Staff Editorial: The cost of inflation

When the state announced the first university budget cuts, the university's top administrators had an air of resilience. They were prepared. When the state cut $12 million of the university's funding, Mote reminded everyone that it was no surprise. He was the president, and he had a plan — he had instructed every department to hold about 1 percent of their state-allocated funding to minimize the offset of any cuts. But as time has passed and the budget news has gotten progressively bleaker, the faculty and administration's stoicism has given way.

"[The budget cuts] threaten everything we've created in the last two decades," said history professor Ira Berlin, who also serves as chair of the committee to reevaluate CORE. "They put us at risk." So as the budget shrinks by tens of millions of dollars, it's no surprise that the university is likely to fire adjunct professors, and that class sizes are likely to increase as a result. Increasing the size of classes is obviously undesirable, but if done carefully, it might not enormously erode the quality of education that the university has striven so greatly to achieve.

It may come as something of a surprise that research examining the effects of larger class sizes in colleges and universities has produced mixed and inconclusive findings. There are studies that have found the expected results — bigger classes result in worse student performance. But the results aren't uniform. First-year students and lower-achieving students suffer more from larger classes. On average, they earn lower grades and are more likely to drop out. But another study followed nine sections of a statistics course at the University of Louisville, and found that class size did not affect grade distributions. There was even a study of economics classes that found student performance improved in larger classes.

The mixed results of studies suggests that the type of class being enlarged plays an important role in determining how students' experiences are affected. Bumping up an economics lecture from 200 to 300 students might not really change one's experience. But doubling the size of a 20-person seminar in French language and literature might radically change the learning experience, since having the opportunity to speak is a critical component in  any foreign-language course. That's probably why humanities professors have been especially vocal about the risks of increasing class sizes.

This week, The New York Times reported that retail professionals are predicting the lowest sales of the back-to-school season in over a decade. Cross your fingers, but there's not much reason to believe our economic woes will be gone by springtime. If increasing class sizes becomes necessary next semester, we hope administrators invest a serious amount of effort in deciding how to go about doing so. They shouldn't tell every department to cut five sections and shuffle classes together. Administrators should talk to faculty and students and sift through grade data. They might want to add some questions to the end-of-semester evaluations related to class size. Find out when size matters.