Fort Lewis College experienced a seat deficit in fall 2016. Classrooms did not have enough space to accommodate everyone despite a decrease in overall enrollment, but adjustments are being made.
The school always attempts to estimate how many students, both freshmen and returning, will enroll in classes prior to the semester, Barbara Morris, FLC Provost and Vice President of Academic affairs, said.
Departments work on their schedules a year in advance so that everything is ready for registration in spring, Morris said.
“There were just a number of factors that happened this particular year that created this perfect storm,” she said. “We were seeing, even as of early summer, that we did not have enough seats which means not enough courses or maybe that the caps needed to be increased.”
There are always adjustments that have to be made each year, Morris said.
“In the summer we thought we had enough, but you know, when it came to actual registration and the first day of classes there was a lot of movement of students,” she said.
Faculty Senate's first meeting this academic year discussed a mandate from the administration regarding increases in class size that would be required to get freshmen and transfer students to full time, David Blake, FLC Faculty Senate President, said.
“So this year there was a bunch of freshmen and transfer students that did not get or were not able to get a full load,” Blake said.
A lot of intro-level courses had their seat capacity increased in order to compensate for the seat deficit, Connor Cafferty, Associated Students of Fort Lewis College President, said.
Reasons for the Seat Deficit:
One policy that affected this seat deficit was the requirement for students to take their math and composition courses earlier in their degree path, Blake said.
“What that essentially dictates is that you have three semesters to do your composition requirements and to do you math requirements, and so that was a policy based off of data that the academic policy committee came with indicating that if students wait to take their composition and math it does not help them get through school or do well in school,” Blake said.
There are a lot of incoming students taking these basic intro courses with this policy, Cafferty said.
The freshmen class tends to be the biggest class, and they represent most of the students trying to fill those intro class seats, and they are the last to register leading to overcrowded classrooms, he said.
Also in order for students to fill their schedules, some arbitrarily took 100- or 200-hundred-level courses rather than courses required for their majors, Morris said.
The overall class enrollment numbers has also be increased by this semester credit change, Andy Burns, FLC director of Admissions, said.
A lot of students have to take an extra class in order to get 15 credits because of the change from four- to three-credit courses, Burns said. Students want to take full course loads to graduate on time.
“Nationally students are graduating with about $30,000 in debt, and we are going to help our students manage that,” he said. “That is why the Finish in Four program and some other strategies are in place to help students graduate in a faster time period, and then hopefully graduate with minimal debt as well.”
Another factor for the seat deficit is Colorado’s new eligibility requirements regarding what classes count as general education courses or guaranteed transfer pathway courses, Morris said.
“When we were going through our curriculum revisions we had fewer courses that met that state eligibility,” she said. “So we had fewer GT pathway courses on the books.”
Effects of the Enrollment Decrease:
Total enrollment at FLC is down, and the next step for ASFLC is to assess how much student fees have gone down, said Cafferty.
Registered student organizations will have to have their budgets reworked, he said.
“Right now we are behind the doors trying to assess where the money is going to come from if it is not here because, unfortunately, student organizations are probably going to be cut which is never an ideal situation, and it is a hard position to be in,” he said.
The Strategic Plan Committee wants FLC to increase enrollment by 2 percent annually, Burns said.
From a capacity standpoint FLC could accommodate an enrollment of 4,400 to 4,500 like it did 10 years ago, he said.
Future Preventative Strategies:
Moving forward, curriculum maps need to be analyzed for any scheduling conflicts, and advising needs to align with maps to graduation and course scheduling, Morris said in an email reporting to Faculty Senate, which she provided to The Independent.
FLC needs better ways to predict student enrollment and course offerings in the future to prevent seat deficits, she said.
“In the past departments, at the local level, have really looked at their course offerings, looked at past behaviors and then scheduled the classes,” she said. “What we need is more of a centralized approach that gives them the information about what courses they need to offer.”
FLC is creating a forecasting tool that takes into account both past behavior and modeling future behavior as well, and so that will give better information to departments regarding their class scheduling, Morris said.