It’s inevitable. At the beginning of each quarter, students rush from professor to professor and from course to course seeking to establish their quarter’s classes. Like puzzle pieces, they try to fit classes delicately into a complete picture of their scheduled lives.
Also inevitable is having that one needed course, or that special class a student is genuinely interested in, fall away into a bleak list of cancelled courses. A list that is all too long.
This spring term alone, over 340 traditional lecture-style courses were cancelled due to lack of enrollment, instructor availability or a variety of other reasons, according to the university’s Office of Institutional Research and Planning.
It is clear that the manner in which Portland State handles its course cancellations needs a tune-up.
Such a large number of cancellations means that over 13 percent of all classes available to students in the spring were never ultimately held. Surprisingly, this number is actually down from fall quarter’s 542 cancellations—nearly 20 percent of courses originally scheduled for that term.
After finding out that a class has been cancelled at the beginning of a term, a student must once again bounce from course to course trying to complete their schedule to earn required credits—though now under the added pressure of having limited time to do so.
This factor conflicts with PSU’s policy of full-tuition reimbursement for courses dropped within the first week. Why should a student have to worry about this deadline while fixing their schedule after the university’s abrupt cancellation?
This also places further strain and inconvenience on instructors, who now have to deal with waves of students all vying for the same limited seats in their classes.
As students get farther along in their college experience, and as graduation becomes a foreseeable reality, planning out courses in which to enroll turns into a serious undertaking. Trying to ensure that all degree, major and university studies requirements are met is a difficult task.
Too many students suffer the setback of cancelled courses. Keep in mind that unlike other universities, PSU also has a large number of non-traditional students, who are already tackling the demanding tasks of managing work, family and college.
The university needs to instill the confidence that it will follow through with all planned courses for the year. Any classes that continually fail to draw high enough enrollment should be cut from the curriculum. The university should at least allow all classes to meet for the first day of instruction to ascertain that enough students have shown interest in the course.
Ultimately, PSU needs to rethink its policies on course cancellation. Even under the most understandable of circumstances, PSU cancelled too many classes at the beginning of each term, resulting in avoidable inconveniences to its students.