Commentary: Scheduling suffers from inefficiency
With advising well under way, students are scrambling to put together the pieces of a puzzle that hopefully resembles an ideal image of their desired future. Unfortunately, there are certain aspects of scheduling which makes this process difficult, such as conflicts, required courses, or class caps.
Of course, the most troublesome and nonsensical barrier to the process is credit caps. If you take 18 credit hours you have to pay extra to take more, and sometimes you will not be allowed to even have the option to take more. At U of M, you can take up to 25 credit hours, sometimes even more, and their tuition is a little bit less than ours. Not to mention that their campus is an entire city! At Kettering, you can take up to 28 credits without an increase in tuition.
If we pay $30,000+ a year already, we should be able to take as many credits as we want a semester that we can handle. That being said, there are certain majors where taking over 18 credit hours is not a big strain. Some majors here require more years for graduation simply because you can’t take enough credits a semester. For example, music majors usually take 5 years to get a degree. Another barrier to a timely graduation is the “Liberal Arts” requirements. These are really intrusive and largely useless to most students; most of the time they don’t even fit well with your major. Why does an English major need a lab course? Why does a math major need a philosophy class? Why does an Exercise Science major need an art class? Let’s fit a 3 hour science class with a 2 hour lab that conflicts with degree required classes just because. Let’s have P.E. classes at 8 in the morning three days a week because sleep is for the weak. Why not drill another hole in your head? It makes the same amount of sense, and it’s a lot cheaper.
There is a difference between making well-rounded students and teaching people to follow the path of least resistance. It’s a great idea in theory to make graduates “well-rounded” but really, if you don’t exercise the information you learn in these oddball courses on a somewhat regular basis, you’re just going to forget it all anyway. If it’s a question of money, that taking more credits a semester will decrease the amount of time a student will be here and inversely the cost per credit, thus potentially cutting income to the college, it should be considered that many aspects of life have more dimension than the expectant black and white outcome. This would show a grey area, most students like more free time and less classes, so the majority will still opt to select 18 or less credits so they can go out and party. But for the people that literally have to take 18 and more credits a semester to graduate on time and start their lives, they should be able to without having to pay extra.