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The End of Small Classes as a Competitive Advantage?
Colin Kutchyera, PhD Student
Lakehead University
If you talk with just about anyone who works in one of Canada’s Post-secondary institutions, you’ll almost certainly hear about how challenging it has become for Canadian Universities to stay sustainable and attract new students. However, these challenges are not felt the same from institution to institution or province to province. The uniqueness of each university in Canada is a strength that is used as a competitive advantage to help compete for enrolment, but can universities actually use these advantages to control their own destinies?
While large and/or metropolitan universities in Ontario like Queens, the University of Toronto and Western can rely on their reputation and location for access to funds (students, alumni, donors, and research grants), smaller universities have different competitive advantages that they need to use to attract students. One of these has historically been the desirable trait of small class sizes and student-faculty ratios.
There are moderating factors that influence the effect of class sizes on student achievement (Gilbert, 1995), but overall, having smaller class sizes is widely considered beneficial. In an increasingly underfunded and competitive landscape, this is a very fragile, risky, but highly competitive advantage. Students like to get to know their professors! Nevertheless, faculties, no matter how healthy their enrolment is, are under intense pressure to “grow, grow, grow!”
Advertising small class sizes as a competitive advantage has become a bit murky. While such claims may be true for some programs not in as high demand such as, history or women’s studies (no disrespect intended), the continued pressure on increasing enrolment means that programs in STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), Education, or Business, have to make up for budgetary constraints. Ironically, at least in Ontario, Universities are allowed to charge higher tuition for these “in-demand” programs, meaning students are paying more money for a subjectively worse experience. Advertising low class sizes seems like an enticing marketing tool, but for the majority of students, this will not necessarily be reflective of their experience. Using this method of calculation, the experiences of 8 students in a class on 18th-century literature are given equal weight as the experiences of 250 students in a Basics of Management course.
While many educators may argue that adding more students changes the experience, there is a bit of a “law of diminishing returns” effect on adding more students once you reach a certain point. The difference in experience between a class of 20 and 40 is vastly more noticeable than the difference between 120 and 140. Even if you’re comparing a class of 350 at Toronto Metropolitan University to a “large” class of 100 at a smaller school, it seems comparatively smaller, but one might argue that the experience is not much different.
When resources are being severely constrained by senior administration, it usually means that full-time faculty vacancies are not being renewed. One of the selling points of smaller classes is that students get to know their instructors. Due to a reluctance to hire new faculty or even renew faculty vacancies, more and more courses are being taught by part-time instructors. First-year students may have little to no contact with anyone who is actually employed full-time in their faculty. A struggling student may walk by all of the office doors during their first year of study and not recognize a single name, even in a small school. While there are some benefits to having sessional instructors from industry teach courses (more relevant experiences, potential connections for employment, etc.), relying too heavily on part-time instructors creates issues with consistency.
Some schools may allude to their geographic location as a truly Canadian experience and consider it to be an advantage. But what is a Canadian experience? For international students who have never been to Canada, all schools are a Canadian experience. Canadian education is an experience. Canadian universities are brands whose reputations have been challenged because of their financial addiction to the moving goalposts of immigration policies and student visa allotments. When these macro-level factors take a hit, schools must rely on their own rankings, research prominence, proximity to industry, and alumni network to attract students.
If you know anything about how small schools operate, these aforementioned micro-level factors don’t bode well for them, but in fairness, the micro-level factors that larger schools rely on can be just as misleading. For example, institutional rankings take into account many factors that have absolutely zero impact on the classroom and learning experience. All schools, big and small, have a good collection of very strong researchers, but being a good researcher doesn’t necessarily make a good instructor and having a prominent researcher teaching a class of 350 means that most students will have very little opportunity to interact in ways that are personally meaningful. It’s also common for strong researchers and the top minds of a university to have course releases and not actually teach very often, if at all, in lower-year undergraduate courses. Proximity to industry can be a great opportunity, but perhaps a bit less valuable if you can’t afford to live in the city that you are going to graduate from.
Despite the caveats, many prospective students continue to place a high level of importance on factors like rankings (especially for international students), or reputation amongst their local network (Pizarro Milian & Rizk, 2018). So while these times are challenging for almost all schools in Canada and sacrifices must be made, smaller schools seem to face the biggest challenges to their identity. Maybe small class sizes aren’t as marketable as they once were, and if that’s the case then Canada’s smaller schools might have to do some soul-searching to rediscover who they truly are and what they do best.
References:
Gilbert, S. (1995). Quality education: Does class size matter? CSSHE Professional File. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED421026.pdf
Kanonire, T. (2017). How students choose the university: Personal and institutional factors. In K. F. Dowling & F. A. Ganotice (Eds.), World University Rankings and the Future of Higher Education (pp. 252–265). IGI Global. DOI: 10.4018/978–1–5225–0819–9
Pizarro Milian, R., & Rizk, J. (2018). Do university rankings matter? A qualitative exploration of institutional selection at three southern Ontario universities. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 42(8), 1143–1155.
