Examples of Good Curricular Design

[Caracal]

2) Friends who went to places like Case Western, Carnegie-Mellon and MIT said they had a lockstep/"weed-out" Bio 100/Physics 100/Calculus 100 year-long program the first year, with some humanities options thrown in; their later years were fairly closely planned out as well. They were going for engineering degrees, seeking work as environmental engineers, geological engineers, or in computer science, so they didn't question those much: they were going to need to get certification to be employable, so they knew and understood the reasons for all the choices that had been pre-made for them and went along with it.

This is what I've seen work for majors with large, specific requirements including nursing, education, and social work.  The weed-out part is unnecessary, but the idea of cohorts progressing in lock step through a standardized curriculum is workable.

At a small enough program at a small enough institution, the standardized four-year plan cannot simply have 40-50 credits marked electives.  For planning purposes, the slots have to be assigned, say, the junior accounting students will be taking a humanities course in the spring.   

The humanities division should be planning for 20 seats from accounting, 10 seats from social work, etc. and only offer the enough sections that can fill, count for the relevant gen ed requirements, and probably are not the same courses that the upper-division humanities majors need.  The level of coordination among departments goes way up with more major requirements, a large gen ed program with many choices for each requirement, and yet very few bodies each term looking for true electives. 

Offering many electives that don't fill is inefficient.

Having majors with many slots marked electives, but few to no electives those majors want to take is problematic.  Super Dinky ended up with nearly all graduates in CJ being double majors with one of two specific fields because that's where the good electives were and CJ had a ton of elective slots.  The humanities faculty were quite angry that most students took the absolute minimum gen ed requirements for humanities and then took social science electives like psychology's human sexuality (usually meeting in the auditorium with the strong argument of letting in everyone who wants it because it's nice to offer something students really want to learn).

The two-year rotation for certain major upper-divison courses is the scheduler's friend.  For example, 6 juniors and 8 sophomores make for a reasonable organic chemistry section every odd fall, much better than trying to get 10 enrollees of any level every fall to sign up. 

I remember ten years of data indicating we started with 30 first-year declarations that would result in a huge organic chemistry section the second fall, but 4-12 sophomores would should up and moving to junior year meant always being below 10 enrollees.  Occasionally, 8 + 12 would necessitate two organic lab sections, but that's an easy fix the times it happened.

Boy, I wish I could invite you to the curriculum committee meeting that I'll be at in 18-24 months. My colleagues do not understand any of this, and will burn the place down in pursuit of "choice" that winds up being Henry Ford's black Model T all over again.

To Spork: I don't think there's an optimal design that can be exported, since so much depends upon the particular needs of every place. You can have the best model, but if a plurality of your students aren't able/willing/capable of following it, your model needs to be changed. I've been looking at some of the Ivies recently for ideas; I look longingly, and come to when I realize how little of it could be replicated at my place.

dc

Meh, I think its back to the problem of terminology again. If don't fill means elective classes have 3 students in them, that's one thing. On the other hand, if there's a cap of 35 and a class gets 21 students, is that really a problem? For most of the classes I teach, the cap is higher than it really should be. I teach some courses that always get to the cap, but it isn't ideal for an upper level course.

In my case, we're talking about the single-digit enrollment problem.

For adjuncts, we break even at about 10 undergraduates, and 8 grad students. Any course that doesn't hit those had better be mission critical, and consistently not hitting them means that the program is underwater.

The calculation for full-time faculty is harder, since salaries vary so much, but we really need to average at least 20 undergraduates per course, or we are in the red.

The math at your place may well be different, and it might vary by program. (Some programs really cannot scale up, so they need to consistently fill to be viable.) But if you don't have a good sense of the break points, it's very hard to defend courses and programs.

Polly and I disagree on many things, but not this.

Oh, sure. I wasn't trying to question your actual numbers. Just saying that the details matter.

[Ruralguy]

I think if the     ( student generated dollars per credit hour) / (faculty salary per credit hour)  start to be equal to about the number of students in the class or  lower, you will have inefficiency issues. I think this may be the first approximation number that many will use to justify a particular lower limit on the student to faculty ratio. This number does seem to be about 10 for my college (both the STFR and the other ratio).

But sometimes there are also some additional practical concerns: Can't make any sections bigger because the classrooms won't allow for it. Or, the opposite: can't break up the class because there are no available classrooms.

Because some students will need a particular class to graduate we won't be hard and fast about lower limiting  a class to 5 or 10 students or whatever, but a department that runs a couple of these better also be running a couple of very high efficiency courses to make up for it (most do---and, yes, its mostly core/gen ed requirements).

[polly_mer]

Yes, I should have used "doesn't make" instead of "doesn't fill".

