News
Disparities exist between departments’ enrollments
By Kirsty Warren ’18 and Dillon Kelly ’18
February 25, 2016
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Two weeks ago, sophomores declared their concentrations. This has brought questions of department size back into focus. From 2012-2015 the average number of students enrolled annually in a department compared to FTE [professor or full time equivalent] ranged from 33.7 in East Asian Languages to 110.1 in mathematics. In that time frame, the two departments with the largest numbers of students, economics and government, had annual average enrollments of 1,228 and 1,234 students respectively. Economics had an average 11.5 FTE and thus an enrollment-FTE ratio of 107.1. Government had an average FTE of 13.5, resulting in a 91.6 average enrollment per FTE. Balancing varied enrollment with the need to staff all the departments a liberal arts college offers presents a consistent challenge.
When a professor’s retirement or resignation creates a vacancy, departments submit proposals to the Committee for Academic Planning (CAP), which reviews the department’s proposals and then makes recommendations to Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds. Dean Reynolds then makes hiring decisions based on those recommendations. Professor of Chemistry Karen Brewer, the CAP chair, explained that the perceived as a “cap” on hiring is better defined as an effort to maintain an overall 9:1 student-faculty ratio.
“There’s a perceived ‘cap’ because we’re not expanding the faculty at this time, or shrinking it, and we haven’t done that for many years because the ratio has been nine to one,” Brewer said. “There’s a perceived ‘oh we can’t expand in any direction’ and that is limiting. In the end, there are only so many faculty positions, so as a whole there’s a cap. But there’s not a cap on, say, a department of three can never expand to four.”
Brewer used the hypothetical of a college where everyone decided to be a basket-weaving major to explain that while enrollment size is a part of the decision making process, a college cannot pour all of its resources into one area. “If you only respond to that, you’re not a liberal arts college, you’re a basket-weavers union,” she said. “How do you look to the future and say there will still be that many basket-weaving majors in 30 or 40 years?”
“The problem that the CAP is always trying to face is that there are the courses that fill up and the fields you need to say you are a liberal arts college,” Professor Margaret Thickstun, the chair of the Literature Department, said. “Not all are equally popular. We want people to take courses they want but we also need a range and you still need to offer that choice.”
In the past three years, 96 members of the class of 2018 declared as economics majors compared to 112 members of the class of ’17 and 84 members of the class of ’16. According to department chair Professor Paul Hagstrom, the department aims to have every professor teach a class with fewer than 40 students. 400-level classes are limited to 20 students and senior thesis courses are limited to 12.
“My concern for class sizes has more to do with the student experience than our workload,” Hagstrom said. “We have a process in place to allocate faculty, and I trust that my colleagues and the administration considers the student experience when they make allocation decisions. Those decisions do affect how we teach our courses.”
Professor Philip Klinkner, the chair of the Government Department, said that large class sizes lead to less interaction between faculty and students and a greater teaching load on intro classes. “The problem is that two different students can come to Hamilton College and have very different experiences,” he said. “The student who follows one path will have small classes and a lot of individualized attention from faculty. But somebody who chooses something else will get a lot of big classes, and the faculty can be spread very thin. There’s a disparity of experiences.”
That disparity carries over, Klinkner said, to faculty workloads. “The faculty has a five class load, for me that’s all about how many blue books and papers I have to grade. If I have 80 students in an intro class, I don’t have the same time to spend with each individual.”
“We say come to Hamilton College you can take whatever classes you want when the fact is that you can take whatever classes you want as long as you have a good registration time if you’re pursuing these larger classes,” Klinkner said.
Some departments, he said, will naturally have smaller numbers of students but those departments are still necessary to an elite liberal arts institution. Klinker said that the Government department does whatever necessary to avoid turning away students and concentrators.
As Thickstun put it, the faculty is an “inflexible, cumbersome, slow-moving system.” Thickstun explained that the hiring process has less to do with money and more to do with number of people employed by the college; for example, the vacancy opened by a retiring custodian could be replaced by a vice president (which would be much more expensive), and that would not be a problem. “Things that you would not think of as competing end up in competition with each other, like hiring a new counselor versus hiring a math professor.”
Because of the merger last year between comparative literature and the literature and creative writing departments, Thickstun’s department is the biggest on campus. “Of course we think we should keep all these people, others in other departments might disagree. Other colleges of our size have much larger literature departments.”
Prior to the merger, the average enrollment per FTE of the English/creative writing department was 67.9. The student to faculty ratio in literature is smaller in comparison to the departments which are “bursting at the seams” as Thickstun said because Writing Intensive (WI) courses (which many lit classes are) are limited to 20 students and first-year courses (FYC) are limited to 16. “We are able to teach in ways we think are appropriate to the discipline,” Thickstun said, thanks to the class size limits. Professor Stevenson Humphries-Brooks, chair of the religious studies department, said that WI and FYC class size limits also benefit his department.
The 2012-2015 average enrollment per FTE of religious studies was 63.5. From the perspective of a smaller department, Humphries-Brooks said that as of the 2017-18 school year, most of the 300-level courses will become 200-level. “I have juniors and seniors say, ‘look, no one wants to take a 300-level course outside of their major because it jeopardizes their GPA,” Humphries-Brooks said.
Thickstun credited the Office of Admissions’ success in admitting classes which declare a breadth of majors. “Some departments have to do more to attract students, say geology for example, but once people are in the faculty are so fabulous that they stay,” she said. “I don’t know of a department that feels they have been hurt by the open curriculum. The faculty as a whole here tend to be very interdisciplinary themselves.”