It's the ratio advantage of the top ranked schools. Students have their papers marked up and ideas scrutinized in small classes led by relaxed faculty or sections led by outstanding graduate students with sunny dispositions and optimistic outlooks. You do your best if you are teaching three courses per semester, It's next to impossible to meet the needs of struggling and advanced students when your time is stretched. Students who don't need help often don't seek it until it is too late while the wealthier students are used to taking up the time of their teachers as they have been taken from one private, after-school class to another since early childhood (my older daughter attends two piano classes, two choir classes, two swimming classes and one math class per week; I suspect that she will have no inhibitions going to office hours). For the teachers it is actually a relief to have confident, ambitious, and well-prepared students take up your office hours, but you are always worried about the students who are not showing up for help. What is also making teaching difficult nowadays is the reduced attention span of students as a result of overuse of technology. It won't be long before all but a few students won't be able to read cover-to-cover big books such as the Bhagavad Gita or Smith's Wealth of Nations or Marx's Capital or Mann's Magic Mountain or Sen's Idea of Justice even if they were given inordinate time. Many students can't get off Facebook during lecture or turn off their cell phones in the library. Lakshmi
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