I was watching a video where they made a joke that implied that in american universities you have 800 people lectures. Like, actually 800 students in one classroom being taught by one professor.
Is this actually true? In my university we have 20 people classrooms and classes get pretty personal. Furthermore, the big 100 or 200 people rooms are used only to give talks about events.
However, that may be because I am studying pure math and we are actually a really small group. However, I've heard from other professors that the biggest faculty (business administration) has like 60 people classrooms at max.
Is this the reason that americans are getting dumber and dumber and ranking lower in science year after year? That in their universities, they are one head out of 500?
Have any of you ever been addressed by a professor in class?
>>7993663
And each one of those 500 kids is paying $20,000 a year and they probably have 20 more lecture theatres on that campus. You can see why the Jews tell kids to go to college.
>>7993675
This is what doesn't make sense.
They are paying like 50k per semester to learn Calculus I and the only benefit this could have is that they can ask questions to their professors, something they couldn't do if they self studied.
But how do you even ask? I mean, take a look at the picture in OP and tell me how the fuck do you ask a question when you are the guy sitting at the back?
You don't get a single benefit by going to such a class.
Also, with so many morons around you, that looks like a really bad learning environment.
>>7993687
That's not a calc class. More likely, that's an orientation seminar, or some kind of meeting of student government members or something.
We do have lecture classes that can get to like 100 students at some universities, but those are the most basic "intro to computers" classes.
>>7993663
The biggest classes I had in my undergrad were comparable to your pic (roughly 300). Those were typically gen ed classes like general physics and psychology that tons of people took though. Most of the classes I took for my major (also pure math) had around 10-20 people and at most 40 (stuff like calculus and statistics).
As an aside, those huge classes are a terrible idea. Everyone has there laptop out just like in your pic and spends the whole lecture browsing Facebook or playing on Steam. There's a reason why a lot of these huge classes have labs/recitations in smaller groups that essential retread the lecture material no one bothered to listen to in class.
>>7993663
Depends on how large the university is and the level of course. I knew a professor who taught at one of the largest universities in Florida for an intro level Classics course that had 800 students style. When he moved on to a more normal sized university the largest lectures could hold 200 people but only ever filled to like 125.
Most courses at a university are between 40-125 depending on the course taught and room given.
If you're going to a uni where lectures are 200+ you're either in a shit uni, it's a shit department or you're a nigger in a 100 course because you're too much of a spergimus maximus to do non-STEM work.
>>7993687
>They are paying like 50k per semester
Even Harvard doesn't charge that much, friend is there out of state and he pays 20k tops. Any normal sized state university you will only end up in like 25k debt at the end.
>how the fuck do you ask a question when you are the guy sitting at the back?
Just speak up a little louder than normal, the acoustics of the room allow sound to flow really well.
>Also, with so many morons around you, that looks like a really bad learning environment.
That's not what makes a bad learning environment, it's that in larger lecture halls 90% of the people are fucking off on their laptops and it can sometimes get distracting if in your peripheral view you have X-Factor, YT, and Fairy Tail all playing.
>>7993687
>They are paying like 50k per semester
At least have a little knowledge on the subject before you speak
>tell me how the fuck do you ask a question when you are the guy sitting at the back?
Happens literally all of the time, not to mention there is email, office hours with professors and teaching assistants, and small (15-20 students) recitations for these classes.
>Also, with so many morons around you
That's your own problem, because you're not better than all of them.
Classes of this size are incredibly rare, anyways. It's limited to intro level courses that a large number of majors require, and you can easily test out or come in with credit for these classes.
>>7993714
>At least have a little knowledge on the subject before you speak
The fact still remains that you are in debt
https://auzzybeardotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/bn-cu894_class2_g_20140515160833.jpg
Maybe you are not paying 50k per semester... but you are still paying too much.
>Happens literally all of the time, not to mention there is email, office hours with professors and teaching assistants, and small (15-20 students) recitations for these classes.
None of that compares to simply raising your hand and asking a question.
