Thu 15 May 2008
If you are a reader of EphBlog and visiting Cambridge, MA, make sure to drop me a line. Lunch is on me! In that spirit, I am taking Sam and Anna (our Yale friends from this thread) out to lunch today. Got a question about life at Yale? Leave it in the comments.
I hope to get deeper into the issue of class sizes at Williams versus Yale. And, even better, I now have some data. Consider the distribution of class sizes from the Common Data Set from page 27 on these pdfs: Williams and Yale. Sure looks like Sam and Anna are right! Yale has 2.5 times as many students at Williams and 2.5 times as many classes with 19 or fewer students. Impressive! Given that reality, there is much less reason to recommend Williams over Yale then Williams over Harvard. Time for Williams to go lecture-less.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I’d be interested to hear what they have to say about alcohol issues.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Yale also has twice the percentage of classes with over 50 students and nearly three times the classes with over 100 students.
May 20th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
How was lunch? Anything interesting discussed? LG asked about their views about alcohol.
May 20th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
Apologies for the delay.
Lunch was great fun! Sam and Anna were quite charming, although I was forced go give Sam some pointers on better boyfriending. I did ask LG’s question about alcohol issues but Sam/Anna said about what you would expect: some kids get very drunk, some kids don’t and (from Anna) to anyone who grew up outside the US it all seems faintly ridiculous. They also mentioned that Yale still had fraternities (or at least a DKE House) and that the drinking there was legendary.
But mostly we discussed all the things that Williams could be doing to better attract international students (like Anna). She pointed out that the Admissions website and no student-generated content and that the whole thing was quite static. She thought that student blogging on admissions pages was great stuff. She also thought that the College could do more to send alumni to elite international schools.
All in all, we agreed about most things.