He used to say two things: that he has estimated to have taught at least 100 thousand people in his life (seems just crazy boasting, but feasible when you are working in 5-8 different schools per semester and each class has 100-250 people) and that a teacher is always teaching for the worst student in the class, and that the only reason that top universities are better is because of their selection process.
Forget class material, forget infrastructure and fancy facilities. What makes the best universities is the fact that the top students are there.
If you can not (dramatically) change your students and make them smarter, you can make your classes smaller and segment by performance. This at least stops your top 20 percentile from being dragged down by your bottom 20.
It's been my experience in college that most teachers just let the bottom quartile of the class fail (and likely switch into another major).
But in reality, even that doesn't matter. In the best universities, your worst students will be better than the average students at the second-rate institutions. If the teacher is simply giving the class to the top 75 percentile, the class will be even better still at the top uni.
How can somebody raise from the bottom 20% if they get subpar education?
Second, there can be individual mobility. A poor performing student with otherwise potential to improve might receive help to overcome whatever is bringing them down, and get them to thrive again. Even in that case, it would help them to be in a smaller class, as it's much easier to identify who among the low performers who want to be helped, and those lost causes who are a drag for everyone else.
Where this matters is in something like a lab or music practicum where the communication between instructor and students is the class. But I can tell you from experience that the variance among different years of students in a single university is large enough to disprove your uncle's point. I had one class that could have been confused for graduate students. Yet another might as well been sent by the Trump administration with the goal of destroying the institution of ear training.
You don't need to know everyone's level, just a rough idea about what the worst student of the class might need.
The first exam that students in test-prep schools take is before classes start, usually a mock university test that can be used precisely to assess your current level and to gather information about the class overall.
You don't need to know who are the worst performers. But if you know that your class of 250 has an uneven distribution of aptitude, you'd try to break the class apart.
I've taught some college classes and guest lectured in many others. The bottom 10% is trivial to identify in a matter of minutes.
You don’t need to know which specific 50 students are in the bottom two deciles, just that they exist and that your policy is to teach to what you’ve estimated is the 3rd decile and above.
You will find out who they are in the exams, but you know they exist in next year’s class even before that class is admitted to the uni.
If it’s a small group, I can actually learn everybody’s names, get to know them, personalize the material more and spend big chunks of the class just answering your questions and starting discussions based on them. The class becomes less of a mere information dump and more of a mentorship.
I went to a relatively small private engineering school. It made a world of difference in my education knowing the professors, and having them know me, especially given that with small classes the professors offered office hours where I could come and discuss the material that was covered during class, as well as problems I encountered on midterms.
I still remember nearly all of my professors, fondly, precisely because of the dynamic small class sizes allowed for.
This most often comes in the form of prolonged rhetorical questions. A teacher, fearing he is losing the class' interest might pause to ask "And, what is the benefit of the scientific method?" The point here is clearly to gauge whether the class understands and is following along in the train of thought. Usually, the rhetorical question has multiple interpretations and valid answers. And usually, the students are not so much wrong, as they simply fail to track what answer the teacher is hoping for. For example, the students might answer the rhetorical question above with "It helps us understand the world.", "It allows us to test theories.", etc. In fact, the teacher was looking for something like "It allows for the independent checking and confirmation of the findings of others."
In a real world example, this sidebar of questions might have taken minutes, and more often than not, completely breaks my train of thought. Often, the teach has completely paused a valid train of thought to either measure or enhance class participation, and in doing so has made it harder for me to understand the lesson.
Sometimes this goes even more poorly, and the teach just wants to witness a "class discussion," which can often entail spending much of the class polling the students for their thoughts. Depending on the subject, this can be a total waste of time. Most of the students in the class are poorly informed, and their thoughts are much less useful than a traditional lecture would have been.
I certainly admit that interactive methods of teaching can be particularly effective, but they are not an unalloyed good. They can often be worse than a simple lecture.
