Big or small? Public or private? Answer those two questions, and you'll cut your field of prospective schools in half. But where do you get the better education: a big state university or a tiny private college? The conventional wisdom: If you can get in and afford it, go small and private every time. Jennifer Anderson appears to be a case in point. After being denied admission to Amherst College, the elite liberal arts school of 1,600 undergrads nestled in tiny Amherst, Mass., two hours west of Boston, Anderson enrolled instead at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the public school across town. The price was right--she got a full waiver on the tuition at UM ass, which for the class entering this fall will be $9,008, compared with $30,780 at Amherst--but she was never quite happy on the sprawling campus, with its 18,000 undergrads, 26-story library, and cavernous lecture halls. In the end, she says, "I felt I was lost in a sea of faces."

Anderson vividly remembers the moment she decided to transfer: She was sitting in a 465-seat auditorium with no windows, "so huge that the students were passing around a microphone to participate." She reapplied to Amherst; accepted this time, she transferred midyear, as a sophomore. Her first class was in a tiny brick colonial, with 17 students sitting around a wide oak table; the professor was in the seat next to her and even asked her a question. "I could never have predicted that a five minute trip down the street would lead to a total college-life transformation," she says.

Unfair. But her own preference for a smaller school aside, Anderson insists that UMass gets a bum rap. "Academically," she says, "the schools aren't that different--blindfold me and put me in a lecture, and I'd have a hard time identifying which school was which." Sure, UMass kids have lower SAT scores, on average, than those at superselective Amherst (1140 vs. 1420). And partly as a result, "ZooMass" --as it's sometimes called--is perceived as much less rigorous. But professors who have taught at both agree that any differences between the two schools have more to do with size than with substance.

So what is the difference between what goes on at a large public university and a posh private college? Money plays a role, of course (UMass has more than 10 times as many students, but Amherst's $877 million endowment dwarfs the state school's $71 million). As does the institution's ethos: UM ass, as a public university, has a mandate to educate all qualified Massachusetts residents; Amherst, on the other hand, is practicing a much more old-fashioned form of liberal arts education, for a very different kind of student body.
But the differences don't end there. U.S. News sat in on introductory courses in psychology, biology, economics, and history at Amherst and UMass and talked to professors and students on both campuses.

Our conclusion: Size matters--and prestige can't be ignored--but there is more to big and small than meets the eye. The actual content of courses, for one thing, is quite similar. In a recent psychology class at UM ass, there are 450 students and, yes, the professor, Tammy Rahhal, is lecturing with a microphone. But she covers the subject matter--psychological disorders, in this case--with a detailed discussion, spicing things up by screening a brief example of obsessive-compulsive disorder from the film As Good as It Gets. The class isn't dozing: Rahhal is peppered with questions throughout ("Is there any treatment for that?" "Are there any racial or cultural differences between people who get it?"). Sure, there are a few hands in the back she seems to miss. But even though she's lecturing hundreds of kids with a range of abilities, "I definitely do not dumb it down," says Rahhal.

Across town at an Amherst intro psych class, 100 students sit in a lecture hall roughly half the size. The professor, Catherine Sanderson, is speaking about memory. As at UM ass, Sanderson asks questions and refuses to accept mumbled answers ("Not the muttering, not the muttering," she repeats throughout the lesson). She, too, turns to multimedia: There is a video on psychology and the law, about how eyewitness "memories" of events are often inaccurate.

"The knowledge is the same," Sanderson concedes, whether you're at a public or a private school. Indeed, some psych classes at UMass and Amherst use the exact same textbook. "We're doing the same thing," says Elizabeth Connor, a biology professor at UMass, "we're just doing it with more people in the classroom than they are."

Many more. Only 4 percent of the courses at Amherst have 50 or more students; at UMass, 15 percent do. Two thirds of Amherst classes have fewer than 20 students--at UM ass, a third do. Of course, huddling around a small table with a dozen other students doesn't instantly equal a better education. But small classes do mean more discussion and more access to professors--which can be the difference between understanding a subject and just sliding by. At UM ass, "you really have to bug the crap out of your teacher to get noticed," says George Kennedy, who is beginning his sophomore year. "It's a lot easier to fall behind in a big class if you don't have the professor staying on you." At Amherst, student-professor relations are built into the system. "There is no getting around it when you see your professor," says Anderson, "no smile and nod and hope he doesn't see you. He's going to recognize you and ask if you need help."