Also, in a group of 20 people usually about 3 - 5 have questions. In a group of 100 I'm sure at least 10 - 20 of you have questions. I'm sure you don't get time to answer all of them.
>That's your own problem, because you're not better than all of them.
I assure you that I am better than anyone who thinks that bringing their laptop to class is a good idea.
I finished my engineering major not to long ago and I can say it was a good investment relative to earning potential. But for MOST people going to college it is a BAD deal with a poor rate of return on original principal invested.
The college financial system is a joke, especially outside STEM.
See the other posters pictures for example.
They charge each student $1,500 for that 3-4 credit class. If you have 800 people in a single course then that one class just pulled in $1,200,000 for one professor to go through some power points and have the TA's do all the work of creating test material, administering tests, and sometimes teaching; sometimes the professors just has to endorse it with the seal of approval. ITS A BAD JOKE. Because then this class will have two other sections at different times in the same day, each with 800 students.
The college will make $3,600,000 from a single guy in a SINGLE semester who they pay $95,000 in salary. Not to mention that they get other ways to charge the students, like requiring books with online elements that require activation codes and new editions specialized to the school that can only be bought from the respective college's bookstore.
Its pure profit. It costs them nothing, but to justify it they fudge paperwork so it looks like this...
Teachers salary cost: 0.2%
(Required) Administrative and miscellaneous fees: 99.8%
--------------------------------------------------------------------
=100%
Cost controls are none existent. Plato and socrates use to teach outdoors in a field; I don't see why we can't do the same.
>>7993663
Go to a small college and then go to a top research university for grad school.
Large colleges are shit if you want to learn anything. They're great if you want resources for research.
>>7993732
>The fact still remains that you are in debt
I went through university without any debt, and most people I know did the same. Nobody in America (save for the extremely wealthy and few genuine dummies) is actually paying full tuition to attend out of state universities. Your chart is average debt per borrower, which tells you nothing about how much debt your typical college graduate accrues.
>Maybe you are not paying 50k per semester... but you are still paying too much.
You can't just claim some ludicrous number and then say "yeah well 50k is pretty much the same thing as 10k [which is still more than you'd expect to pay at a good state school]."
>None of that compares to simply raising your hand and asking a question.
Like I said in the first 5 words of that sentence, people regularly raise their hands to ask questions in large lecture halls.
I swear people just make up shit they want to be true about American universities.
>>7993714
So you are effectively paying $20k to email someone?
>>7993663
The sadness is that with all the money that americans are charged, universities could easily split their big rooms into several smaller 50 people rooms. Actually, they could even build more rooms.
Then all they would have to do is hire more professors and then you could easily have smaller more personal groups that would benefit students.
There is already a guy who made the calculation that universities make like 3 million dollars from these classes, while they pay a professor about 100k. Build some walls to divide the big classroom into 4 smaller classroom and then hire 3 new professors to take care of the new groups.
It is as easy as that.
But cucks like >>7993744 would rather keep eating the shit he has been fed all his life.
I don't know if you are European or South American or Asian, but unless you are american, you will never understand how >>7993744 feels. He's been fed shit all his life, he can't even imagine how a good university even looks like. Let him be.
>>7993663
>100-800 people lectures
Freshman physics, calculus, gen chemistry, organic chem, and engineering classes are like that.
>20 people classrooms and classes get pretty personal
Upper lever math and science classes and engineering electives are like that.
>Have any of you ever been addressed by a professor in class?
Yeah
>>7993663
Introductory courses at my university take place in huge lecture halls. I just think it is to save money on professors. My huge lecture is split up into recitations each week so there is clearly the classroom space around campus to have 20 kids per class. These recitations are usually taught by adjuncts or TAs so it is not at a large expense to the administration of course. We don't learn anything in those recitations and it is once per week. This type of lecture environment is not conducive to learning. The students pretty much teach themselves. That has actually been the experience with all my introductory courses, even those in smaller classrooms. I would say it is a method to weed out people because the smart people will learn the material and pass and the slower students will drop out, but they curve these introduction courses like hell so their drop off rate isn't high early on. It is weird.
