be quite rigorous. I'd be happy to assume the same thing about computer science.

    As to faculty quality: I don't doubt that poor faculty quality would play a role in the awfulness of large survey courses, at Penn State and elsewhere. For my part, as a young, inexperienced teacher I probably made any number of mistakes, but the one that really counted–the one that removed me from consideration for the tenure track–was demanding too much. Maybe I should have gone into computer science?

    Reply
  16. Matt Davidson

    I did my undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Illinois roughly a decade ago. I had a fantastic academic experience there, and I have absolutely no regrets that I didn't attend a smaller school. I learned much, even in the large lecture classes I took. (I had two classes with 1700 people in them.) The faculty across disciplines were terrific–at the cutting edge of their areas. They also were very available for conversation. I spent literally hundreds of hours in just my philosophy professors' offices talking philosophy. I also spent a fair amount of time talking with my professors in other areas.

    I realized when I was there that I had outstanding minds teaching me, and I was determined to glean as much as I could from them. I believed then and still believe that it is a far more rewarding educational experience to have a class of say, 40, taught by a leading mind than it is to have a class of 15 taught by a lesser figure. I didn't want to sit around have have cozy discussions with my classmates. I didn't know very much, and neither did they. I wanted to be taught epistemology by the guy who had just written a book on externalism, not listen to my classmates talk amongst themselves about how silly and vapid Descartes is. Most of the students in my philosophy classes (and I put myself in this boat) had learned just enough to interfere with their own education by becoming dogmatic on issues they did not fully understand. But I did realize that I had amazing resources in the professors I had, and I took full advantage of this, even in larger classes that were outside of philosophy.

    It may true that one can coast at a large, top-notch research university and still receive decent grades. Perhaps for "coasters," a smaller school with more peer discussion and less-distinguished faculty is a better fit. But for the serious student, there is no question in my mind that having outstanding faculty who can guide you as you pursue your studies by far the most important factor in choosing a college.

    I now live in LA, and I occasionally run into students who were accepted to Berkeley but chose to go to a smaller, (much) lesser-known school. Invariably, the student says that Berkeley was "too big." I want to say, "Do you realize you just turned down one of the elite universities in the world? Do you know the quality of the faculty with whom you could have worked there? Sure, you're on a first-name basis with the 20 other people in your major and the 5 professors in your department now. But, with some work, you could have had so much more." Of course, I never say this. But this myth that one can't receive a good education at a large, (very good) public school, or that one would learn more at a smaller school is really pernicious.

    The situation is something akin to being let loose two sorts of libraries. On the one hand, you have 10 million volumes from which to choose. It may take some work to find the rare volumes that only such a library would have, but if you put in the work, you will be rewarded. On the other hand, you have many fewer books from which to choose. It's much easier to find decent books without looking very hard. But you could have had much better volumes had you put in the work to search through the larger library.

    Of course, there are many smaller schools with faculty that rival the faculty at good state research schools. So I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush here. But, the opportunities for students at major research schools are amazing. Perhaps one can get through such a school doing little work (this depends on the major, of course) and hiding in crowds. But so what? Why should one think this impugns the educational quality of such a school?

    Matt Davidson

    Reply
  17. Jonas!

    I believed then and still believe that it is a far more rewarding educational experience to have a class of say, 40, taught by a leading mind than it is to have a class of 15 taught by a lesser figure.

    i strongly disagree with that. it is true that at big schools you could pick some leading figures' brains, which is great. but i think learning in class really depends on how good and willing the scholar is, as a teacher. from my personal experience, i've been in a decently small class taught by a leading mind in mind, and his complete lack of caring (always arrive late, first to leave, no interest in talking to students, minimal assignments and even less comments) made that class feel like a complete waste.

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  18. Virginia Kim

    My anecdotes come from second-hand experience: I watched my brother as he earned his BS and BA at Wisconsin (comp sci and philosophy) and I now observe his progress at the University of Denver as he works toward his PhD in comp sci.

    He is the perfect example of both the possibilities and limitations of a large school. He walked out with a wonderful education, equalling my own *much* more expensive private education.

    But he did so in 5 years because too often classes that he needed to take to fulfill his comp sci degree were full by the time he was allowed to register. On paper, he had a vast selection of courses each semester. In reality, too many students were attempting to take classes that were capped. He finally got into these classes by virtue of his seniority his fourth and fifth years in school.