However, at a small enough place, as long as the gen eds are moderately appealing to non-majors (e.g., art appreciation, villains in literature, history of warfare), the exact options are irrelevant to the people who are selecting mostly by time slot as they follow the plan of, say, junior accountants take a humanities course in the spring that counts for the relevant gen ed requirement.

If the place is small enough, three sections of humanities completely full at 20 students is much more efficient than four sections at only 15 students.  That fourth section likely means hiring an adjunct to cover a section of freshman comp or history survey because we're not hiring adjuncts for arbitrary electives.

The institution must have thriving humanities majors to be able to have enough humanities faculty members to offer many electives every term and have them all be full enough at 20 to be efficient.

[polly_mer]

I think if the     ( student generated dollars per credit hour) / (faculty salary per credit hour)  start to be equal to about the number of students in the class or  lower, you will have inefficiency issues. I think this may be the first approximation number that many will use to justify a particular lower limit on the student to faculty ratio. This number does seem to be about 10 for my college (both the STFR and the other ratio).

That ratio is too small by far to be the limit.  Dollars paid by credit hour have to cover so much more than just faculty salaries in a tuition-reliant place.

There's facilities, utilities, maintenance, library, IT, office supplies, and other services that must come out of that money.  There are standard ways to cost out classroom use beyond faculty salaries.

You can't run without a staffed registrar's office with specialty software.  Financial aid, business office, and someone filling out all the data requirements for federal, state, and accreditators are also vital.  None of those offices are cheap to run.

Focusing solely on faculty direct costs is how adjuncts claim to be making bank for gen ed classes when the truth is a savings of a couple thousand dollars at most.

[dr_codex]

I think if the     ( student generated dollars per credit hour) / (faculty salary per credit hour)  start to be equal to about the number of students in the class or  lower, you will have inefficiency issues. I think this may be the first approximation number that many will use to justify a particular lower limit on the student to faculty ratio. This number does seem to be about 10 for my college (both the STFR and the other ratio).

That ratio is too small by far to be the limit.  Dollars paid by credit hour have to cover so much more than just faculty salaries in a tuition-reliant place.

There's facilities, utilities, maintenance, library, IT, office supplies, and other services that must come out of that money.  There are standard ways to cost out classroom use beyond faculty salaries.

You can't run without a staffed registrar's office with specialty software.  Financial aid, business office, and someone filling out all the data requirements for federal, state, and accreditators are also vital.  None of those offices are cheap to run.

Focusing solely on faculty direct costs is how adjuncts claim to be making bank for gen ed classes when the truth is a savings of a couple thousand dollars at most.

My figures include all of the overhead. Technically, it costs about 7.7 graduate students in a course to cover the costs (adjunct salary + fringe + operating overhead). We round up to 8. This is how we decide if summer courses are worth running.

The calculations for full-time faculty, of course, are harder to assess by course, since salaries (and therefore also fringe) vary so much. But on aggregate it works out to about 20/section. Again, that's all costs factored in.

And yes, some courses have to be small (for accreditation or technology reasons), and there are other considerations.

My initial comment to Polly was referencing the fact that my place currently has many "lockstep" elements. Some departments want to change this to a bespoke menu, and I don't think they fully realize how unlikely this is to offer actual choices at convenient times. 

[Ruralguy]

Just because the ratio is used as a marker doesn't mean I don't realize that these other costs exist or that the ratio tracks that cost. After all, if it just was meant to track the professor's salary, then the standard value of the ratio that people would use would just be 1. This value of the ratio that I mentioned recognizes that the professor's salary is likely only about 10% of the costs. My college's budget is about 75 million. We have 100 faculty. Average carrying cost of a TT  faculty member is probably about 100 K. So, cost of faculty is about 10 million.  So, the ratio is a rough estimate, but seems to make sense, so long as you realize that its *not* saying that faculty are the only cost.

[Ruralguy]

On seeing Codex' post, that is more or less the precise point I am trying to make by representing it as a simple ratio, though I realize it can be potentially (but unintentionally) misleading.

That is to say, showing more of the details as Codex has done is more clear, but to my mind makes the same point.

[Ruralguy]

I should also add that it also depends on how much of a college's budget is tuition driven. So, while I think some of the numbers I mentioned work as an approximation, you need to know the details of a particular college to get a precise number.

[spork]

Thanks for the replies.

[. . . ]

2) Friends who went to places like Case Western, Carnegie-Mellon and MIT said they had a lockstep/"weed-out" Bio 100/Physics 100/Calculus 100 year-long program the first year, with some humanities options thrown in; their later years were fairly closely planned out as well. They were going for engineering degrees, seeking work as environmental engineers, geological engineers, or in computer science, so they didn't question those much: they were going to need to get certification to be employable, so they knew and understood the reasons for all the choices that had been pre-made for them and went along with it.

