I get the numbers pressures. I played them for years, teaching — and reading papers in — courses of 90+ students, once in a course of 150 (Greek Myth), Bio 101 style, though I (in contrast to my Bio 101 colleagues, who co-taught and tested in ways that made everything zip by, by their own accounts) read (and commented extensively on, I hope, helpfully) every one of the several papers each student wrote, plus their finals.

In the 70’s and 80’s, we in certain fields taught in large courses to “justify” teaching, say, 10 students in beginning Greek, five in an advanced course. (In practice, I doubt any of my colleagues in “high enrollment pressure” departments had the faintest idea how many hours it might take to prepare one advanced Greek course, class by class, whether with 5 or 10 or 50 — hah! — students.) Though I do prefer preparing for such an advanced Greek course to reading a hundred, or even just twenty, translation-course 101 papers. Another story.)

Or, we could just have a college that offered nothing but Econ, Bio, History, and English. Why not? Enrollment and consumerism — YES!

I know you do not want this, but it may result from some of your thinking, if we’re not careful. It WAS the result for a while! We’ve been this way before, after all — “go by the numbers” in the ’70’s and ’80’s. That approach created, and would create again, its own distortions, serious distortions. We should all proceed with care on this front. That’s all I am saying. I am not challenging the enrollment pressure problem for certain departments, or the authors’ arguments (which I have already referred to my colleagues for reading).

Sure, they make such experiences more likely. But the point the authors are making is they make those experiences more likely on a very inequitable basis. If you have a department that’s getting hammered by enrollment pressure, the students in those much larger classes are thus less likely to have the high-impact experience that the authors say makes such a difference.

Of course, “small” is a relative term, depending not just on general type and level of course but also on field. For instance, foreign language teaching has limits on the number of students you can teach effectively that might astound a Bio 101 prof.

Lots of apples and oranges here. Liberal arts should revel in apples and oranges? Yes.

We’ve structurally built in some small classes to our English majors, but they don’t take them until they’re seniors.

Within a single institution and major isn’t it likely that all or most students get the chance to have the small class experience? If there are 50 person classes and 5 person classes, aren’t we likely to see Seniors (let’s say) get 5 person classes in their majors while the gen ed classes taken by underclassman are going to have 50. Over a single college career this should even out even if at any one time it is uneven. And are there reasons to believe that only the privileged get 5 person classes? Hence the elitist claim. I can see privileged professors getting them but do only privileged students get them as well? I honestly don’t know.

Also, I graduate from a SLAC and I can only remember one class that had as many as 50 people, an introduction to Micro-Economics. I also remember zero classes with fewer than 10 students outside of the “project” classes that I took where I did my archival research. I remember 10-25 students in every class and that was pretty standard across the board from Fresh seminar to Gen-eds to upper level classes in my major. Is that because I was a humanities major (history)? Is Hamilton different in this regard? I ask because it would appear that if my memory is correct then the elitist claim of the small classes would be severely mitigated.