<p>I just wanted some opinions- last year when we were looking at schools one of the consideration was the availability of courses in her program. For us it was fairly easy as D decided she wanted to major in Literature/Education and wanted to stay in our State. </p>
<p>So my question is what would you consider a varied enough or I guess substantial number of courses. Her school offers 23 different lit classes for spring 2009 and a total of 28 different sections, This does not include the standard GE English courses required for all students just the classes for majors in Lit. There are a total of 520 students enrolled in these 28 classes.</p>
<p>Would that be considered a substantial curriculum? The school has about 5000 students and I am guessing 300- 500 lit majors total.</p>
<p>I can't give you any "number" but one thing you could do is to find a school that is known to excel in that curriculum and compare the course offerings. Also, did you check the fall course offerings? When I was an undergrad, my college offered certain courses in the fall and certain courses in the spring.</p>
<p>It sounds good to me, but I think you should also look at another factor:</p>
<p>Which courses are required for graduation and how often are they offered? Sometimes, not every course is offered every year. Students can find themselves needing to take an extra semester or year to graduate if a required course is not available when they need it.</p>
<p>Marian- I agree with you. Since my D is only a freshman we have not experienced that problem. Looking over the courses and the requirements for the lit major and education certification that does not appear to be a problem. It appears that all the required classes are available every semester and in the specific category required for the major there is always at least one selection in that category every semester.
You must take Intro to Lit, Brit Lit, Shakespeare and Poetry as a lit major and those 4 classes are offered every semester. You also must take the following categories- Drama, Major Authors, International, Pre 1800, Theory and Process and a Seminar class. There is at least one class for each category every semester. Although if you do not plan correctly you may have to take a class just to meet the requirement and not a class you really want to take. You also need 2 lit electives at the 300 level or above.</p>
<p>The variety seems great in terms of courses. What strikes me though is 18 professors for 28 courses. Variety of professors isn't always a good thing (I suppose its diversifying risk by why not few really good professors?). I suspect that kind of ratio reflects a lot of courses taught by adjuncts/sessionals or graduate students. It's a bit of work, but you might want to a sample check on who those 18 profs are. I'd prefer my D to be a student in the kind of environment I teach in, which involves a smaller core of tenure track professors in the last two years, who get to know their crop of students each year very well because they teach multiple courses to them. Though the downside is usually less course choice (and also it may not be as realistic in a popular major).</p>
<p>starbright- thanks for the insight. I just checked There are 17 tenured professors listed in the Lit faculty. I should note that 2 are also shown as professors within the Spanish Language area, 2 as American studies faculty, one as an Education faculty member and one on the Philosophy faculty. It looks like each professor teaches 2 classes but those also shown in the other areas teach one lit class and one class in the other area. One individual listed as Lit faculty is not teaching spring 09. That covers 26 class sections. It appears there are 2 adjunct professors covering the remaining 2 class sections. I looked and these adjuncts also teach a GE English and another GE humanities course. The full time tenured professors teach 2 classes and the underpaid adjuncts teach 3 classes but mostly GE classes. The adjuncts do seem to have limited responsibilty within the major.</p>
<p>Also, consider the availability of the courses. Are students often put on the waitlist for a class or locked out due to seminar caps? Depending on how public the scheduling system is, you may be able to find hard stats on this or you may have to depend on anecdotal information.</p>
<p>I made a mistake in my last post it appears that professors teach 3 classes each semester 2 in the major and one GE in English or Humanities.</p>
<p>Keilexandra- there were very few classes this coming semester that were full and there was another section of those closed classes available so that does not appear to be a problem.</p>