Colleges That Offer Small Classes on a Budget

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acai berry diet pills in stores of 11:28AM May 19, 2010

US News and World Report ranks everything and I sometimes wonder how accurate or true their information really is when it comes to plopping institutions into categories. I have noticed this with their Top Hospitals ranking too - often the decisions make zero sense.
In this case, how can they call UCLA or U Cal Berkley "Most Competitive" when both colleges have such a huge student population base and they are both state universities? They cater to all levels of academic ability and their teaching staff is just as good as those on the other side of the country, in the SUNY system of NY State.

Souzie of FL 1:46AM May 09, 2010

The University of Montana Western richly deserves the recognition it has received by U.S. News and World Report. After a 15-year struggle, the campus became the first public baccalaureate university in U.S. history to adopt an immersion-learning scheduling system where students take one class at a time for 18 days (yep, we stole it from CC). We have come from nowhere to recently rank as the 18th best baccalaureate campus in a 15-state region of the west, and our efforts were acknowledged by the Carnegie Foundation and CASE with the U.S. Professor of the Year award for baccalaureate campuses, given to one of the original "block heads" on the faculty (me)!
The great story here is that faculty, with the support of a few key administrators changed an entire campus. Faculty relinquished the podium and now work in an aboriginal learning relationship with students on projects that make a difference to society. The environment of this change was most improbable. We are talking about a campus in a highly conservative environment (politically and locally), with little money, little support for change, low salaries for all employees and downright hostility from every direction to change of any kind.
This is a great story in American higher education just waiting to be told and assessed. The learning outcomes and student satisfaction surveys that we have conducted show phenomenal early results (we adopted this in 2005). However, an exhaustive assessment of learning, faculty reaction and leadership processes that allowed this to happen are all just waiting for some bright folks to grab this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for educational research.
To learn more, check us out on the web (http://www.umwestern.edu/) or drop me a line for reprints of a recent paper on this historic transformation. Thanks.....Rob

Rob Thomas of MT 12:24PM February 02, 2010

Liz in LA asked:
"Do these numbers include graduate seminars, or do they reflect only undergraduate courses?"
Since New College of Florida has no graduate students, all classes at NCF are taught by professors, almost all of whom have terminal degrees in their fields.
I'd attribute NCF's "more selective" rating rather than "most selective" to NCF's relatively high acceptance rate. That acceptance rate is due mostly to the fact that few applicants without the qualifications to gain admission to NCF actually apply to NCF. Florida's big state universities are inundated with unqualified applicants, thus, their lower acceptance rates.

First Year's Dad of FL 6:11PM December 01, 2009