Business professor Kristina Gavin Bigsby says it’s harder now to be a student at the University of Iowa than when she was completing her own degree programs — four of them — at the university.
Costs are rising and students have more worries than ever, she said, and it’s not uncommon for Bigsby, director of undergraduate studies and associate professor in the Tippie College of Business, to get harried emails from students struggling to add coursework to what they’re already juggling.
Despite these issues, more and more students are turning to a UI education, with the university welcoming its second-largest incoming class ever of 5,561 undergraduate students this fall. Applications to the UI were also record-breaking, totaling more than 31,000.
When enrollment grows, class sizes — and the number of offered course sections — grow with it. While some departments might not be feeling the full brunt of the strain yet, faculty and graduate students say it’s getting harder to balance all of the work on their plates.
“We are going to do everything possible in our power to create value for students, because that is really our job,” Bigsby said. “But I think some people are starting to get burnt out, and I can’t blame them.”
Preparing for growth
Retention has grown alongside enrollment, with a 90.9% first-year retention rate representing a 5-percentage-point increase over the past five years, according to Tanya Uden-Holman, UI associate provost for undergraduate education and dean of the University College.
Uden-Holman said in an emailed statement that many university instructors, both faculty and graduate teachers, are using “evidence-based teaching practices proven to improve learning and engagement in large lecture settings.”
The UI’s Enrollment Management data team created “predictive dashboards” a few years ago, Uden-Holman said in her statement, that have helped the university prepare for enrollment growth by “anticipat(ing) student interest” and planning out staffing, course sections and classroom space.
“Guided by our institutional strategic plan, the University of Iowa has taken a proactive, data-informed approach to supporting student success in large-enrollment courses. This work includes advancements in predictive analytics, instructional planning, and faculty development to ensure that growing student demand is met with high-quality learning experiences,” Uden-Holman said. “We are deeply grateful to our faculty and graduate instructors, whose dedication ensures academic excellence across all course sizes.”
Support for both teachers and students is available through university programs like the Center for Teaching and Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology as well as supplemental instruction, Uden-Holman said, which are group study sessions led by students who already found success in the course before helping others.
Seeing student needs no matter the numbers
After Bigsby started as a full employee of the university in 2018, she taught a database management course with cohorts of between 100-150 students that is “pushing closer to the higher end of that range,” she said.
The Foundations of Business Analytics course Bigsby now teaches has just over 900 enrolled students — an increase of 300 students in just two years. No matter what struggles classroom leaders are going through, Bigsby said her first priority is to the students she’s teaching, whether there are nine or 900 of them in the course.
“How do I, even with 900 students, see them as individuals and see them as humans, and not just, you know, numbers that I have to get through the class,” Bigsby said. “Even in a quantitative field, I don’t see my students as just numbers and statistics.”
The differences between small and large courses are fewer than one would think, Bigsby said. She still approaches the course with the mindset of treating students how she wanted to be treated as a student, with flexibility and transparency. Overcommunicating with students about expectations, deadlines, course policies and the reasoning behind the concepts and skills she teaches them prevents panicked emails and other issues in the future.
Bigsby also makes all of the materials for the course, from instructional slides and presentations to data sets, practice problems and test questions.
Bigsby works with 10 teaching assistants for her Foundations of Business Analytics class, on whom she is “really reliant.” While no one teaches the teachers how to be managers when they have so many teaching assistants, Bigsby said she tries to make things as easy as she can.
In order to ensure there is consistency across the 20 discussion sections of the course, Bigsby started this semester filming herself going through the discussion topics for the assistants to reference or follow along with in their sections if need be.
“I try to lay out everything clearly for them the same way that I do for the students in the class, because at the end of the day, the teaching assistants are students as well,” Bigsby said. “This experience is a way for them to pay their tuition, but it’s also a way for them to learn and gain the skill set.”
Graduate student instructors deal with time constraints
For graduate students working as teaching assistants and in instructor roles, having more students could mean cutting back on other graduate work or working more than their allotted hours, all while many deal with financial and food insecurity, among other things.
Anne Moore, press and publicity coordinator of the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students (COGS), said the union has been hearing from its members “across the board” about increased expectations and workloads from more sections and more students. There is also the rule that most graduate workers are generally limited to 20 hours of work per week, but many employees don’t find it easy to stay within that limit.
“Part of that time is teaching, and then the rest of that time is meant to prepare for your teaching and to do grading and stuff. With these larger class sizes, people are finding that they can’t get the work done in 20 hours,” Moore said. “We’re only paid for 20 hours of work, so it’s sort of this Catch-22 for teaching assistants.”
Cary Stough, a teaching assistant in the UI rhetoric department, pointed out that graduate students are students as well as university employees and they have obligations outside of instruction in order to complete their degrees, like research or large projects.
In the rhetoric department, graduate workers teaching courses are “instructors of record,” Stough said, which means they create their own syllabi and other materials and don’t have the same relationship with overseeing faculty.
The idea of working just 20 hours a week is “kind of a joke” to graduate workers, especially those in rhetoric, as they steer more course sections and act as the first point of contact for more students, Stough said. The pay graduate workers receive is already inadequate enough to put students through financial uncertainty, Stough added.
“There’s no time to make a life, rather than make a living, outside of the university,” Stough said. “And those insecurity problems, those housing insecurity problems, those food insecurity problems, the lack of savings that we have because we’re paid so low is going to be exacerbated if the university decides to willy-nilly throw more work onto us.”
What UI instructors need to facilitate growth
As those tasked with teaching future courses brace for potentially higher enrollment in the future, Moore said she would hope that the university would grow graduate admissions alongside undergraduate, as well as raising graduate pay and hiring more faculty.
There are some “hard constraints” the UI is butting up against currently, Bigsby said, that would need to be dealt with if the university and its colleges want to keep growing.
The main one is simply space — where in the past university administration would aim for classrooms to be at around 90% capacity, now she said rooms are “busting to the gills” with students trying to find space. It’s not a problem that can be solved easily or quickly, Bigsby said, and so far everyone has been dealing with cramped conditions without issue.
In terms of offering support and resources, however, Bigsby said she’s much more interested in what would help students than what would help faculty. Bigsby said her department has used its own funds — and went over budget — to pay peer tutors to help students with certain introductory classes. It was good because it helped the students, she said, but the costs add up.
It would take thousands of dollars to offer programs like supplemental instruction and peer tutoring in every large class, but if the UI says it cares about students and wants to keep growing, Bigsby said they need to be “willing to put our money where our mouth is.”
“One thing about teaching a large class is you get ‘mean world syndrome,’ because you see a lot of problems, and it’s not that students in these classes are worse than other classes,” Bigsby said. “It’s not that they’re less prepared, it’s not that even a higher proportion of students in these classes are struggling, it’s just that there’s more students. And so if we can support the students, it helps me as the instructor, it helps everybody.”
Find this story at Iowa Capital Dispatch, which is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions:kobradovich@iowacapitaldispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: University of Iowa instructors feel strain of larger class sizes while supporting students
Reporting by Brooklyn Draisey / Des Moines Register
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