When I was a student at Stanford, I had some incredible professors and seminars, but these classes were often the exception; more often, I ended up with faculty who put little time into their teaching and it showed. Classes were often disorganized, the professors were disinterested, and this resulted in unengaging academic experiences where my peers and I learned material, but a lot was left to be desired. Today, I am a professor at a liberal arts college where innovative teaching and student engagement is central to our mission. But, I have long wondered how representative my own experiences have been in higher education.
New data from College Pulse’s Students Views on Faculty survey suggests that it is. Roughly 2,000 current students at 120 schools, ranging from national liberal arts institutions to community colleges and national and local universities, were explicitly asked a series of questions about their professors and classes and the data show that learning experiences between liberal arts schools and universities are significant.
As an example of these differences, the survey asked students to comment on how engaging the lectures and classroom assignments are on their respective campuses. It turns out that students who are enrolled in liberal arts colleges—institutions that explicitly pride themselves on teaching and student-faculty interaction—rate the teaching and classwork highly; 84 percent state that it is excellent or good. For students in universities today, the figure drops significantly to just 67 percent.
Digging a bit deeper, for students at top-25 liberal arts schools per US News, the figure is 92 percent positive and barely drops for the top 100 schools at 90 percent. Regional liberal arts colleges are lower at 74 percent, but these figures are consistently higher than university student attitudes toward their teachers and classes. Among the top 25 universities, nearly two-thirds of students (74 percent) positively rate the teaching, but that figure drops to just 65 percent when the next 75 schools are included. This is an appreciable division between colleges and universities here.
Considering academic rigor, 91 percent of liberal arts students rate their schools positively compared to 82 percent of university students. Among top liberal arts colleges, there is little slip, too—93 percent of those in the top 25 and a higher 97 percent for the next 75 schools rate rigor as very good. Universities look a bit different, with rigor declining based on ranking; 89 percent for the top 25 and 81 percent for those ranked between 26 and 100. So, the liberal arts collegiate experience is clearly more consistent than those who are attending universities.
Finally, when it comes to faculty making connections with their students, which is what often cements learning and academic growth, the college-university cleavage emerges once again; 72 percent of students at liberal arts schools believe that faculty connect well with their students and this appreciably drops 15 points to 57 percent at universities.
At the top 25 universities, 53 percent of students rate their faculty as good or excellent at connecting with students. That figure climbs to 60 percent at universities ranked 26 through 100, but then falls back to 55 percent at schools in the 100-plus range, suggesting that even universities with lower reputational status regard connecting with students as a lower priority than liberal arts colleges do.
Regional universities score the highest here, with 68 percent of their students believing that faculty connect well with them. This may be due to the fact that research is a much smaller focus at these schools, many of whose faculty buy into the mission of transforming lives through education and, thus, want to deeply connect with students.
At liberal arts colleges, however, 68 percent of students at top-25 schools say they have good or excellent connections with their professors. At colleges in the 25–100 range, that figure shoots up to an extraordinary 93 percent. This may be the case because while scholarship remains valued at lower-ranked liberal arts schools, the lessening of research as a priority, alongside support for student growth, creates a culture of teaching and engagement in the classroom—and, thereby, of intimacy.
The data demonstrate that my own experiences are fairly representative of where liberal arts colleges offer a notably more student-focused experience where teaching and connecting with faculty is far more common than at universities. This is not to say that students cannot have deep relationships and wonderful professors at universities. Many universities have focused on increasing the number of seminars and creating first-year studies programs to address concerns with teaching and retention over the years. However, it is more likely that one will find faculty more committed to teaching on liberal arts campuses. These real distinctions are not just observations that dot school advertising materials but potent and meaningful educational realities for undergraduate students today.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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