Letter from Chip Northrup

What Yale Study Isn’t Telling You

Yale University, from whence such local luminaries as Rhyming Waldo Johnston and Helpful Harry Levine came, has just finished a comprehensive analysis of how colleges are in part to blame for the current crisis in higher education (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?smid=em-share). What the report evidently did not address was one fundamental flaw in the business model of large universities.

Studies have shown that, on average, the most productive college educations come from smaller schools—with better teacher/pupil ratios—such as our local Hartwick College, Hamilton College and Colgate University.

The dirty, not-so-secret business model of large universities is that they use grad students as teaching assistants (TAs) to class sections of a much larger lecture hall class. So if you take Geology 101 (aka “Rocks for Jocks”) from Professor Famouso, you go to a lecture hall once a week with a full professor, then go to a small section class taught by a grad student that can barely speak English and is constantly looking for the white-board eraser.

This TA is getting paid minimum wage, so this is a profit center for the university. If you took a chemistry class at SUNY Oneonta, you would get a professor—like Ron Bishop who, I would argue, can speak English and find an eraser at the same time.

This small class size model was, in fact, the basis of Yale’s success—well over 100 years ago. When Waldo and Harry were there with Teddy Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The universities that can deliver those smaller class sizes are colleges that do not have graduate schools and some state-run universities.

The best investment in higher education is in small colleges, some online courses and enlightened public universities that can offer smaller class sizes taught by professors. The Yale study left that bit out.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown