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My experience echoes the post above me. I went to a small private college. No TA's, was taught by professors who made themselves available. Also, my biggest classes were about 40 people; these were the lower division 'core' classes. My upper division classes had as few as 8. It was a great experience.
I think it will depend on whether you attend smaller school -- public or private -- that is more focused on the educational process rather than one of the large research-focused schools that are almost like "oh yeah, and let's have some undergrad programs too."
The undergrad population at my teaching-focused state university was about 10,000. That was small enough that of the roughly 40 classes I took, only 2 of them had more than 50 students, and only 2 of them were taught by TAs as opposed to professors. By the time I got to senior-level classes, it wasn't uncommon to have as few as 15 students per class.
My first year undergrad, I went to a school with about 35,000 undergrads. My class sized ranged from 12 (English) to 400 (Physics lecture but with 20-25 person labs). If you were to drop the physics class, my largest classes were 60 person lectures w/ 20 person discussion groups.
The only class I ever took that had a large lecture without a small lab/group assigned to it was a logic class (soph year, 20,000 undergrads). 150 person lecture, no work groups.
My final two years didn't see more than 18 in a class (26,000 undergrads).
Grad school classes were 15-20 (6500 grad students).
Giant lectures are almost always used for something most if not all the student body will need to graduate (physics, chemistry, biology, etc). And they are always broken up into smaller labs or discussion groups.
My experience echoes the post above me. I went to a small private college. No TA's, was taught by professors who made themselves available. Also, my biggest classes were about 40 people; these were the lower division 'core' classes. My upper division classes had as few as 8. It was a great experience.
I went to a state school and this was (almost) my exact experience as well.
Biggest classes (Business) were about 100, but all taught by professors.
Most of the classes in my major (Philosophy) had about 20 students.
I've been attending academic and technical classes at the local community college for the past, 10 years.
I'm very much used to, and appreciate the 15-40 person environment in sit-down classrooms.
With my style of learning, this small setting makes things somewhat less difficult when it comes to grasping material properly.
However, if I intend to continue my education into the higher levels of things, a university is obviously going to be unavoidable.
The thing is that whenever someone portrays a university-level class in the media in any way, the vision of 100+ students seated in what appears to be a small stadium always happens to be the norm.
Are all universities like this, or is this just a stereotypical representation?
All universities are not like this. It depends on the school, the program, the level, etc. Some schools will have auditoriums for freshman classes only, while higher-level classes are smaller groups. I don't think it will be too difficult to find out average class size from any college you are interested in.
I went to a small private university for undergrad, the largest class size was capped at 40 (and there were only a few rooms that even went up to that size so it was a handful of intro classes that got that big). Professors taught everything except for a few labs that utilized TAs. Further into classes in my major the size shrunk dramatically and I remember sections of classes with as few as 3 and 4 students. (Upper division chem/bio stuff especially). It was a really nice experience as my professors knew me by name and were available to me in office hours. I came from a small high school (>100 seniors in my year) and was going through a lot during college so that made a huge difference. I'm now working on my MBA and I have classes that go up to 60 students, which to me seems huge after undergrad.
Typically, the smaller schools (based on enrollment) don't do the massive lecture hall thing. If you're worried about being lost in the shuffle, I'd look for the smaller private schools or smaller state related schools and see what they offer.
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