Increasing Lecure Sizes: The Solution or the Problem?

Ryan Kerns

College attendance is increasing very rapidly with the growing need for advanced workers in the 21st century. However, class sizes are also growing trying to make room for these increasing numbers. At first, this may seem like an effective way to go about accommodating the surplus in students. According to Matilde Pinto Machado in his study, Does class-size affect the academic performance of first year college students?, “Due to greater student autonomy, it is even possible that college students benefit from larger classes with stronger competition and peer pressure as well as a larger potential for interaction with other students.” However, many other studies have shown that in most cases, this can hinder a student’s learning ability by taking away personalized attention and the ability to ask questions. For example, my calculus and physics classes have about 200 students in each class, and according to Will Powers at the Associated Press, this is not uncommon. In fact, he claims that, “The National Center for Academic Transformation, or NCAT, estimates that the 25 most common college courses— in subjects like economics, English, psychology and the sciences — account for 35 percent of four-year college enrollment nationally. That means a lot of people are taking a relative handful of courses.” With this increase in the number of people, there is a decrease in the ratio of professors to students. This often causes them to lose essential personalized teaching that is needed to succeed at such a high level of learning. When trying to grasp a difficult concept, students tend to need to ask questions and explore the concept at a personal level. While this was easily obtained through small high school classes, it is a shock for students when they enter an auditorium full of 200 students seeking that same personal attention their freshman year. Making matters even worse, students often feel like they can’t ask any questions during a lecture without being ridiculed by the rest of their peers. This creates a huge problem because questions are essential to understanding new, challenging subjects, especially at the collegiate level.
All of these factors combine to make an already challenging transition even more difficult for students. So, why don’t colleges make more classes instead of making the existing ones larger when they know that it hinders the students’ learning? Or, better yet, how can colleges change the way professors lecture in order to engage the increasing number of students?