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If you really value faculty involvement etc, I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like. That's as opposed to relying on a proxy like student/faculty ratios, low rankings or being a state school. Each state runs its own state schools (and some cities like NY have their own) and have wildly different levels of funding and support for education. And being public does not make them immune from going the adjunct all the way route.

Student faculty ratios can be reported using "full time equivalent" faculty. Meaning, your class of less than 20 students might not have a more available professor, because they're actually also teaching at 2 other universities in the same system to make ends meet. It's not the ratio to the number of tenured faculty, adjuncts count.

For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

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BeetleB 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I might suggest focusing on finding out those statistics directly and getting a sense of what current student experiences are like.

And outside of liberal arts colleges, where are you going to get those statistics?

The places that openly boast these things tend to be very expensive, and hard to get admission into.

Certainly, if you have a shortlist already, you can email the department and ask for those stats directly. Most people don't have that shortlist, though.

> For class size, you can have dozens of small classes nobody takes, and have giant lectures for the core intro classes everyone takes. Then the average class size of the classes offered is quite small, but the average class size of the classes you take is quite large.

And that's why you look at the percentage of classes with under 20 students. It's certainly easy to find universities with as good a faculty/student ratio as what I posted, but with only 20% of the classes having less than 20 students.

Incidentally, if they have dozens of small classes, it's a good sign. A lot of departments will cancel a class if it has less than, say, 8 students.

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vikramkr 2 days ago | parent [-]

> where Talk to current students/forum/visit etc. If you're gonna spend 3-6 years of your life there it's worth putting in the legwork. And figuring out the amount taught by adjuncts etc - you can just ask.

and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game. You'd want to figure out what the sizes of the classes you actually take are.

	▲	BeetleB 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If you're gonna spend 3-6 years of your life there it's worth putting in the legwork There are over 500 public universities/colleges. Your advice is great after you've made a shortlist. My advice is on making the shortlist to begin with. > and on the percentage of classes under 20 - that's the exact metric I'm talking about being easy to game. Technically true, and overly pedantic. I'd put money that 90% of the schools that have that metric actually will have fewer students in the classes in the major of your interest (likely engineering). In the real world, these kinds of counterexamples you speak of are, well, the exception. Engineering is demanding, and many students drop out after the sophomore year. At least in my department, they had a very clear and open goal: If you don't do well enough in the introductory courses, you will simply be disallowed from taking junior level courses. You needed a B on a key (not easy) course, and a grade of at least 75% on that course's final exam. I sincerely doubt there are many (if any) universities trying to game that metric. Letting professors teach small classes is expensive. Which is why I said that if a university really has a weird distribution where there are lots of courses with a tiny number of students - that in itself is a good omen!