    Even with all the motivation in the world, a student's education can be hampered at a large university.

    By contrast: while some classes at my school were impossible to get into (especially if taught by a Nobel prize winner), appealing alternatives were frequently available. Professors were much more easily accessible and independent projects were common.

    Furthermore, my experience was fairly typical at my school in part because almost all the students I knew were intellectually curious and highly motivated. That in of itself is invaluable. My brother had difficulty finding similarly-minded peers. I don't think he'd describe his educational experience as typical compared with the educations his classmates received.

    (In case anyone's curious:
    My school: The University of Chicago.
    Its rank this year: 14.
    My opinion: simply ludicrious. But that's a whole different can of worms.)

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  19. Ryan Danks

    Three observations:

    1. In my experience there is no correlation or — less accurately but more descriptively, a completely random correlation — between the quality of a professor's scholarship and the quality of his or her teaching.

    2. There is a strong negative correlation between the quality of teaching and the size of the class, and . . .

    3. The number of faculty who can effectively teach a class of more than forty or fifty students (let alone a class of hundreds) is, as a percentage of the total faculty, vanishingly small.

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  20. Brian Leiter

    Regarding the comments of Mr. Danks: I will note that in law, Professor Lindgren of Northwestern's law school has produced data suggesting that there is a positive correlation between scholarly productivity and impact (in terms of citation) and teaching quality. I've no idea whether the correlation holds in other fields.

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  21. Ryan Danks

    I've seen Professor Lindgren's article on the subject but not his more recent working paper. I am not convinced by the methodology or the conclusion, particularly as it is applied to the present question. My assertion was that there is no correlation, not a negative one, between the quality of scholarship and teaching ability. I would like to see Prof. Lindgren's work replicated not only over a greater variety of law schools but also on a greater variety of professors.

    But I confess that my skepticism is based mostly on ancedotal evidence and and first- and second-hand observation, which is a pretty weak position to be arguing from.

    Still I'd love to schools — law and otherwise — post the results of the faculty teaching evaluations (anonymously, of course) alongside the grades on the wailing walls.

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  22. Jeff Erickson

    Heh. I'm the professor at Illinois who taught Lucas Wiman's CS algorithms class last semester. The class had 200+ students, mostly juniors and seniors in computer science; it's required for any CS degree. A 60% average was actually a low B-, just above the mean. Yes, answering any question with “I don't know” was worth 25% partial credit.

    Sadly, I think Lucas's experience is fairly typical at UIUC. It is possible to get an excellent undergrad education here, at least in engineering, but only if you have the self-motivation, discipline, and maturity to hunt it down. We have some AMAZING students, on par with the best anywhere in the world, who do just that, but they're a small minority. Good thing, too; the faculty simply don't have time to interact effectively with all the students. (My department has roughly 1300 undergrad majors and 45 faculty. It ain't no shibboleth.)

    I've heard complaints for years about “joke” classes at UIUC, especially in the liberal arts, mostly from engineering students. I've also heard complaints from faculty that they can't make their service classes more rigorous because that would lower their teaching evaluations, which would affect their salaries, or at least their department's budget. The faculty culture values good research far more than good teaching; nobody gets tenure here because they teach well. The student culture seems to value learning far less than grades. Or drinking.

    I was an undergrad at Rice and a PhD student at Berkeley. I think the education that most Rice students get (at least in the mid-1980s) is far better than the education that most UIUC or Berkeley students get. Students were more interested in learning; teaching was more highly valued; students and faculty interacted much more closely. The opportunities were simply easier to find.

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  23. Mark Eli Kalderon

    I think that the continual empahsis on class size is grossly overemphasized. I was an undergradaute at the Univeristy of Michigan which, at the time, had 60,000 students, but I found that the amount of faculty attention was down to student initiative. If I sought out individual tutalege I always got it. If you wanted to slide throught the course you could. The moral: No one can force your to have an education, it is up to you.

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  24. EGS

    Just a short comment: Class size and student/faculty ratio during students' junior and senior years of college should be given great weight.
    While as a student at the University of Texas I did have several extremely large classes, almost all of my courses in my major (journalism) during my last two years were comprised of 20 students or less.
    In addition, regarding student life, the diversity of choices presented to students at a large university, obvious in the variety of student groups and club opportunities a very large campus can present, should be considered.