>>7993770
The problem is that my calculus one group was like that.
By the way, do you share calculus classes? Here, physicists have their own calculus, so do biologists and chemists, and everyone really.
I did a calculus for mathematicians only, and that is why the group was only like 15 guys. Do you not do this?
Do you mix majors? If so then that sucks because if we had done calculus with fucking biology majors then I doubt it would have been as fun and rigorous as it was. I mean, it was pretty much real analysis for babies, more than it was calculus calculus.
>>7993775
My lectures in big classes have ~110 people if that puts anything in perspective.
>>7993769
The worst thing about cucks is that they refuse to believe that they are being fucked over. When they raised tuition fees to £9,000 a year in the UK there were riots yet Americans say nothing when charged nearly £30,000 a year in some cases.
>>7993776
>do you share calculus classes
Kind of... physicists, chemists, engineers, and math majors share the full calculus courses while bio*, business, cs, econ majors usually take watered down courses. There's also a honors track you could substitute in that had 20~40 kids from various majors in it.
>>7993776
Yea beginner courses are usually mixed. Very few schools actually streamline you and let you jump into your major straight from Freshman year. Most unis have fluff courses you will share with people of other majors and even different colleges. There were people in the college of business in my calc class and I am studying to be an engineer.
Yuropoor here.
As a freshman math student at a pretty prestigious university we had lectures with about 100 people. Since then it got alot better, the more advanced lectures still had like 20 people in it.
Then I changed universities for my master's to a slightly less prestigious university and now I pray I won't be the only person showing up for lecture. Kidding aside though, we are usually 2-6 people for an advanced master's lecture.
>>7993663
>buying apple products with your student loans
Jesus fuck. I'd be buying the cheapest fucking thing possible so I have more money to pay back those shitty loans. Then again I'd never be so fucking stupid as to get a loan in the first place.
>lectures
That isn't even teaching. All you have to do it find out the requirements for skipping all this shit, learn it really well on your own time, then challenge the college for the degree (they will probably charge you a fee for the testing).
College in the USA is nothing more than a tuition farm.
>>7993663
Yeah it's getting to be a huge problem, there's a documentary (I think it's called Ivory Towers or something like that, it's on Netflix either way) something will give eventually and it'll either be universities or the so-called education bubble. My money is on the bubble.
>>7993795
>CS majors take a watered down version
For what purpose? Only reason I didn't double up math and CS was because I had a shit sophomore year and was 2 hours short on the math side. Couldn't just take a little longer because I ran out of scholarship. (Well 6 total short since I took another CS course since I knew I couldn't double major).
>>7993836
>Jesus fuck. I'd be buying the cheapest fucking thing possible
And you won't get laid.
>>7993706
I had a guy in orgo II lecture that watched porn on his laptop constantly
>>7993732
I bring my laptop to class and I have a 3.7 in biology bs. I don't browse shit while in lecture though, I use it for note taking as I can type 180wpm with few errors but I can't write more than 60 words a minute. When you get into 600 level immunology courses, you are going to need to write very detailed notes very quickly. What were you saying about how you view the world trough generalizations?
>>7993663
its true if you go to a shitty uni, personally the biggest class ive ever had was chem 101 just because so many majors require it.
ill annotate the rant about the education system lowering its standards further and further in america. basically everyone goes to college after high school now. in 10 - 20 years there will be no people to work maintenance jobs and trades because everyone thought a college degree would get them out of that. That's why there's so much entitlement today in our society (See: I have a biology degree and I only get paid $35k a year! WTF is wrong with this world???). people are applying an old model of success to the modern day. people bitch about no jobs in their fields. Soon there will be no jobs for anyone unless you are very competent. people will start to wise up on this again and in maybe half a century start seriously weighing the costs of college against the poor chances of getting a job. Unless something major changes, this is the direction I see the american education system going.