[. . . ]

I can't comment on the other schools, but the typical first year at MIT is two semesters of physics, two of calculus, one of chemistry, one of biology, and one course each semester in either a humanities or social science subject, all at the 100-level (for MIT). The first year serves as the bulk of MIT's gen ed requirements and the prerequisites for many of the subsequent courses in the science and engineering majors that students start pursuing heavily (though not exclusively) in the sophomore year. In sum, it's a fairly well-defined, coherent first-year academic experience.

[. . . ]

In some disciplines you just can't help upper levels having much lower enrollment than lower levels. for instance an intro physics or chem course taught to engineers and pre-meds. Most of them don't go on to take, say, Advanced E&M or Quantum (whether they be within upper levels of Chem or Physics).

[. . . ]

Business might be closest to having even distribution in upper and lower levels, but that's because the major is popular, and though many take intro Bus courses to satisfy the core, its not the only such option out there, so its not like all core seekers take Bus 101. Therefore, more parity between lower and upper levels in this discipline.

Unfortunately I don't work at MIT. We don't have a physics major. We don't have a quantum course. The options I could have chosen as a sophomore at MIT don't exist here. The only common experience in the first year is a meaningless "intro topical seminar" (students choose a section based on what fits into their schedule after they've picked their other courses, the seminar's topic is not driving the choice of section) and Composition 101.

Business is our largest program, but business courses don't count toward our gen ed requirements. The various flavors of the business major require 60-72 credit hours. And a student majoring in, say, history or psychology, has no reason (whether to fulfill a curricular requirement or to satisfy personal interest) to take a "business" course, except perhaps for 100-level micro- or macro-economics. Plus business course sections are capped at 25 whereas courses in other departments are capped at 30 or 35. The department is, not coincidentally, the most egregious example of faculty overloads, while history, for example, often has adjuncts teaching the 35-student sections of 100-level courses and the tenured faculty teaching the upper-level courses that enroll maybe 10 or 12 students each.

I like the idea of prohibiting seniors from taking 100-level courses. Many of the upper-level humanities and social science courses with really low enrollments (even though they are offered only once every two years) in reality don't require prior study in lower-level courses.

[polly_mer]

20 undergrad students per course is a credible number that accounts for tuition dollars that go to other expenses.  10 students sounds a lot like tuition is one of several revenue streams and possibly not anywhere near half.

Once we're talking a small enough place that the total budget is $10-15M for everything, unnecessary, underfull sections resulting in an additional $20k in unnecessary expenses is an easy fix.

I remember sitting on the academic program prioritization committee and being stunned at how few broad categories were routinely breaking even.  Gen eds being run underfull (mostly 15 students instead of mostly 25) quickly add up to being more money to run than tuition brought in, even for adjuncts teaching at $1800 per course.

In terms of money makers, we thought pretty fondly of the CJ and generic business programs as attracting new students, offering only sections that were maxed, and having faculty who were generally happy to have a second career as professors with the master's degrees at moderate pay.  Some specialities in business are expensive, but an MBA from a regional program is not expensive.  The retired cop with a state pension and a master's degree is not at all expensive.

[Ruralguy]

Well now I want to crunch the numbers for my school a bit more precisely. I would think something a little higher than
10 works, but a more precise look might bring it closer to 20. Were certainly encourage to run sections of 20-40 if we can manage it, but for a  medium sized major at a small school, you will only rarely get section sizes close to that after the first intro sequence.  But we do purposefully run our gen Ed's with a minimum of about 25.

[polly_mer]

Well now I want to crunch the numbers for my school a bit more precisely. I would think something a little higher than
10 works, but a more precise look might bring it closer to 20. Were certainly encourage to run sections of 20-40 if we can manage it, but for a  medium sized major at a small school, you will only rarely get section sizes close to that after the first intro sequence.  But we do purposefully run our gen Ed's with a minimum of about 25.

That lack of scaling is what is closing programs and even colleges.

Ten years ago, a college of a thousand undergrads was viable with careful planning.  That was a standard metric and HLC presented data showing that a thousand students was the breaking point between large and small for most quantities HLC was tracking.

However, in the last few years, when I look up colleges that are in my mind as good small colleges that are likely to thrive in the next ten years, most of them are 2-3k undergrads or very special missions with a great endowment/generous sponsors like Berea College.

[Mobius]

We had a provost that have use a "break-even" number so high that it was unbelievable or the university should immediately close. Only a handful of classrooms could fit that number of students and the two large lecture halls had class sections that filled a third of the seats. Those large classrooms also sat empty much of the day.

[Aster]

Maybe the university needs to invest in more athletics programs. Ha ha.

[mamselle]

Sure. Just turn all those useless large lecture halls into squash courts.

M.