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  25. CE Petit

    As an undergraduate at Washington U (St. Louis) a long time ago, the largest class I had was about 110 studentsthe basic cell biology class. My average class size was around 35 as a freshman, including both organic chemistry and freshman physics. The key was not that professors knew, and interacted with, the few best students in the class; it was that they knew, and interacted, with virtually everyone in every class, even in the lectures (outside the math department, anyway). It seems to me that the measure of undergraduate education quality is not what is available to the very best students who would succeed at virtually any institution, but what is offered to and available to everyone as part of the routine.

    Conversely, while I was in law school at UIUC I also taught AFROTC juniors and seniors during the spring semesters. These students, most of them on the Dean's List and most of them engineers, simply couldn't handle the kind of discussion and participation expected in a small class. They couldn't think on their feet (or behind their desks), especially if the discussion questions had not been revealed before class. Given that as officers they're always going to be in a "small class," that says something pretty disturbing about the academic preparation they received as freshman and sophomores.

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  26. Michael

    3L at Pepperdine Law School.
    So long as a student has access to good books and professors smart enough to discuss the difficult parts of those books, then he or she is getting a great education. If a teacher has students reading crap, or if the teacher is too busy indoctrinating students to cite them to the original sources, then the education is poor. I know several graduates from the Political Science Department at Berkely who never read The Republic. (!)

    To me, that is what college is about. First, access to the great books. Second, access to professors who are willing to discuss those books. Third, access to students bright enough to have those famed midnight conversations over espresso with.

    Sadly, how one measures these things is beyond me.

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  27. Lucas Wiman

    (Please note that the tone of my comments wasn't based solely on my own experiences, but also those of my friends and classmates.)

    I agree that there are many bright undergraduates at UIUC. The brightest people my age I've ever met have been at this school. This is another factor to consider when deciding where to go to school. At a place like Illinois, you meet a lot of very ambitious, bright students, so the intellectual atmosphere is fantastic (among the upper eschelons of students). I think this is a very important piece of education, since other students teach you about proper attitudes, strategies of problem-solving, and also give you a taste of areas you're not specializing in.

    I grew up in a two-college town, which housed Illinois State U. and Illinois Wesleyan U. Wesleyan is a small, liberal arts college which is my image of this kind of school. In two years at ISU, I met a number of students from IWU, some of whom were quite bright. But I always got a sense of parochialism. There didn't seem to be much competition among the undergraduates, and the availability of resources to students was much less than at UIUC. Students would frequently and spontaneously defend their choice to go to a "small school" on the grounds that "big schools" didn't really care about students and you couldn't get as good an education there. It certainly didn't seem to be for me. I imagine that the situation is somewhat different at Haverford, for example, but I suspect that it's not that different.

    Re: Prof. Erickson's comments, I apologize for the error in the curve. I remembered that the requirements for high grades seemed ludicrously low–for some reason 60% stuck in my head. (I got an A-, I remember that clearly.) I should comment that many of the questions in the class (on the homework, not the tests) were *extremely* difficult, but one didn't need to answer many of them correctly to get a decent grade. Furthermore, there were collaborative study sessions at which less able students leeched answers off of more able students. That's not to say that collaborative study is a bad thing; I did the problem sets with a fellow math major, and I found the experience generally rewarding and fruitful. Again, one can learn quite a bit from classes here (at least upper-level classes), but I think that most students don't. Lower level gen-eds have been uniformly wastes of time.

    Someone else writes:
    "for the serious student, there is no question in my mind that having outstanding faculty who can guide you as you pursue your studies by far the most important factor in choosing a college."