You can even observe the social effects on /sci/ and other internet boards if you look hard enough. People are already starting to realize again that a trade job makes good money without a college degree. History shows that if there is money to be made, people are going to flock to it just like with the
business degree
law degree
STEM degree
medical degree
and now the engineering degree. Yes, engineering has been discovered by the masses. my dumbass neighbor who has never taken beyond pre-calc in high school nor has shown any interest in physics or science whatsoever is starting a mechE degree next year because he wants to design cars (memes aside im not fucking kidding). The best way to be successful in your field these days is to be better than everyone else.
>>7993744
You are full of it, we wouldn't be more than 1 trillion in student loan debt if everyone was getting free rides here and there or somehow working through college and paying it off step by step. That guy might have been a dope but you are an out of touch elitist too.
>>7993744
>i went through university without any debt, and most people I know did the same
>no one is paying full tuition except the rich and the stupid
my school costs roughly $60k per annum to attend. its a private school, a great education, and its gotten me into multiple respectable grad schools for chemistry. I had large scholarships, awards earned along the way, and large reductions in cost of attendance along the way. I will be $60 - 70K in debt when I start grad school.
you are out of it if you think most people are on a full ride to school.
>>7993913
>>7993924
Admittedly, my state covers tuition for students above a certain GPA in high school, which was more or less everyone at my university. It probably is different in other places, so I am a bit out of touch. There's a real difference between getting a full ride and not having any debt, though.
>>7993931
state and GPA requirement? is it for a certain uni?
>>7993935
https://secure.gacollege411.org/Financial_Aid_Planning/HOPE_Program/Georgia_s_HOPE_Scholarship_Program_Overview.aspx
3.0 and they will pay your tuition at any public school in the state. I think now they pay a portion of the tuition if you're between 3.0-3.5 and all of it if you get a 3.5+, but they used to cover everything for anyone who got at least a 3.0 in high school.
>>7993663
I went to a pretty big university and for classes that most people take (ex gen bio, gen chem, pysch 101, physics, etc) you'd have maybe 100 people in that lecture. However once you got past the general stuff and get into what classes you actually need to major in you'd get around 20 people in a normal sized class room.
Part of the problem is that people just fuck around on their phones all day or sit on their laptops playing video games.
I'm an American university student. Most of my classes have 4-6 people. Classes like abstract algebra, real analysis, things that every stem undergrad takes. 4-6 people and my school has 24,000 total students (including grads). Pretty good I think.
I should add it's not just math. Anthropology classes, foreign language classes, all of them only like 4-6 people, sometimes 10 or even 20 but not too often.
Not sure what schools you're referring to OP.
>>7993663
>I was watching a video where they made a joke that implied that in american universities you have 800 people lectures. Like, actually 800 students in one classroom being taught by one professor.
We need more context than that. Anybody can say anything.
My mind is fuzzy on this and I could check but I'm lazy. When I was attending college, class sizes were never more than a few hundred students. Those type of courses were generally intro courses or mandatory gen ed courses. I was an engineer so class sizes in my major cut down rather easyily and quickly.
>>7993941
Jesus, thats good, and not that unachievable although competition must be insane however fuck man I'd almost move to Georgia to get that.
>>7993663
Not related to the thread, but is this macbook picture thing actually a joke ?
>>7993663
This seems like a good general for this question, if I have college questions, would it be best to ask them here, /adv/ or /hum/? I need advice on what to do with my life.
I have been unemployed 2 years and am bored. I and so I want to get a second bachelors in Anthropology B.Sc., trying to find out some things about it.
>>7993971
/adv/ is the right place.
Why would you want to get a B.S. in Anthropology though? That's really not going to help with your unemployment. I'm not just joking, it really sounds like you need to reconsider that decision, a lot.
>>7993971
Best not to ask them anywhere on 4chan
they aren't allowed here, /adv/ is a shit board, and if you're asking 4chan for serious life advice you have bigger problems that what the answer to your question is
>>7993941
>https://secure.gacollege411.org/Financial_Aid_Planning/HOPE_Program/Georgia_s_HOPE_Scholarship_Program_Overview.aspx
holy shit. so you basically get free university education if you live in georgia? is everyone there dumb or something? how many people would you say dont graduate with over a 3.0??
