How does undergraduate teaching compare at Northwestern and Bowdoin?

For consistently accessible, professor-centered teaching in ordinary undergraduate classes, Bowdoin has the clearer advantage. Its liberal-arts structure, small enrollment, and absence of doctoral programs mean professors, rather than graduate teaching assistants, lead the vast majority of courses and are central to students’ day-to-day academic experience. Northwestern offers excellent teaching and outstanding faculty, but the experience is less uniformly intimate across departments and course levels.

At Bowdoin, smaller classes are the norm well beyond first-year seminars, so discussion, written feedback, and office-hour relationships tend to begin early and continue across a student’s four years. Faculty are hired and evaluated with undergraduate education as a core part of the institution’s mission, and students commonly take multiple courses with the same professors.

At Northwestern, upper-level courses and many humanities, social-science, and smaller major classes can be highly engaging and close-knit. However, popular introductory STEM, economics, psychology, and other high-demand courses may be large lectures, often with graduate TAs handling discussion sections, grading, or routine questions. Research-active professors can still be accessible, especially once you enter a major, but students typically need to be more proactive about office hours and finding smaller classes.

Northwestern’s scale does provide a much broader course catalog, specialized programs, and opportunities to learn from leading researchers. But for a student whose first priority is regular, sustained contact with professors in everyday classes, Bowdoin is more reliably built around that model.