ECHOLS scholars may not be responsible for all of our class selection problems, but when small classes fill up on the first day, the impact of the program becomes clear. Allowing Echols scholars to register before everyone else is not only unfair, it has a seriously detrimental impact on the educational experience of all non-Echols students.
Proponents of the program frequently argue that 8.5 percent of the student body, or 852 Echols scholars, only has a small impact on everyone else's the registration. This might be true if all classes were equal in size and in desirability. However, each year, a few highly coveted classes fill up fast for a reason -- they offer the most interesting material with the most popular professors. The best courses also tend to be small classes, as few students prefer an impersonal lecture with mandatory section to an interactive seminar.
So yes, Echols scholars will leave plenty of space in 300-person astronomy lectures. But when each department offers only a few small classes, priority registration for 850 people creates a very real shortage for the rest of us. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Echols scholars don't have area requirements; each scholar is free to select five dream classes before non-scholars get to register. The result is that Echols scholars can enjoy four years of small classes while everyone else is lucky to secure a single seminar by their third year.
In response to these problems, some departments have taken measures to ensure that fourth-year majors get priority over first-year Echols scholars. Many departments restrict a few classes entirely to majors, while the Politics Department restricts its seminars to third- and fourth-year majors for the first two days of registration.
David Klein, Associate Chair of the Politics Department stressed in an e-mail that the department values the contributions of the Echols scholars, but he acknowledged that course restrictions were intended to give third- and fourth-year majors a chance to register before first and second years with priority registration. "Many of our majors have a good deal of trouble getting into the politics classes they want -- especially seminars -- in their first couple of years," Klein wrote. "They feel that by the time they reach their third or fourth years, they're entitled to a good shot at getting the classes they're most interested in, and we sympathize with that view."
These departments should be commended for addressing the needs of their majors. However, the fact that professors are forced to preemptively restrict small classes points to the damaging effect that priority registration can have on an overcrowded department.
Echols Dean Richard Handler argued that registration problems are primarily due to a shortage in professors. "I would argue that the enrollment problems they experience are not primarily due to Echols," he said in an e-mail, "but to the overall situation of Arts and Sciences, which, in the past ten years, has not been able to increase the size of its faculty while student enrollments have steadily grown."
No one can argue with the fact that we need more money and more professors. But faced with the reality of our limited resources, we have all the more reason to be as fair as possible in course registration.
The result of the faculty shortage is that most students have an extremely hard time getting into their desired courses, forcing professors to contend with massive waiting lists orcountless plaintive e-mails begging for admission. When so many students are obviously dissatisfied, the most obvious solution is to prioritize fourth years who will never have another chance.
In addition to harming other students, priority registration fosters an unhealthy sense of entitlement in the Echols scholars themselves. The scholars' SAT scores might pad the University's enrollment statistics, but this certainly does not make them better students and it definitely does not mean that they deserve a superior learning experience. But granting priority registration sends the message that these students are not only more desirable but also more deserving than their classmates.
The merits of even having an honors program are questionable when nearly every student arrives at the University with strong academic abilities. But as long as the program exists, we should find other ways to entice these students to enroll. In a study conducted in 2002 and 2003, only 40 percent of surveyed Echols scholars indicated that they would not have come to the University without the Echols program.
Chances are that we would lose even fewer of those students if we abolished priority registration and found other ways to make them feel special. And to those scholars who cannot fathom attending the University without registering before everyone else -- transfer and see if we care.
Cari Lynn Hennessy's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at chennessy@cavalierdaily.com.
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