Honey, I shrunk the class!

While many of us bemoan Columbia’s course registration process, we often forget the schedule troubles that we faced in high school. Those were the days when the number of class choices was only in the dozens, when taking a “regular” class might encumber one’s GPA, and when some of us were never able to take physics since state enrollment caps prevented us from getting into the class (Physics for Poets, here I come). For years, I had felt the blow of class-size laws as they stopped me from getting into desired courses and caused administrators to scramble to meet impossible standards. I just didn’t get the fuss.

Over the past several years, the issue of keeping class sizes small has been the centerpiece of the national education debate. The 2001 No Child Left Behind act ended the $4.1 billion class-size reduction program, bringing the issue to the forefront of the past decade’s deliberation. In 2009, President Barack Obama’s secretary of education Arne Duncan unveiled Race to the Top, a $4.35 billion education competition between states that included class enrollment caps as one of its primary criteria for funding evaluation. Today, despite a continued push for smaller classes, New York City schools are facing the highest number of oversized classes in a decade, with over 7,000 classrooms exceeding their contractual enrollment limits for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Why all of the attention? Perhaps it is because the question of reduced class sizes doesn’t have an easy yes-or-no answer. While hundreds of research studies like Project Student Teacher Achievement Ratio have focused on the benefits of smaller class sizes, the results have been mixed and inconclusive.
Even in studies that have shown an overwhelming correlation between reduced class size and student performance, confounding variables are rampant. Comparing data from schools with smaller class sizes to schools with higher caps often involves a direct comparison between affluent schools that have the resources to reduce size and indigent programs that can’t even afford to preserve the status quo. Moreover, schools often reserve smaller class sizes for students with behavioral problems or on the ESOL track, so poor performance from students in smaller classes is probably a better reflection of outside factors than it is of the effectiveness of a lower student-teacher ratio.

A reduced ratio also comes with an immense cost. In May, the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution reported that “increasing the pupil/teacher ratio in the U.S. by one student would save at least $12 billion per year in teacher salary costs alone.” Since the evidence doesn’t say that smaller class sizes are inherently more conducive to learning, there is a prodigious incongruity between expenditures and efficacy. At a time when budget crunches have left no state unsullied and schools have had to cut back on textbook purchases and arts programs in order to fulfill class-size requirements, the fact that legislation has been based on inconclusive evidence is troubling.

Yet none of this seemed to matter before I came to college. Spoiled by contained class sizes, I had never seen why the idea of adding a few extra students was branded as so deleterious. Then I was introduced to my first lecture-hall class. While my professor was engaging and the material was interesting, I couldn’t help but feel like I was missing out on something as I was instructed from 15 rows below. I realized how lucky I had been and how lucky I am.

Columbia’s undergraduate students are incredibly fortunate to have the support of an administration that sees the importance of small classroom learning. The 22-person Literature Humanities course tucked away in Hamilton is an unthinkable anomaly within an American university system dominated by colossal lecture halls. Yet the advantages that we have in some classes show us where we still have room for improvement in others. When large lecture classes exist, departments make an effort to include supplementary TA-led discussions. However, this system leaves much to be desired. For one, the quality of TAs varies greatly across the board, leaving two students enrolled in the same course with very different classroom experiences. Moreover, this arrangement detaches learning from discussion. Physically separating the introduction of the material from critical discourse engenders an education barrier—in effect, we are taught that learning and thinking are two distinct processes.

The recent commitment of the Committee on the Global Core to include more seminar-style courses and to tighten enrollment is a harbinger of good things to come. It is an issue that certainly needs to be discussed in other classes, notably Frontiers of Science, which has made a laughable attempt to have half of the first-year class attend a weekly lecture. Five weeks of college have taught me something that education research in elementary and secondary schools has yet to confirm—size matters.

Jared Odessky is a first-year in Columbia College. He is the CCSC Class of 2015 president. Worm in the Big Apple runs alternate Tuesdays.