Big, rah-rah schools with mostly small (<30 or 40) classes and sufficient hands-on advising to graduate in 4?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don't buy the bs posted about state flagship honors colleges. Notice how the few posts giving elaborate criticisms of state honors colleges never name the school and ignore other posters requests to name the school or schools.

I asked before reading the whole post and just got to the end. I did notice how no one named the bad experience state schools. Hmm.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Students register for prerequisites they don’t need and then sell their seats on Reddit and the school does nothing about it.

This I find most disturbing/fascinating. How this is even done.

That happens at UCLA

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honors college at a state flagship?

This is the answer. Most honors colleges promise smaller classes.

In my dd's experience, they don't deliver. The only benefits she got were housing (which ended up being only with honors and awful) and early scheduling, which didn't matter because the classes were hundreds of kids. And for whoever replied with "and they have recitation" - do you even understand what that means?? It means DOUBLE the class time with a TA. It's bullshit. It's the class time PLUS another class time because it's necessary to bridge the gap with a class with hundreds of kids. DD transferred to a school with small classes, taught by professors. No recitations. It's D1 and has deep traditions, but isn't a big football school (if that's what rah-rah means here).

OP - you need to look at schools that don't use TAs and don't have recitation.

We tripled our tuition payments to get her out of an honors college at a rah-rah school

You learn something new every day - I’ve never even heard of recitations. Can you share school name?

Most schools call them discussion sections.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honors college at a state flagship?

This is the answer. Most honors colleges promise smaller classes.

In my dd's experience, they don't deliver. The only benefits she got were housing (which ended up being only with honors and awful) and early scheduling, which didn't matter because the classes were hundreds of kids. And for whoever replied with "and they have recitation" - do you even understand what that means?? It means DOUBLE the class time with a TA. It's bullshit. It's the class time PLUS another class time because it's necessary to bridge the gap with a class with hundreds of kids. DD transferred to a school with small classes, taught by professors. No recitations. It's D1 and has deep traditions, but isn't a big football school (if that's what rah-rah means here).

OP - you need to look at schools that don't use TAs and don't have recitation.

We tripled our tuition payments to get her out of an honors college at a rah-rah school

You learn something new every day - I’ve never even heard of recitations. Can you share school name?

Most schools call them discussion sections.

I thought all schools use these. I did them 30 years ago at my college (UC) and my kids do them now in their private university (undergrad population of around 8,000). Recitations allow you to ask questions, go over difficult concepts, discuss concepts with classmates and the TA. You can still go to office hours to talk to the professor directly. Why is PP freaking out about the extra time in class? It is 50 minutes once or twice a week. They are barely in class anyway and have so much free time. God forbid they spend a few more hours a week in school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Michigan
Boston College
USC
Notre Dame

30-40 people classes? maybe upper-level classes but not your freshman or even prob sophomore years.

My kid is at USC and aside from GE classes in their first year, nearly all classes were in the 17-50 people range. Easy to graduate in 4, most have credits to graduate in 3 or 3.5 if they wanted. Lots of academic support, Lots of resources, USC is a machine.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, OSU. I was a grad student there. There are certainly huge lectures but they are generally for 101 classes and you still get broken up into smaller groups. Most 200+ level classes are under 50. Obviously this will vary wildly by major.

As for TAs teaching instead of professors, a few things: 1) very good professors will probably teach lectures anyway, and that's actually not a bad thing. A high quality professor giving a high quality lecture class is actually a great way to learn; 2) Most professors are mediocre teachers (I say that married to a professor, and knowing many others) so there's no guarantee that having someone with Dr. in front of their name will give a better educational experience than a TA; and 3) some TAs are fabulous. It's all dependent on the person and that is true regardless of the school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honors college at a state flagship?

This is the answer. Most honors colleges promise smaller classes.

