A sense of scale, public vs. private universities

People generally understand the difference in governance between public and private schools, but they might not always realize the difference in scale. State universities educate many more people (20,000 – 40,000 students) than private universities do (1,000 – 7,000 students).

Another difference among schools (public or private) is whether or not there is a medical school. If there’s a medical school, then there is also probably a hospital. And if there is a hospital, there is probably a medical network. Often the medical personnel outnumber the professors. For example, in 2021 at UCLA, there were 5549 people employed at UCLA with “nurse” in their job title, and 4474 people with “prof” in their title. And 1777 of those profs were in the hospital or medical school, so only 2697 were in non-medical departments (thus nurses outnumber them 2 to 1). I’m not picking on UCLA– it’s my alma mater and I’m quite fond of it. You can look up similar numbers for other universities.

There aren’t a lot of top-tier research universities left without medical schools, but some good ones remain: Princeton, Berkeley, MIT, Caltech, UC Santa Barbara, and Carnegie Mellon, to name a few. By the way, either of the two public schools on that list teach more undergrads than the private schools listed. Combined.