A foundation of the bloated academic and teaching industry requires that that professors can not teach more than a small number of students at once, or at least not teach them well. And that people who were taught in schools with smaller classes that were more expensive must be better. All claims about teaching and learning should be considered with that in mind, especially when it comes from the industry itself.
That being said, interactivity with professors probably works better in most other settings than a lecture format.
That was quite the course.
I actually think that putting a bad teacher in a small class makes it worse than a large one.
The same is true for selectivity. It doesn't account for education at all, only the difficulty of getting in. But since it doesn't account for the applicant pool, it doesn't account for the difficulty of getting in either. You could use things like SAT scores as a measure of the difficulty of getting in and ditch the acceptance % completely. I work at an R1 that gets hit hard because we admit most applicants because, you know, we exist to educate folks, not to serve as a signalling device.
Where is this anecdote coming from? A billion years ago when I studied at a small liberal arts college with small class sizes, professors were keen to share with us exactly why they were teaching from particular texts or why they had selected certain materials to make it clear that while the class wasn't being taught by that famous guy from MIT, it was still his book and materials we were using. I knew all my professors by first name, knew where many of them lived, had access to them anytime it was needed, and that's directly counter to my partner's experience at a large university.
I went to a liberal arts college and had small class sizes (most around 9-15 in size, with the largest being 30) - I could see my professors 1:1 pretty much anytime I wanted, but there was also a preceptor (TA) for each class who didn't teach, but was available to answer questions related to assignments, projects etc. I went to the house of many of my professors for food or drinks too. Generally also was on a first name basis with professors.
The downside is that liberal arts colleges aren't research institutions and they are generally undergraduate only. This means you don't have as many choices for advanced courses. However, the professors at liberal arts colleges really tend to be there for the teaching and tend to enjoy that. One of my math professors was the head of the mathematical association of America and also authored the books on Analysis (the mathematical subject - not a data science thing) we were using.
There are also research consortiums of small colleges. I did original geological research 2 out of my 3 summers in a small college via the Keck Consortium:
What's ironic about this though is how many universities won't accept their own undergrads into their grad programs... IE: they know that their undergrad programs are sub-standard but they don't seem to take action to improve them because the money and the focus is on the grad programs.
Class size naturally dropped as you got into niche subjects, of which there were many!
Where I was asking for clarification was on the idea that somehow people were getting better materials and a better overall experience in thee 500+ people lecture hall type experiences, rather than those 20-person intimate learning style classes.
- Honors sessions - Extra seminars - Quality of Material - Quality of student support groups
All of these things get better as the class size grows. In my last class at Georgia Tech, there were 900 students studying a niche topic from a particular professor. Due to class size, there were ~12 TAs and an extremely active slack discussion group where people could get support.
A smaller class just means the professor has limited resources to assist students.
If you have a given teacher, in a given classroom, with a given amount of TA help, blah blah, so that all else is equal, and then you reduce the class size, the students will do better.
The problem is that all else is far from equal in the data used in these rankings. Instructor quality drops off rapidly as you have more sections. TA help falls. The classroom may no longer be appropriate for the class, etc.
The rankings are not able to capture the effect you're talking about.
You wouldn't pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition for lectures unless you were the kind of person that universities like Columbia try very hard to not admit.
Classes, however, are very valuable. You can ask questions when you don't understand things, you can talk with the other students to build shared understanding, you can get your homework graded and confirm that the things you weren't sure about on it were actually correct, you can take exams and test your skills. And those things are much, much better when there are 16 of you in the class rather than 128 or 512.
Great Classes Implies Larger Classes (pure supply / demand); Larger Classes doesn't imply Great Classes
Controlling for as many of the relevant variables as possible, there does seem to be a strong negative correlation between class size and test scores. Beyond that, who knows, but it makes sense that small classes would succeed more often (at least up to a certain point of course)
2) I guess they can actually by having massive classes in the spring and comparing to the fall.