I went to a top school pretty recently, and many courses in the first two years had 200-300 people in them. There were also courses higher up in the course foodchain that had fewer than ten. I would say 25 is a reasonable average figure.
Re:Why Top Colleges Squeeze You Dry
by tokenadult on Thursday April 15, 2010 @09:10PM
(#1269449)
Yeah, that seems to back up what I was talking about for undergrad courses. I'm sure this course I'm looking at with 680 enrollment brings up the average a bit... 772, 480, 280, 330, 248, 260, 223... and there are a good number in the 50-100 range.
The grad courses of course have smaller class sizes since they're the long tail of education, but that's not what we're talking about here. If you remove the courses with 0 undergrads, the average is probably not below 25.
For our analysis, it's the mean and not the median that matters, since we're talking about the sum of money brought in by professor teaching divided by the number of professors.
From first glance, it looks like the median is quite possibly below 25, but the mean isn't, if you only look at undergraduate courses.
Also, professional schools have huge class sizes and charge tuition at the same or an even higher level.
This is at a "top" school? Even at the non-top college that I attended for my undergraduate degree, I had many classes with a smaller class size than that. (To be sure, in my professional school nearly all the classes were a good bit larger than that, but that is what I am trying to figure out, what is typical and best illustrates how showing up to teach a college class well prepared compares to showing up to do any other kind of job well prepared.)
So, if I may, could I kindly have an authoritative source cited for the statement that average course size is 25 at the echelon of colleges we are talking about (those with tuition of $40,000 per year)?
For you and several onlookers, I will note that everyone who looks at how well workers are compensated for their work looks not only at salaries, but also at all fringe benefits and other employer costs for compensation of the worker. One would look at funding of health insurance, paid vacations, sabbaticals, retirement benefits, and so on to see which jobs are comparable to which other jobs. I have not recently heard that jobs in academia are notorious for having meager fringe benefits in relation to salary, but rather the contrary.