All about under-enrollment

While Tufts offers a wide array of available classes on the Student Information System (SIS) during course registration, some inevitably end up getting cancelled each semester due to low student enrollment. The process of course cancellation depends on a variety of factors, including the tenure status of the professor teaching the course and whether or not students could gain similar skills from another course offered that semester. Additionally, not all courses and departments are impacted equally by under-enrollment, often due to the size of the department in which the course is taught and how and when the course is announced and advertised.

According to Tufts Registrar Jo Ann Jack, most decisions to cancel classes are made before the class even starts meeting. Other classes that do meet at the beginning of the semester are usually cancelled within the first week.

Pedro Palou, chair of the Department of Romance Languages, said that the number and type of courses initially offered is based partially on their enrollment during previous semesters.

“[We] check the three previous years and also, of course, the serial progression of the courses,” he said. “It is a process always done with a clear rationale.”

This structure is similar to the ones used by many of the academic departments, Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences Joseph Auner said.

However, Auner said that even with this method in place, a couple of classes in each department are likely to be cancelled due to under-enrollment each semester.

He explained that if a class has six people or fewer, the department will usually at least consider cancelling the class. Whether it actually does so, however, depends on a few conditions.

According to Auner, each academic dean is included in the discussions regarding course under-enrollment in their respective academic departments.

Jack explained that there are no specific courses that tend to struggle with under-enrollment.

“It varies semester to semester,” she said.

Even so, there are certain departments that seldom encounter challenges in filling their classes. For example, Auner said that he oversees the Department of Biology, and he rarely encounters cancellations of biology classes because it is such a large, popular subject at Tufts.

Though at a less consistent rate than the biology department, the Department of Romance Languages does not usually struggle with under-enrollment either, with only two-to-three under-enrolled classes per semester, according to Palou.

While student enrollment is a large factor in deciding to cancel under-enrolled classes, it is not the only one, Auner explained. Another important consideration across departments is the university's contract with the professor teaching the under-enrolled class.

“Other factors that go into decisions about whether or not to run a course include collective bargaining agreements with the part-time and full-time unions,” Auner said.

Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) in lecturer contracts often provide the university with guidelines as to what they can and cannot do with professors whose classes get cancelled, Auner explained.

According to Auner, professors in the part-time workers union have contracts that state that they must be paid regardless of whether or not their class runs. Often in these scenarios, under-enrolled classes will run because the university is paying the professor’s salary anyway.

In many cases, full-time lecturers or professors with tenure will be assigned other duties in place of the class that was cancelled according to what their contract allows. However, part-time lecturers’ CBAs often state that the university cannot give the lecturer any extra duties due to their part-time employment, which often does not grant them health benefits and other perks of being a full-time or tenured lecturer, Auner said.

An additional consideration when determining whether or not to cancel a class is the intended size of the class.

Auner, who is also the former head of the Department of Music, explained that some classes, such as small jazz ensembles, actually function best when they are kept small.

“The small jazz ensemble courses sometimes had less than six people in them, but that was the point: To give students the experience of playing in a very small group,” Auner said.

However, the reverse may also be true. When there are not enough people in a class, it might not be worth running because there may be other sections of the class, or it may not be productive without the right number of people, Auner said.

He also said that upper-level classes and important graduation requirements are seldom cancelled because they are in some ways irreplaceable to the students taking them.

Special topics classes, on the other hand, are often at risk of being cancelled due to under-enrollment. Auner attributes this under-enrollment in part to the way they are displayed on SIS. They are often hard to find for students searching for classes, he said.

“Because of the way SIS is set up, new, exciting classes don’t have the high enrollments you would expect because students may not know about them,” Auner said.

Auner also pointed to a lack of advertising that might contribute to under-enrollment in special topics courses.

A similar enrollment challenge can be found with Experimental College (ExCollege) courses, which are announced later than other courses, requiring students to fit them into their existing schedules. However, these ExCollege classes usually run even if they do not meet their expected enrollment numbers, because the people teaching them are often guest lecturers and Tufts students, Auner said.

One final consideration that arises when deciding whether the enrollment of a class is too low to run is the opportunities that the course offers for students.

“At Tufts, we want to create opportunities for students to take courses across the humanities, natural sciences [and] social sciences,” Auner said. “We want the course offerings to be balanced.”

Primarily, the classes that get cancelled have counterparts in different time slots or are truly too small to facilitate productive conversation and learning, Auner explained.

“The students are paying substantial tuition, so we want to be thoughtful and deliberate about where resources go,” Auner said.