This enrollment increase, absent the addition of new faculty that would keep class size down, also coincides with the institution of stricter requirements to majors in law, jurisprudence & social thought (LJST), political science and, most recently, the development of increased requirements in psychology outlined this year. Some perceive these new requirements as the faculty’s efforts to reduce the numbers of majors in their respective departments and possibly responsible for enrollment increases in other departments, such as economics. “People have to major in something,” explained economics major Ben Bishop ’09. “If one department actively makes their requirements harder to discourage majoring in that subject, students will swamp departments with easier requirements.”
The new LJST requirements are considered particularly stringent and compel prospective majors to begin planning early in their college careers in order to fulfill them. LJST majors must complete LJST 1 and 10 before the end of sophomore year, take two junior seminars (one analytic seminar and one research seminar), five electives and LJST 77 and 78 towards the completion of an independent project analogous to a thesis.
Yet Chair of LJST Austin Sarat maintains his department did the right thing by restructuring its major for the class of 2008. “LJST reformed our curriculum to provide a greater focus on research, writing and analytic skills,” he said. Sarat thinks the restructured curriculum provides “an even greater payoff” for his department’s majors and the new academic experience is “even more intellectually intense, demanding and rewarding.” He added, “No one is barred from majoring in LJST,” but the increased requirements and necessary commitment to the subject nonetheless appear to have driven some students away from the department, as it now carries less than half of the majors it once supported. The department has also begun to cap its courses more strictly.
LJST’s new requirements, perhaps, are responsible for catapulting psychology from the third most popular major to the first. As a result, the psychology department introduced new requirements in January that will affect with the class of 2011. “We are sort of responding to what LJST did [because] we attract very similar students,” explained Chair of Psychology Catherine Sanderson, implying that her department hopes to reduce its number of majors. In addition to the previous distribution requirement, psychology majors must now complete 10 courses, pass a qualifying exam covering the material of Psychology 11 and Psychology 12 before declaring the major and enroll in either a senior seminar that includes significant independent research or complete a senior thesis. The lab course requirement has, however, been eliminated.
Similarly, political science, a discipline with classes that are sometimes cross-listed with LJST and attracts students with similar interests, has tightened requirements for its major beginning with the class of 2010, instituting distribution requirements within the major, a mandatory declaration of a concentration and 10 obligatory courses instead of nine. The Committee on Educational Priorities (CEP) is fairly lenient, giving departments the discretion to set their own standards.
Departments that attract similar social science-oriented students such as anthropology, history and sociology may soon see a greater influx of student enrollment. The increase is already most pronounced in economics, as it now carries 68 majors in the class of 2008 and 69 in the class of 2009, up from 51 for the class of 2007. “It’s unfair to the economics faculty that they are being burdened with more advisees and more students in their classes because other departments are pushing them away,” explained Bishop, who calls the recent trend of increased requirements in an effort to decrease majors an “arms race” and a practice that is “not sustainable” in the long run.
Chair of Economics Geoffrey Woglom disapproves of what he calls other departments’ efforts to “cherry pick the best students.” While his department understands the “temptation to say ‘let’s do something to get our workload down,’” it has resisted, he said, because of its commitment to providing access to its subject. In line with the College’s over-arching commitment to diversity, the department now teaches intensive courses for students with inadequate secondary school preparation in quantitative skills as a means of making the discipline more accessible to students from a wider variety of backgrounds and more disparate levels of education, even if it further taxes the department’s scarce resources. “It’s ironic that we’ve been trying to do what we thought the College wanted and as a result of that we’re not getting the resources we need,” said Woglom.
Majors such as Nathaniel Hopkin ’10 have found difficulty getting into capped electives in the department and find scheduling time to meet with advisors before pre-registration exhausting. “Frustrating” is how economics major Matt Stolper ’10 describes his experiences in the economics department. He considers increased enrollment a “huge problem” for both class size and advising. Stolper does not consider hiring more professors necessarily the best way to improve the situation. “The problem should be addressed by looking at the departments that have forced the crowding,” he said.
Time will only tell how the perceived crowding out effect continues to play out and whether or not the new political science and psychology requirements further influence student decisions. “It’s an open question, an interesting question and one I would like to look at with my colleagues, the CEP in particular,” said Dean of Faculty Gregory Call.
—Katie Guthrie contributed