<p>“adjuncts (a.k.a. part-time faculty), who are generally compensated on a per-course or hourly basis,”</p>
<p>[AAUP:</a> Informal Glossary of AAUP Terms and Abbreviations](<a href=“http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/about/mission/glossary.htm]AAUP:”>Informal Glossary of AAUP Terms and Abbreviations | AAUP)</p>
<p>It would not make sense for a Harvard student to go to Wellesley to take a course that is offered at Harvard. The transportation time could be used to go to the Harvard professor’s office hours, and have lots of time left over. </p>
<p>MIT is more reasonable, but it has large introductory classes as well. Although it is within walking distance, you should hear the ROTC candidates complain about having to make the trip to MIT, and they are presumably a hardier bunch than the average Harvard student.</p>
<p>These LAC’s that set up consortia do so to increase the variety of courses available, not to encourage their students to take the same courses elsewhere. Even the smallest colleges offer the standard introductory science courses on campus. </p>
<p>This is the same story at any larger university. You get more advanced courses, but you pay for this with large intro courses. The Harvard faculty apparently is concerned that this may be part of the reason for the attrition from science, so they are looking at class size. They have also found that student satisfaction with the major is inversely proportional to the size of the major. Lots of students in the concentation=big classes, poor advising, and student dissatisfaction.</p>
<p>The issue for places like Harvard is that essentially all the students have the intellectual ability to major in just about anything. So they tend to drop out of majors not because they cannot do the work, but because they do not like the field. </p>
<p>The question is why they seem to make this decision more about science and engineering. It is possible that they are recognizing, and responding to, market forces. The student body is quite preprofessional in orientation, and the rewards for a degree in economics are consistently higher than those for a degree in engineering, let alone pure science or math. So one driver may be the economic considerations that devalue science degrees compared to heading for law, medicine, or business school.</p>