In my dd's experience, they don't deliver. The only benefits she got were housing (which ended up being only with honors and awful) and early scheduling, which didn't matter because the classes were hundreds of kids. And for whoever replied with "and they have recitation" - do you even understand what that means?? It means DOUBLE the class time with a TA. It's bullshit. It's the class time PLUS another class time because it's necessary to bridge the gap with a class with hundreds of kids. DD transferred to a school with small classes, taught by professors. No recitations. It's D1 and has deep traditions, but isn't a big football school (if that's what rah-rah means here).

OP - you need to look at schools that don't use TAs and don't have recitation.

We tripled our tuition payments to get her out of an honors college at a rah-rah school

You learn something new every day - I’ve never even heard of recitations. Can you share school name?

Most schools call them discussion sections.

I thought all schools use these. I did them 30 years ago at my college (UC) and my kids do them now in their private university (undergrad population of around 8,000). Recitations allow you to ask questions, go over difficult concepts, discuss concepts with classmates and the TA. You can still go to office hours to talk to the professor directly. Why is PP freaking out about the extra time in class? It is 50 minutes once or twice a week. They are barely in class anyway and have so much free time. God forbid they spend a few more hours a week in school.

Agree. I was thinking the same thing…I’m happy that’s there’s extra class time involved.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honors college at a state flagship?

This is the answer. Most honors colleges promise smaller classes.

In my dd's experience, they don't deliver. The only benefits she got were housing (which ended up being only with honors and awful) and early scheduling, which didn't matter because the classes were hundreds of kids. And for whoever replied with "and they have recitation" - do you even understand what that means?? It means DOUBLE the class time with a TA. It's bullshit. It's the class time PLUS another class time because it's necessary to bridge the gap with a class with hundreds of kids. DD transferred to a school with small classes, taught by professors. No recitations. It's D1 and has deep traditions, but isn't a big football school (if that's what rah-rah means here).

OP - you need to look at schools that don't use TAs and don't have recitation.

We tripled our tuition payments to get her out of an honors college at a rah-rah school

The above is not true. Every public honors college also offers priority class registration and special advising.

Nope. It's a common honors benefit but it's not universal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don't buy the bs posted about state flagship honors colleges. Notice how the few posts giving elaborate criticisms of state honors colleges never name the school and ignore other posters requests to name the school or schools.

I asked before reading the whole post and just got to the end. I did notice how no one named the bad experience state schools. Hmm.

Not the PP, but my kid has been disappointed with UMN honors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Students register for prerequisites they don’t need and then sell their seats on Reddit and the school does nothing about it.

This I find most disturbing/fascinating. How this is even done.

Never heard of anything the PP is describing.
DP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't know of many large rah-rah schools with less than 30-40 students in *every* class, but here are Virginia Tech's numbers:

20-49 students 46.2%
Classes with fewer than 20 students 33.3%
50 or more 20.5%

Pretty good sizes for a large school. The intro classes are generally larger, but not huge. My DC goes there and has also had a very responsive advisor who has met with her both virtually and in person since the summer before she even attended. As a freshman, they mapped out her entire four years and she is right on track to graduate on time.

If, let's say,
2/6 of classes have 10 students,
3/6 have 40 students,
1/6 have 100 students

Then the average is that 40% of a student's classes have 100 students.
Even though large classes are a small fraction, they have have almost half of the students, so students take a lot of large classes.

Depends on the major. My kid is also at VT and has never had a class larger than 50 students, and that was just in one intro class freshman year. She has also never had an TA teach a class. Are you the poster who is making lots of absolute statements about state schools that aren’t even true 99% of the time?
DP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don't buy the bs posted about state flagship honors colleges. Notice how the few posts giving elaborate criticisms of state honors colleges never name the school and ignore other posters requests to name the school or schools.

+100
They know they’re spewing BS and that gullible parents will buy it. Probably the SLAC booster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don't buy the bs posted about state flagship honors colleges. Notice how the few posts giving elaborate criticisms of state honors colleges never name the school and ignore other posters requests to name the school or schools.

I asked before reading the whole post and just got to the end. I did notice how no one named the bad experience state schools. Hmm.

+1
That’s because they’re lying. I have kids at three different large state schools. None of them have had any of the weird experiences that poster describes - in fact, quite the opposite. They are all having fantastic experiences.