April, 2022 archive

RATIO, SCHMATIO 

By SAMANTHA STAINBURN (Former managing editor of Teacher Magazine) 

ISABELLE CARBONELL, a college senior from Bethesda, Md., has thrived over the last four years as part of a small learning community. Most of her classes have had fewer than 35 students. For freshman and sophomore years, her dormitory was in the same building as the cafeteria and many of her classrooms and professor’s offices. You see the same people over and over, and that lets you create networks, she says. You get to know your professors informally. You see them in the hallway, they say, How that project going along and you bounce ideas off them. Prospective undergraduates are deluged with statistics from average class size to the number of Nobel Prize winners on staff  with which to take the measure of a college. Is Ms. Carbonella’s  story an argument for choosing your college by the numbers?

Not exactly. She attends the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which has some 25,000 undergraduates, 4,100 full-time faculty members and 540 buildings. If she had been looking for an intimate experience, the numbers would have led her elsewhere.

That’s just one of the problems with statistics: they rarely tell the whole story. (Ms. Carbone’s story is that she signed up for Michigan’s Residential College, a program in which students live and attend classes in the same building. She now lives off campus but continues to take classes in the R.C. building.)

Another problem with numbers: Often statistics don’t measure what’s important, says Lloyd Thacker, executive director of the Education Conservancy, a nonprofit group working to improve the college admissions process. For example, the selectivity of a college, measured by how many applicants it denies, provides little information about the educational experience there. Read more »