Indeed, 300:1 is pretty common in large lecture courses, even ones at relatively high ranked schools in fairly important topics (algorithms, for instance). And that's with the teacher having to give a different lecture to every single section every year, instead of just recording one lecture for everyone for the next several years.

Even more time is saved if we unbundled university education in general, so that the various paths and credentials are their own thing. IE, Intro to Poetry 101 isn't necessary for someone who's pursuing finance credentials.

> Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.

How do you figure that?

Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them.

Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches ~1 class a semester (especially consider research professors who may not teach a course every semester). So if students are taking ~5 courses a semester on average, I'd expect to see a ratio somewhere around 6:1, nothing even close to 50:1.

I’ve never had a single class with less than 30 students except for ones where the students dropped out mid-quarter. (Ironically one of my smallest classes was one that was for 65+ students but the instructor was so bad that we had less than 20 by end of quarter)

I went to University of Washington - if it matters.

For the record, OSU lists their student:faculty ratio at 18:1. First year gen ed courses are huge but most upper level classes are a much more manageable size.

https://oregonstate.edu/about

It's been a while, but I don't remember any of my upper division CS classes at OSU being smaller than ~30 students. That's why I wondered if perhaps admins were counted somehow, or maybe grad students, to get to a lower ratio.