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EDIT: Others have commented that this is just that the # of students taking courses vs. the # of students in the major. The phrase "program enrollment" meant so
by codemac 3y ago
EDIT: Others have commented that this is just that the # of students taking courses vs. the # of students in the major. The phrase "program enrollment" meant something different to me. This would make the 800k profit make sense.
When I look at their actual numbers, his comments don't make sense: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/bf3ef02f-e90a-4e43-a316-d295fa489067/academic-transformation-public-data-table_july-17-2023-100.pdf https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/bf3ef02f-e90a-4e43-a316-d295...
They somehow have 18000+ credit hours to their department in a year, but only 61 enrolled students in fall 2022 which, means an average student enrolled was taking 310 credits? Or ~150ish if the 2022 credit hours is for both fall & spring?
What I think is happening, is that most universities allow you to meet your "foreign languages requirement" by showing your High School transcripts, and then you get those credits applied to your transcript. That means you actually make $0 from those credits. The later part of the spreadsheet clearly shows how impossible this is - they did not make $6.7M with 61 students' tuition. Clearly the tuition is just a dumb excel formula multiplying by the credits.
So either they're somehow the most expensive foreign language school in the world, with 1 instructor per 2 students...
Or they're a wildly expensive department that almost no one major's with, and their research grants don't cover their millions in losses to the university.
- legitster 3y agoYeah, the student to teacher ratio was telling. With 30 something faculty it was only 2?
- SL61 3y agoThe enrollment numbers are probably for majors, i.e. enrollment count of 5 for the French program means there are 5 students majoring in French. The vast majority of students taking French classes would be taking them for general education requirements (or whatever WVU calls that), or due to other degree programs requiring a language class, or as electives. At my alma mater, the Philosophy department had something like 10 majors, but the whole department was kept afloat by the Nursing College's requirement for their students to take an ethics class. The philosophy professors would teach a few high-level philosophy courses to tiny classes, and then several massive ethics seminars with hundreds of nursing students.
- cperciva 3y agoYup. The same goes for mathematics programs around the world -- a relatively small number of Math majors, but the departments are kept afloat by teaching calculus courses to everyone going into other science and engineering programs.
- codemac 3y agoGreat clarification, thank you! Did not consider that option.
- cperciva 3y agoStudents don't just take courses in their own program. What we have here is 61 students majoring in languages, but lots of students from elsewhere in the institution taking language courses. Possibly because of a foreign language requirement, possibly out of interest... but I'd bet that a lot of them just take language courses to get an easy A.
- codemac 3y agoGreat clarification, thank you!