Planning for Increased Enrollment in 2016-2017

April 11, 2016

We are writing to bring you up to date about some of the preparations underway for an expected increase in enrollments next fall, and to ask for your assistance. We are pleased that the students that we have just admitted to UCSB have more academic excellence and more diversity than ever before. Our campus is in demand, and our students are better than ever. As you know, our Long Range Development Plan, which was approved in 2014, sets a course for gradual growth over a 15-year period. However, the University of California Office of the President has promised to enroll 10,000 new California undergraduates in the UC system over the next three years, and has mandated that campuses do their part to enroll their share of this increased enrollment, beginning Fall 2016. This increase comes at a time when some national trends in enrollment patterns that have caused larger increases in certain majors (such as STEM fields and Economics) than in others. The growth in our undergraduate population will take place almost entirely in the College of Letters and Science, but the impact will be felt across campus.

All of our administrative offices have been working together, in consultation with the Academic Senate, to help prepare. We have an immediate and even urgent need for departments to cooperate in planning their curricula and for individual faculty to be flexible in arranging their course assignments and teaching schedules.

Classroom availability and course scheduling are major concerns as we face a potential demand for an additional 2700 classroom seats per quarter during the 2016-2017 academic year. Since 2013, we have strongly encouraged academic departments to limit the number of their undergraduate primary courses offered between 10:00 a.m. and 1:50 p.m. to 60% of the primary courses offered. In order to offer enough courses to meet student demand, allow students to fulfill multiple requirements across several departments, and ensure classroom availability, it is imperative that departments and faculty offer as many courses as possible—especially lecture courses—in time slots that are currently least utilized.

This includes early morning, late afternoon, and evening times, as well as course patterns that make equal use of every weekday. (For certain non-required courses, or courses that also are offered at regular times during the week, some faculty might wish to consider the possibility of Saturday classes; it may be possible to adapt some pedagogical patterns utilized in Summer Session to offer courses for longer blocks of time on Saturday.) Although we are looking for alternative teaching venues, adding seats to currently offered courses in conventional time slots will not be enough to accommodate student demand since we do not have enough large lecture halls and classrooms on campus. We need more courses offered throughout the day and week.

Departments should consider such strategies as offering multiple iterations of impacted courses, deploying lecturers and graduate student instructors strategically to cover the maximum number of needed courses and sections, and experimenting with innovative formats for lectures and sections. There may be opportunities (consistent with Academic Senate policies and contractual obligations governing workload) to organize instruction in alternative formats, including the further integration of on-line components. In select cases, when appropriate and within policy, student peer review and the judicious use of some advanced undergraduate instructors might supplement instruction by faculty and graduate student instructors. It also may be possible to recall some emeriti to teach high-impact courses.

Deans are being provided with information about expected enrollments based on recent experience and Admissions data so they can work with department chairs as they prepare their curricular plans. We want to provide students with the curriculum that they need to fulfil their major and General Education requirements and make academic progress in a timely manner. Deans will receive additional resources to help meet the highest-priority curricular needs with additional instruction by graduate student instructors and Unit 18 Lecturers, but these resources are limited. We count on Senate faculty to teach those courses that are most in demand.

As we accommodate increased enrollments, we will revisit a variety of registration practices. Processes for reserving Fall 2016 seats for freshmen will be adjusted. We will continue to evaluate and refine tools like the wait list system and priority registration in order to protect and improve timely degree completion. Departments already have undertaken related efforts as they have reviewed their upper-division major requirements. Combined with the addition of temporary teaching spaces, more courses taught outside of “prime time” hours, and increased funding for instruction, these efforts will help us to address the needs of our students.

A task force is surveying the campus for suitable instructional venues that are not in the General Assignment classroom inventory. We may request that departments loan some of their departmental spaces to accommodate appropriate enrollment needs. The campus is acquiring new classroom scheduling software that will provide multiple tools to allow us to better analyze, model, and respond to enrollments, thereby optimizing our classroom use and course scheduling.

We will continue to update the information we have about expected enrollments, especially when we have the data on transfer admits, and when we know which students have accepted our offers of admission. The campus has opted to increase the percentage of transfer students, consistent with state mandates and in order to better spread out the enrollments of new students across class years and majors. A new Transfer Student Center, based in the library, will help to support our new transfer students.

We are actively working to increase the recruitment of new students in majors that have the capacity to accommodate more students, and to develop more enrollment management strategies. Academic advising will be augmented during Orientation and throughout the year in order to better assist students with planning their schedules. We are committed to pursuing our long-standing goal of increasing the number of graduate students. We also recognize that new staff and support funding will be required as we accommodate more students.

In a period of shifting student demographics, shifts among freshmen, transfers, and graduate students, and fluctuations in student interests, we need strategic admissions and enrollment planning aligned with academic priorities, faculty recruitment, curricular planning, and resource planning. Although the unexpectedly rapid growth in undergraduate enrollment has made it challenging to plan for the upcoming increase in Fall 2016, it is important for us to grow strategically, selectively, and carefully, and make realistic commitments of resources in order to ensure that growth is financially feasible, responsible, and in our interest. Chancellor Yang recently announced a dramatic and transformative gift that will augment and improve our ability to house our students on campus. We also are committed to improving and expanding our classrooms and instructional laboratories.

Faculty recruitment is increasing, and new faculty FTE will be available over the next few years. Although it will be a challenge to fund the recruitment packages, renovations, and new capital projects needed to both replace retiring faculty and augment faculty recruitments, we will continue to accelerate the pace of faculty recruitment.

We look forward to having discussions about the new opportunities that growth will provide to build on our strengths and establish new areas that will advance excellence and support our mission as a public research university dedicated to scholarship, innovation, discovery, education, and the public interest.

Thank you for your assistance and cooperation.