PSU drops nearly 80 summer courses

Portland State’s administration last week officially cancelled 79 summer courses as part of an ongoing effort to reduce costs amid continuing budget pains faced by the university.

While course cancellations are nothing new and usually stem from low demand, 26 of the 79 classes to get the axe this summer had 10 or more students on their rosters, with several having more than 30. Those cancelled courses with the highest enrollment were “Fundamental Biology,” “Introduction to Genetics” and “International Monetary Theory,” with 43, 39 and 33 students enrolled, respectively.

According to Scott Gallagher, PSU’s director of communications, these cancellations will save the university $658,000.

“The amount of money we would have generated by leaving those classes open would have been $396,180,” Gallagher said. “So we’re looking at [canceling] 79 courses out of thousands that we’re still offering during summer.”

The savings, according to Gallagher, were not enough on their own to justify the cancellations.

“This is a very difficult task that we approached very carefully,” Gallagher said, adding that the university is “still absorbing budget cuts from the previous [funding] biennium.” Those cuts, he said, force the university to be as efficient as possible. This has come to mean running fewer classes with more students in them rather than offering more courses that are less full. “There’s a science and an art to it,” he said.

The same could be said about the deliberation behind this summer’s cancellations.
Gallagher said that courses were chosen based on what kind of impact their cancellation would have, adding that the summer courses that were dropped will be offered again during the regular academic year. The relationships between courses and the various series were also examined, Gallagher said. The administration is “looking at that across the entire university,” he added.

“In a perfect world we’d love to have smaller classes and offer them throughout the year and not be concerned with enrollment and size,” Gallagher said. “But we have to be as efficient as possible.

“This is the unfortunate result of ongoing disinvestment from the state,” he said. “That’s the world we live in now.”