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[gothic]

I seek your wisdom, chairs and deans. My medium sized humanities department in a large university has recently lost all its experienced administrators. The rest of us are struggling with some basic questions as we cope. We figured out that if we admit 100 first year students and all have to take "HUM 101," we should make sure each semester's class can accommodate 50 students. However, our humanities-addled brains can't figure out the more complex issues. Is there a standard calculation everybody except us knows how to use to determine course size? For example, each of our approximately 500 students has to take any three HUM courses from a menu of 10 courses over the course of his/her 4 years here. How many students must each of the 10 courses enroll on average to make this work out?

In gratitude,

Gothic

[daniel_von_flanagan]

If I understand the numbers you are giving:
In any given year, you have 500 actual students, each taking 3/4 of a class, so you have 375 virtual students.  As you are offering 10 classes, that averages to 37.5 students/class.  If you don't offer all of the 10 classes each year divide the 375 by the average number you do offer annually.

Three humanities classes over the whole 4 years as an undergraduate is really enough for a degree? - DvF

[dale1]

Following DvF, note the enrollment trends at your institution.  For instance, do more students enroll in Fall than Spring (or one term versus another)?  Do you offer summer courses?  What percentage of your credit hours or headcount comes in summer term(s)? 

At my institution, we have more students in Fall term (have Fall, Spring, 2 short Summer terms) than in Spring, and fewer in Summer than Spring.  But, we have about 8500 credit hours total per year, and about 3900 in Fall, but not the same amount in spring. 

So, what I would do is look at trends in past enrollment, and look at how your courses were meeting student need.  If you had a morning and evening class with 100% enrollment capacity, and your rooms could hold 120% enrolllment capacity, then I would say increase your capacity by 15-20% and keep the same classes. 

Normally it's less important to determine exactly how many courses and, for me, determine what needs to be offered when.  For instance, we offer our first four courses in the major every semester.  Then we offer advanced courses on a once-yearly rotation, such that students beginning in either main term (Fall, Spring) can have a selection of advanced courses once they are prepared for them.

This also has to do with the number and course load per faculty member.  You also should take into account course type (lecture, seminar).  It's not practical to have seminars with 30 people, but lecture classes with objective exams can be managed with many tens of people (lectures in biology have 100+ often (but poor attendance in most, YMMV)).

You're welcome to contact me via PM if you want to discuss further.  I do this job all the time.

[gothic]

My warmest thanks to DvF and dale1 for their prompt and helpful replies.

To answer DvF's question, I teach in a humanities subunit within a professional school in a large research university. Students in our program have to take 4 courses in my humanistic discipline in order to graduate. Elsewhere, people who work in my field are members of a lager department in a liberal arts program, but not here. One humanities-subunit course is required of all students in the professional school. It is offered every semester. (The math is easy on that one--at the minimum, we need the same number of seats as total incoming students divided by two.) Then in addition, our students have to take 3 more of our courses. They are of course also required to take many other courses, both in their professional program and across the university. I am not specific because my colleagues would be mortified that I am asking for help outside the unit--that is very taboo here. I have no such compunction, and am grateful for your help!

Historically, we seem to have had fairly even total enrollments in the school as a whole from semester to semester (550 students). The challenge in looking back at historical enrollments is that we now have a different number of faculty (75% of whom are new, too) and a different (greater) number of courses as well as different kinds of courses. Furthermore, course caps previously were determined idiosyncratically, which created weird backlogs of students. For example one identical course was capped between 25 and 60 and actually enrolled between 25 and 50 students when offered annually from 2002-2006, then was capped at and enrolled 120 students last semester. Setting apart the intro required course and 4 graduate seminars offered annually, which are sacrosanct and separate from this calculation of undergraduate enrollments, we traditionally have taught only undergraduate lectures.

We know how many courses (10 total annually x 3 credit hours each) we can offer, and when we can schedule them (the professional school has a specific set of time slots allocated to us and plenty of classrooms), but we are trying to figure out what the average course size ought to be so we don't end up dealing with 120 students in a 50-student course or granting blanket exemptions from graduation requirements.  And now that we have additional faculty, we would also like to vary our offerings, including adding some undergraduate seminars to the mix. But before we can do that, we need to determine the average number of what DvF calls virtual students we need to serve in these 10 courses.

If I understand dale1 and DvF's guidelines correctly, if we offer 10 identically-sized lecture courses annually to our 432 virtual students, each course needs to enroll 44 students. Alternatively, we could offer 6 60-student lecture courses and 4 18-student seminars. And so forth as long as it adds up to 432 a year. (Of course, we would need to boost those caps a little to make room for the occasional student from another department.)

Am I making sense?

With warm thanks,
Gothic

[sibyl]

Is it necessarily the case that you will get 3/4 of each student each year?  In many institutions gen ed requirements are considered something to "get out of the way," while in others they are something to be put off until the last possible minute.  Look at the historical enrollment patterns for clues to this question, too.  You may find it more appropriate to plan, for instance, for 1.5 courses per freshman, .25 courses per sophomore and junior, and 1.0 courses per senior.

Also, I'm not following your math.  550 x 3/4 = 412.5.  What makes 432 the right number?  Is there something else at work, or is that just a typo or something?

Whatever you decide, make sure that you get support from the deans and from the larger faculty.  You need to make sure that students are being advised to take the courses at the right time -- that is, if your plans depend on them taking two such courses in their first year, then they need to be advised to do that, otherwise you won't be able to meet their needs.

Good luck.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

gothic, unless your special situation give you extra control over uniformity of class size, I think you are going to need wider margins of error, not for accomodating the occasional student from another department, but to account for your own fluctuation.  In particular, you don't have exactly 3/4 of your total student enrollment taking classes each year; in theory it presumably could happen that in one given year every single one of your students takes a class, or even that some students take 2.  The 37.5 or 41.2 or whatever is just an "expected value", or average.  - DvF

[gothic]

My thanks to Sibyl and DvF for their insights. I was proposing course caps that are about 133 percent of our ideal average enrollment per course to account for these fluctuations. I anticipate that this margin for error will suffice, given that our students are used to taking specific courses during specific assigned semesters (310 is always taken second semester sophomore year, for example). (I am not sure this rigidity is ideal, but this is the way the unit works.)

We have new advising staff, so we will do our best to communicate with them about implementing our new curriculum effectively. You are wise to remind us of the importance of this aspect.

And 432 is 3/4 of the 144 first year students we have today x 4.

With warm regards,
Gothic