A new trend is emerging at some American universities and colleges: If a student fulfills certain academic standards, the institution guarantees that his or her degree will only take a maximum of four years. Therefore, if a student cannot graduate on time because he or she cannot get into a required class, the institution will pay for the student's additional semesters.
Perhaps the economics department should calculate the costs that such agreements might incur for Brown. Many senior economics concentrators found themselves unable to get into six particular upper-level courses when they were suddenly limited to 100 this semester despite being uncapped in previous years. Further, some members of the department refused to enroll seniors who needed these upper-level classes to fill requirements that would enable them to graduate on time. The dearth of spots in these classes induced plenty of anger and hysterics — most notably, The Herald reported that one student offered to pay another student for his spot in ECON 1540: "International Trade" ("Econ caps spur black market controversy," Sept. 12).
We applaud the economics department for eventually increasing the caps on those six classes from 100 to 110 and reserving those extra 10 spots per class for senior concentrators. We also appreciate the department's ambition to get classes down to smaller lectures for the purpose of increasing class participation and professor-student dialogue. But this problem speaks to a larger, campus-wide issue — Brown has experienced easily avoidable administrative problems because some departments have failed to communicate thoroughly with concentrators. Various departmental nightmares could have been less calamitous with better and more advance contact between departments and concentrators. Though more and more professors have started to upload syllabi to the Brown course preview website in a timely manner, there are still many who have failed to post them a full two weeks into the academic year. Uploading syllabi at the beginning of the semester is an easy way to make students' lives much easier. Yet some professors continue to leave students, many of whom have a stressful and packed shopping period, in the dark. While we do not mean to rehash last semester's debates on the International Relations program, the entire procedure could have been much less taxing for IR students if administrators had been more communicative and sensitive about timing. Furthermore, we cannot help but assume that economics concentrators would have preregistered for their desired upper-level courses last spring if they had explicitly been warned about the class cuts.
With a bit more department-student communication, students will have slightly easier lives, and departments will not face the negative and angry backlash against their otherwise defensible policy changes. And, of course, the University will not have to dole out the big bucks to get its students to graduate.
Editorials are written by The Herald's editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
