The Instructional Capacity Playbook

Understanding the portion of service enrollments in each department (or course) allows academic leaders to measure their programs’ contribution to students’ success outside of their own majors. Curricular interdependency also helps departments predict demand. Enrollment changes in programs with the highest number of service enrollments are a critical predictor of course demand.

With a strong understanding of course-level capacity and curricular interdependency, academic leaders are well equipped to predict course demand and right-size instructor assignments before the schedule is set.

Even with the ability to gauge demand in advance, there will inevitably be some mismatches between student demand and course availability. Once students actually register for courses and a theoretical degree plan is converted into a tangible schedule, the effects of section selection come into play, and space and instructor availability needs become more acute.

Most institutions allow students to place themselves on a wait list for full courses, but these wait lists are typically managed by individual instructors and are limited to a handful of students. Uncapping and centralizing wait lists allows institutions to size excess demand for course additions once the registration period has begun. Automating the wait list through existing registration systems frees up instructor time for curriculum planning and other activities.

Tuition revenue is a critical lever in any budget model. The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) planned for rapid enrollment growth in its College of Engineering, leading to an increase in tuition revenue in an otherwise lean time (Virginia Tech was planning for a 3% across-the-board budget cut). Rather than the traditional model of using this revenue solely for Engineering’s priorities or adding it all to a central fund, Virginia Tech allocated funds based on the wide-ranging impacts of growth.

Faculty line recapture and reallocation is probably one of the most important ways of reallocating resources in response to changing enrollment. When faculty lines open due to a faculty member leaving or retiring, institutions have an opportunity to reassess whether the line is needed in the current department given enrollment shifts that occurred during the faculty member’s time in seat or changing research priorities.

While high-demand courses during the standard academic term may lack enough capacity to meet demand, courses outside of the traditional academic year are typically scheduled without central oversight and are often under-filled. The intersession between holiday break and spring term is often unused altogether or treated as an optional enrichment opportunity.

The below example shows how four sections of a lower-division anthropology course with fill rates ranging from 38% to 69% could be consolidated resulting in three sections with an 80% fill rate. Not all under-filled sections should be collapsed or consolidated (some are scheduled to accommodate students taking co-requisites scheduled at the same time as the other sections of the course, for example). However, institutions that have gone through the process indicate that the savings from even a small number of consolidations still merit the effort.

One area where many institutions have identified opportunities to increase capacity is in very small courses, particularly those designated as independent study. Independent study constitutes about one-tenth of the total courses taught at the average institution, but they have a significant impact on faculty workload.

The Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University took a systematic approach to reducing the number of small course offerings by focusing on non-degree-applicable “tracks” within its degree programs. Rather than eliminate all courses with fewer than five students, the Greenlee School asked faculty to consolidate courses in specialized tracks, those in extensive sequences, and very small electives or independent study.

Beyond increasing the number of instructors or increasing the number of students per course, there is a third way to increase capacity: changing the patterns of demand at the curricular level. Curricular requirements can create bottlenecks when one course is required for a large number of majors.

A simple way to set up a departmental teaching benchmark is to add up the statutory teaching capacity of all tenured and tenure-track faculty, then subtract all planned/funded releases. The resulting “theoretical course capacity” is the maximum number of courses the unit can schedule without hiring adjuncts.

The standard workload and planned releases are a good starting point for measuring faculty contributions to the department, but of course they do not tell the whole story. Binghamton University takes a more holistic approach to measuring faculty activity through a dashboard that counts several different types of teaching and many varieties of scholarly activity, as well as release time given for administration (in $).

Many institutions have pursued multiple tenure tracks to allow faculty to specialize in research or teaching. The Belk College of Business at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte developed such a model in 2000, where faculty were hired for teaching, research, or combined “tracks” to tenure. However, this model led to political conflicts because it created two standards for tenure and reduced the research productivity of faculty on the balanced track.