Enrollments

[Denis Crnkovic]

Although we don't have any empriical evidence here at Gustavus to prove
that freshman seminars are interfering with our enrollemtn, the Registrar
seems to agree that we are probably right to assume that all the languages
except Spanish are losing out to the FTSs. It would help, too, to have some
figures for similar elective courses to see if they have suffered in the
same way as the "difficult" languages. As elsewhere, our enrollments were
on a decline much steadier than the precipitous drop we had in 1993 (when
we also introduced the FTS). This yearhas been particularly difficult;
Greek, for example, had no enrollment at all this fall. As much as we try
to convince our colleagues that the FTS is "really remedial learning" (the
phrase is from the late Coleman Barry of St John's U) we are rebuffed and
told that we are on the cutting edge of education. What will eventually be
cut remains to be seen. We have thought of introducing an off-sequence
beginning Russian course in the spring, but the dean is encouraging us to
introduce instead an intensive Russian course that culmiates in a trip to
Moscow in June. We will dutifully try, but we're not sure we'll get
anywhere near the enrollments she will find satisfying. Our students
convince us that Russian suffers mostly from a lack of adversting both on
campus and in the high schools. We've started an aggressive 'advertising'
campaign and are developing our WWW homepages in hopes that high school
counsellors might see them, but all that requires a lot of time, effort and
budget squeezing.  Our Spanish enrollments, like those everywhere, have
skyrocketed, not least because students in he pre-professional courses are
told that they absolutely need Spanish these days to get into the kingdoms
of law school and med-school.

Denis

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Denis Crnkovic'
Russian Language and Area Studies
Gustavus Adolphus College
Saint Peter, Minnesota 56082
cronk at gac.edu
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In paradisum deducant te angeli.....
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