Step It Up, Professors
Posted on June 30th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
A letter writer to the Globe has the answer to Harvard’s budget problems: professors should teach more.
Adding one course to a four- or five-course load reduces by between 15 and 20 percent the number of professors needed to deliver the same quantity of courses with no increase in class size.
What I think people fail to realize, or are just reluctant to admit, is just how big Harvard’s fiscal gap is, and just how small an impact measures like this would have….
4 Responses
6/30/2009 9:58 am
I’m shocked-SHOCKED!-that pre-registration for Harvard courses hasn’t been proposed as a cost-saving measure. This seems like the perfect time to push it through over the objections of entitled undergraduates. If students pre-register for fall courses in the spring, then Harvard-like most schools-can actually plan teaching assignments in a rational and ultimately more cost-effective way.
Common wasteful scenario #1: traditionally huge course has teaching guarantees for 10 sections for 180 students; that course is unexpectedly under-enrolled and has 10 sections for 120 students because the teaching is promised and budgeted based on predictions; this may be better for teaching, but it’s hard on budgets when you add it up.
Common wasteful scenario #2: relatively new course gets unexpectedly popular and needs 10 sections for 180 students instead of 5 sections for 90 students; instead of capping the course, Harvard scrambles to hire TFs from HLS and KSG and/or TAs from the community; this is wasteful because it sends money out of the FAS system instead of keeping it with GSAS students.
That letter writer from Bridgewater State calls heavier teaching loads the third rail of college politics. The real third rail at Harvard College is the undergraduate belief that “shopping period” is an inalienable human right. See the Crimson’s archives for Bill Kirby’s lesson on this subject. Perhaps Michael Smith can strap on a pair and get pre-registration done. It’s a policy that is both financially and educationally sound. Perhaps he would feel empowered if some faculty lined up behind the proposition or put it forward themselves.
6/30/2009 10:23 am
Hear, hear!
6/30/2009 10:33 am
I too wish we could have more accurate enrollment prediction; there are all kinds of advantages to knowing well in advance how many TFs to hire. But there is no need to know which students are going to be in the course, just how many. A few years ago, my colleague Stuart Shieber and a few students constructed a remarkably accurate enrollment prediction model, a computer model predicting the next year’s enrollments from such data as previous enrollments in feeder courses, faculty teaching ratings, numbers of new concentrators, what other “competing” courses are available, and so on. There was a report and there were quite a few presentations to deans, the registrar, and so on. For reasons about which I could only speculate, nothing happened, not even the simple matter of collecting more data so the model, if it were ever built, would have more data on which to chew. I think there was some skepticism that the thing could actually work, in spite of the evidence that it did work, predicting the 10th year of historical enrollments when it had been trained on data from the previous 9 years. And in spite of the fact that models like this are routinely used in the world of consumer goods and services to predict demand for new offerings based on historical and demographic data. (Shoe makers don’t decide how many pairs of red and black shoes to manufacture by asking shoe buyers to pre-register for their purchases.)
The truth about preregistration systems is that they work great if the objective is to ration scarce resources and the institution is willing to limit the extent to which students can change courses. These conditions are often met at the schools where preregistration is successful; without those conditions, pre-registration is not the magic bullet it is sometimes claimed to be. Harvard could impose those conditions too, but it would be an educationally costly change to cap course enrollments or to prevent students from switching courses or, in the case of freshmen, to expect students to choose courses before they had shown up in the fall.
6/30/2009 11:34 pm
At Brown, there is preregristration, but then we still have shopping period. You might think the latter undermines the former, but Harry Lewis’ first point seems to prove true: you don’t need to know which students will enroll. In my experience, we can predict the numbers remarkably well based on the preregistration numbers. Even if particular students who were preregistered end up dropping during shopping period, it seems an equal number of other students register at the start of the semester. We almost always end up with about the same numbers as the preregistration numbers, even if the actual students registered have changed dramatically.