By Shelly Williams/editor-in-chief
Walking into TR Campus, students can preview a poster of the sections dropped from the campus’s spring offerings — 103 of them.
Despite a TCC record-breaking enrollment of 45,323 students, the college still canceled many sections throughout the five campuses this semester.
“Most sections are canceled because of low numbers enrolled in the sections,” said TCC director of institutional research Linda Hines. “Keep in mind that some scheduling builds a section for a lecture and another for the associated lab while other scheduling may have one section for lecture and lab combined.”
NW Campus had 111 sections that didn’t make this semester while NE Campus had 79, SE Campus had 70 and South Campus had 56, according to aFeb. 4 section status report.
“In many cases, it really is the mismatch between what we have scheduled and what students respond to,” NW interim vice president Delbert Derrett said. “We are an open door institution. No matter how carefully we attempt to plan, our schedules do not turn out to match student response in specific instances.”
He said many situations remain when canceling sections has little or no impact on students.
“In some cases, courses are cross-listed, different course numbers but the same content, or clustered, different levels of self-paced instruction, in what is really more than one section meeting at the same time and place,” Derrett said. “In these cases, one section might be canceled but the other remains.”
In other cases, such as private music, TCC builds multiple sections for an instructor.When no one enrolls, Derrett said canceling the section has no impact on students.
“I think that most of the courses that were canceled on NE Campus were private music lessons, which were placed on the schedule early for the convenience of students and then not needed,” said NE vice president for teaching and learning services Jane Harper. “There were also some clustered dance classes where we offered all the possible options resulting in some zero-enrollment classes, which we canceled at the end of the registration cycle. We had very few classes that were eliminated from the schedule with students enrolled.”
However, 6,316 course sections did make this semester throughout the district.
“Cancelling sections is never a first choice,” Derrett said. “Most of the time it is a result of who we are — an open door institution with a multitude of programs for our students.”
