Happy First Day of Classes

UCF’s enrollment could have increased to 50,000. Because of budget cuts and bad priorities, this may result in even larger than usual class sizes.

In related news, U.S. News & World Report's college rankings have come out and Rollins gets a lot more love than UCF. I’m not a huge fan of Rollins. It has always struck me as a post secondary playpen for the dumb children of the very rich (Bret Easton Ellis takes a great dig at Rollins in his novel American Psycho). However, to give Rollins credit, they do seem to make the most of their small class sizes. Their students have homework, multiple papers, and lots of interaction with the instructors. In contrast, UCF’s students often have large lecture classes with only a few multiple choice exams. Although it is a question of opinion, it seems almost indisputable that the former is a better method of education than the latter.

The sad thing is that it didn’t have to be this way. If Hitt had not had such a boner for growth at the expense of everything else, he could have been presiding over a still large school where students attend reasonably sized classes at an academically respected university.