<p>A couple of points:</p>
<p>a) I’m notorious here for harping on the the financial underpinnings of colleges as a selection criteria. Why? Because it impacts things like course availability. This is particularly acute right now as almost all colleges and universities have responded to the endowment crash by increasing enrollment and/or decreasing faculty size. They can shovell all the you know what in the work in their happy-talk press releases, but when you have fewer professors teaching more students, there are consequences.</p>
<p>b) The easiest way to avoid ever capping a student out of a course is to teach all freshmen courses in 1000 seat auditoriums. You actually want you student to get capped out of a course or two along the way. It means that the college is serious about class sizes.</p>
<p>c) There are ways to make it equitable. Swarthmore caps the vast majority of its courses including freshman seminars that are capped at 12 and many intro level courses that are capped at 30. For the bread and butter courses, then add professors and sections, but it is still an imperfect science predicting what 18 or 19 year old kids will choose… If a course is over-enrolled, there is lottery. If you lose out on the lottery, you get priority standing for the course the following semester. As a pratical matter, freshmen should be armed with several choices for a first-year seminar – in fact, I believe they are asked to list three choices. Otherwise, I believe my daughter was lotteried out of one course freshman year (a fluke year since it was a course with four sections (capped at 12) and fluke over-enrollment). She took the course second semester and plugged in a different course from her “to-do” list. I don’t recall that she was ever lotteried out of a course after that, although she always went into registration with five or six courses on her list because scheduling issues (time of day) can complicate the picture if you don’t get your prefered time slot for one course.</p>
<p>d) College freshmen like to complain to their parents about every perceived injustice as they grapple with the realization that it is not, after all, a perfect world out there.</p>