"Clearly, it's a challenge. I don't think anybody wants to teach a large class with 300 people," says Richard Rogers, a statistics professor at UM ass. Rogers offers a weekly lunch he calls Pizza With a Prof, where he and a different set of a dozen students each week meet over a slice to try to get to know each other. He also holds special classes every Saturday for anyone interested in spending more time with professor and subject. Technology helps, too: In some 41 courses at UM ass, students purchase small, hand-held wireless transmitters called Personal Response Systems that they take to every lecture. During class, professors will put questions on the board, students punch in their responses on their PRS s, and the answers are instantly projected onto the screen. "There's always going to be advantages in a small class," says Norman Aitken, an economics professor, "but this offers as much interaction as you can get in a big one." Indeed, a few PRS quizzes into a class, and the hands start going up. "Coming into a class like this with all these people I was pretty intimidated," says Stephanie Fougy, now a junior, of her 300-person econ lecture. But with the PRS, "there comes a point where you know you're not alone, right, because you just saw 200 people answered the same way you did."

UMass also has a 2,800-student honors college, which administrators call their own "high-end liberal arts school." The college takes 500 high school grads every year--requirements are a 3.5 GPA, 1300 SAT, and graduating in the top 10 percent of the class--along with any students who maintain a GPA above 3.2 in college. Perks include more small classes and closer contact with profs. "The other thing that makes an honors course an honors course," says Linda Slakey, the college's dean, "is that it's full of other honors students."
And there is the rub. No matter how successful UMass professors are at educating their students, the fundamental difference between Amherst and UMass eventually rears its head: student ability. "Look, our admissions office skims the top 1 percent of people in the country," says Richard Goldsby, an Amherst bio prof who teaches at both schools. Amherst kids are admitted precisely because they are highly motivated learners with strong backgrounds. And studies show that stronger peers tend to enhance performance; weaker peers impair it. UM ass, by its very nature, cannot use tough admissions criteria, and thus "there are some students who can't do the work," Goldsby says. Which isn't to say there aren't UMass students who are as gifted as those at Amherst--there are just a higher proportion of them at Amherst.

Diversity. That said, the distinctions diminish somewhat after the first year. "It's definitely demoralizing as a freshman to have to sit in those big rooms," says Kazem Edmond, a recent UMass grad, "but then all of a sudden you're in quantum physics with a class of eight." Sophomores find that profs are, in fact, sometimes accessible, and they revel in the greater student diversity found at a state school. They also begin to see UM ass's size--with nearly 100 different bachelor's degree programs--as a positive. According to a survey of students conducted in 2002, fully 86 percent of UMass students were satisfied or very satisfied with their academic experience; 76 percent with the size of classes; 81 percent with the accessibility of faculty. After graduation, 18 percent of UMass students in another survey had plans to go on to graduate school in the fall; more than a third thought they'd be back in the halls of academia again within two years. (At Amherst, only a fraction more--21 percent--planned to stay in school.)

Bottom line: Both schools have their perks. "Sure, when you go to Amherst, there's this sigh of relief: It's not crowded; computers are available. UMass feels more like the U.S.S.R. --long lines everywhere, you know?" says Alma Gottlieb-McHale, a 2004 grad. "But I would never trade my experience at UM ass. Part of education is figuring out how to work through the system." And there's an added bonus: UMass and Amherst have an agreement with three other area colleges that allows students to take classes at other institutions. For UMass kids, that can mean as many as 10 small liberal arts classes for that same state-school price.
Jennifer Anderson, for her part, believes the difference comes down to how you want to learn. "I needed a setting that was closer to a family dinner table than a concert," she says. If you can learn over the blare of the speakers, however, you might save yourself a lot of money.