    I agree wholeheartedly. I transferred to Illinois from a smaller school focused on teacher-education. The variety of classes available was very poor, though the faculty were very supportive and intelligent. I think I've benefitted quite a bit by coming to UIUC, since it has allowed me to take courses in advanced topics from people doing active research in those areas. The only undergraduate courses in which I have learned a substantial amount have been the graph theory course I took with Doug West (who is both an excellent teacher and researcher) and the class I took with Erickson. Erickson's class was one where, I think, one could get through with a B or a C without too much effort or much understanding of the material. (West's wasn't–the problem sets usually took me 8-9 hours to do, weren't substantially curved, and made up the majority of the grade. However, I suspect that there are some political considerations for why this is so, which I won't go in to. Suffice it to say, I think the difficulty and level of that class had much to do with and a small number of other profs than with university policy.) If one were to use all the "group" resources available, one could probably get a high B or a low A with some understanding of the material. That said, Erickson is a truly brilliant lecturer and devoted enormous effort to preparing top-notch materials for the course. The curving in the course (and the relatively easy tests vs. the extremely difficult homeworks) probably have something to do with the factors Erickson mentioned in his comments. I wish these factors weren't so, but they are. They should figure heavily into any student's decision on what college to go to. Be totally honest about how motivated you are, and how much you want to learn. If you're not very motivated, but want to learn quite a bit (not as contradictory as it sounds), you should probably go to a small school. If you're either very motivated, or have little desire to learn, go to a large research school.

    My advice to smart, motivated high-schoolers: (1) go to a large, research oriented school (2) do not take introductory courses if you can avoid it (most large state schools have proficiency exams for many courses) (3) take as many upper-level (preferably graduate level) courses as you can (4) do research with faculty if possible (5) go to a good graduate school (6) write a brilliant thesis (7) become an academic superstar (8) teach at a large, research-oriented school, trying to dumb down your courses to increase your salary. (OK, I don't have any experience with 5-8, but I can dream…)

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  28. Lucas Wiman

    Oops.

    "I think the difficulty and level of that class had much to do with and a small number of other profs than with university policy."

    Should read:
    "I think the difficulty and level of that class had much to do with West and a small number of other profs than with university policy."

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  29. Ryan Miller

    Full disclosure: I am a rising senior at Boston College, majoring in philosophy and math.

    First, Prof. Leiter, it seems odd that you take the USNews report to task for misranking on the basis that your intuitions about faculty quality differ strongly from its rankings, and faculty quality is clearly important to undergraduate education. As the ranking does include measures (like peer ranking) which are related to faculty quality, it seems like you really should be making one or both of the following two criticisms: (a) the measures the report uses to track faculty quality are flawed, and better ones are possible and/or (b) the report does not weight heavily enough those measures which track faculty quality. I'd be amenable to both of those arguments, but it seems like something specific would be more helpful than a general report on your intuitions about, e.g., Illinois and BC, which might at any rate be biased towards departments in your fields of interest.

    Second, it seems important to remember that the students who will pay the most attention to this report are probably not the self-starters. The people who will find and speak to the professor of the 1300 person lecture will presumably also find and speak to people specifically knowledgeable about the schools they are considering and their fields of interest. Also, if we're interested in maximizing outcomes for students, it seems like those self-starters would probably succeed anywhere, whereas the solid students who aren't terribly self-motivated do need smaller classes and more overtly interested professors.

    I know that I chose BC over Pitt, despite the disparity of faculty quality in my primary major as reported by the PGR, because I knew that faculty overtures were important to my level of interest and performance. I also wanted to maximize the percentage of intellectually-minded students in my classes and thus my chances of actually meeting and interacting with those students.

    Finally, it seems that the ideal measure of college education would be the outcome for a student given the student's prior demonstrated ability. For the top echelons, this might mean something along the lines of the chances of a student's receiving a graduate fellowship plotted as a function of the student's SAT score. Due to our tremendous Fulbright production and recent success with other prestigious fellowships, BC would excel at this measure. There are probably more appropriate measures that would take into account a broader proportion of the student body, but it seems that the general form of 'results given expectations' is important. Neither the USNews nor PGR rankings take much account of this.

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  30. Brian Leiter

    My comments are not based on "intuitions" about faculty quality, but on various more reliable measures of faculty quality, from reputational surveys of scholars, to citation studies, to Academy memberships and academic honors.

    The US News undergraduate reputational surveys are sent to folks like Deans of Admissions, who are simply in no position to offer any informed comment on faculty quality. The question evaluators are asked is also not about faculty quality. If faculty quality is a factor at all in the US News undergraduate rankings, it is by accident.

    The PGR measures faculty quality for purposes of graduate study in philosophy; it does not purport to be about undergraduate education.

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