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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?
it's a reality - but it may not be across the board
A lot will depend on what you are studying and where you are studying it
If you are at a flagship state university with incoming classes of 10,000 students you are going to see more of these mega rooms than if you are at a small schools with a 1,500 student body total
This is something you can research as you get into your coursework
At my university the standard classes often were in lecture halls if the type of course fit for it .... then if appropriate there would be a lab breakout that same week which would go over some of the coursework associated with the lecture in a smaller environment (for example, a statistics class would have the main professor give a tuesday lecture to all students taking stats at that level, then on thursday you would meet with a different professor, grad assistant, etc to work through some problems and the application and reinforcement of that lecture)
Also, you can check into how often professors keep hours - this provides an opportunity for some 1 on 1 time if you need it outside of the lecture
Then for the more detailed classes, higher level classes in my major or classes where it just wasn't practical to have a need for a lecture then it would be in a smaller class setting
If you go to a large school, SOME classes, especially those that are mandatory for a large number of students, may have lots of kids in class. At my school many years ago, freshman chemistry had 300+ kids in the lecture. The required chemistry lab on the other hand had just 20 kids.
Class size shrinks quickly as you move further into your major. Most of my computer science classes had 20-30 students. I don't remember many junior/senior level classes that had more than 30 students.
Thanks for clearing all this up, really appreciate it.
I was sort of looking into either Dixie State in St George, or Southern Utah U in Cedar City.
I regularly haul loads past these two places and see advertisements touting "public value, private attention".
If this is truly the case and there are more like this, then suddenly I don't feel so down about my educational prospects.
Like I said in other posts, driving the truck is okay for now, but I'm looking to get additional tools under my belt as well.
If you can spare an hour when you pass by, setup a campus tour - there you'll get to see the facilities and talk to a couple of students (who are there to help sell you on the university, but can still provide some good information)
you'll get to see some of the classrooms, etc in most tours
What's interesting is the student/faculty ratios on these schools are fairly high - but the average class size isn't bad and the percentage of courses with greater than 50 students is pretty low
compared to the university of utah which has a much better student/faculty ratio - but 15% of classes have more than 50 students
I doubt there are any universities where such huge classes are the norm. I attended a very large public university, and while some of my classes were large, the majority were not. The big ones are almost always the intro courses, and those are supplemented with smaller recitations or labs where you have the chance to go over the material in a smaller group setting. Since presumably you'll be able to skip many of those classes (through transfer credits), you'll be quickly getting into the upper-division courses, which are far more likely to be much smaller. I don't know about the schools that you're looking at specifically, but I don't believe any of my upper division courses had more than 40 students, and most had far less.
No, even at large universities, only intro-level classes (for example, English 101) or cross-majored classes have 100+ students. Especially for your major, your classes will probably not be more than 25 students; grad level courses usually don't have more than 15.
In fact, this is how universities ideally operate: the more specific the content, the harder the classes and the fewer the students, a trend that culminates in a dissertation [at the PhD level] in which you are completely solo (save for your advisor).
Stereotype all the way. It depends where you go, but the largest classes are usually going to be those with separate labs, like the Sciences, or maybe some of your electives. I went to a school that has a student population of 30,000 and the only large classes I had were Biology. Every other class allowed you to get to know all your classmates and your professor knew if you were ditching.
I went to a "college" so it technically was not a university. Most of my engineering classes were 15-25 students. I only had a few lecture hall environments in freshman year (staple classes like Chemistry and Physics 101). I was taught 100% by professors. No teacher's aides, ever.
For whatever it is worth, I'd estimate my college had a total of 3000-4000 students.
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