Many institutions react to program capacity issues when they become a crisis status (often only a week or two prior to the start of an academic term). For those institutions, options are limited (e.g., adding a handful of sections that can be taught on an adjunct basis). Other institutions have had better success by planning for strategic changes in course offerings and reducing uncertainty by using templated schedules or lock-step cohorts. The reactive approach and the pain resulting from it don’t need to be explained or amplified. Therefore, I’ll focus on efforts in the market to anticipate change and improve predictability of student need.

 

Some institutions have invested heavily, often in their institutional research offices, in the historical analysis of student demand for courses. Using this approach, courses with increasing enrollments and consistently full sections can be isolated as candidates for increased seats and/or more sections. Alternatively, courses with declining enrollments and consistently unfilled seats may create opportunities to reassign needed faculty to courses in the first group.

 

Other schools looking to reduce last minute surprises during registration have started implementing approaches that “funnel” students into a select group of courses. Common examples include templated freshmen schedules (which emphasize a handful of core curriculum courses) and highly simplified program requirements. The most effective way to minimize surprises is the “cohort scheduling” approach in which all students in a cohort follow a template that satisfies simple program requirements with no electives. While these approaches fly in the face of a “traditional” liberal arts education, they have been effective in allowing some institutions (especially for-profits) to efficiently deliver courses when they are needed.

 

Visit again next week to learn how institutions could address their academic program capacity challenges in new ways that would yield greater benefits for their campuses.

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