This improv class is a scam
I paid $300 for an improv class. It's a set of eight classes, two and a half hours each. The class has twelve people in it.
In our first class, I was only on stage improvising for about two scenes total, or about ten minutes (as a generous estimate) out of the two and a half hours. That's about 8% of the total class time. Even assuming future classes have 50% more improvisation time, that's fifteen minutes of improvisation time each class.
How can you improve at something by practicing it for fifteen minutes a week? You cannot.
Yet this is a mathematical property of the class structure. With twelve people in the class, and often just two people on stage at a time, at any given time you have a one in six chance of being onstage. So at absolute maximum, that's 17% of class time spent improvising.
The class I signed up for advertises in the course description that "you’ll get in lots of reps". But this is obviously not the case. An improv class that focused on getting lots of reps in -- indeed, a class that optimized to best prepare its students to be successful improvisers, would be structured very differently.
Consider this alternative: instead of 15 minutes over eight classes (for a total of two hours), I could hire a private improv instructor. This Reddit post suggests that the going rate for an improv coach is $50/hour. That means the same amount I paid for my class could instead pay for six hours of private coaching.
But of course you need more than one person to improvise. So say you have two motivated friends, now for that same price per person you have eighteen hours of private coaching. With the much smaller class size, you have a two in three chance to be on stage at any given time, so that by the end of this instruction -- for the same cost -- you will have spent 12 hours improvising. That's six times as much practice time as in the course I'm in, and with much closer instruction.
Why doesn't this happen? You could even pay well above market rate and still come out with a much better learning experience than a standard improv class.
I felt this way when I took a group swing dance class recently too. The class was extremely slow paced. I would have learned so much faster via private lessons, at minimal additional cost if split between me and a dance partner. At least that class suffered less from its size -- regardless of the number of people in the class, everyone can be dancing at the same time. The main thing you lose out on is individual instructor attention.
Improv is the worst-case for a group class, because only a subset of students can be practicing at a given time. And for economic reasons, class sizes will tend to increase until the maximum sustainable size. Group improv classes, then, seem on a purely financial and mathematical basis to be destined for failure.
Q: Have famous improv training programs like UCB solved this problem?