>>7993663
What the fuck do you think happened?
I used to go to school in Florida and they fucking curve everything while at the same time giving the Blacks extra attention and later on the fucking Affirmative action cancer lets even stupider motherfuckers into college.
The lighter you are the less oppression points you have.
And this is coming from a Hispanic
>>7993961
Is Georgia a nice place?
>>7993941
Where do they get all the money for this? Getting above a 3.0 in high school is not that hard. Was there another requirement requiring a specific score on standardized tests?
>>7994030
The US government is a bottomless pit of money. this is part of the reason why we Euros call you cucks for paying tuition
>>7993979
Most people I went to high school with didn't have any desire to even go to college. It's kind of sad.
>>7994016
If you have to live in the south, I'd pick Georgia. Lots of cool mountains and rivers and shit, along with the only actual city for hundreds of miles.
>>7994030
>Where do they get all the money for this?
It's funded solely by the state lottery.
>Was there another requirement requiring a specific score on standardized tests?
I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's about on par with getting a 3.0. Basically anyone going to UGA or GT got the scholarship.
>>7993984
What does your post have to do with OP's? Are you just mad that you did not get the preferential treatment you wanted?
>>7993862
Go to /g/ and ask them how they fared in calculus
>>7994119
That picture is sad and kind of makes me laugh. I probably wouldn't fare too well in a calculus class today either (though I'm not a recent graduate, I graduated a few years ago), but not because I don't understand it, but because I don't have all of the formulas memorized any more.
Personally I preferred math courses like abstract algebra, graph theory, linear algebra, and "discrete math." Those classes were more than just memorizing a formula.
>>7993663
I've heard stony brook has intro chemistry courses with over 2,000 students in a classroom.
>>7994041
Wow that's pretty neat
>>7993740
I paid over $5,000 per class at a top 10 university. $1,500 would be a steal. Due to this I'm not attending that university next semester
>>7993663
I was at UC Santa Cruz for Physics. My largest class was gen Chem, about 450 people. Smallest was Solid State Physics, about 25 people.
>>7993744
Holy piss you Americans are blind.
There's a faggot on here who had a big rationale about how because there was no interest until you graduated you weren't really in debt.
At 20k a semester I would either kill myself or just go to a trade school.
>In EU
>Top Uni in my country
>Maths classes are around 15 people tops after the second year
>Government gives me 650 euro a month because I live far away
>Spend about 200 a month on transport and food since I can afford subway every day and the rest on whatever I want
>Top of class
>Paid work placements coming up soon
>Pretty damn happy with myself
>>7993866
Not him but that was the worst post I've seen this year.
Fuck you
>>7993663
the only classes at my school that were huge 100+ ones were the freshman courses like calc and gen chem.
once you got into your major specific courses it shrank down to 24 per class.
>>7993908
>starting a mechE degree next year because he wants to design cars (memes aside im not fucking kidding)
I know three people who done this.
They dropped out though kek
>>7993908
>my dumbass neighbor who has never taken beyond pre-calc in high school nor has shown any interest in physics or science whatsoever is starting a mechE degree next year because he wants to design cars
these guys wash out or end up as cost analysts.
engineering takes talent, and if you don't truly have the aptitude for it, you will be a cubicle shitter for your entire career.
>>7994502
america has a lot of extreme outcomes. there are kids getting wrecked by student loans but also top students who pay nothing to attend top universities. universities staffed by best top of the world in their respective fields. universities with huge sporting events, massive amounts of expensive campus amenities, luxury dorms subsidized by the psych majors, great career placement track records, and so on.
>>7993663
not an american
where i live the libertards elected liberal government that froze tuition raises without tax raise
now the university is getting budget cuts across the board, including the fucking science faculty, how the you fuck shit up so bad that the science faculty is getting budget cuts
now there are more students than instructors and you can even get into classes and graduate on time
liberals ruins everything, i'd rather take out more loans and graduate on time since i know i can climb the career ladder faster than these retarded sheeps that needs the government to hold their hands
