There were some cries of celebration and tears of joy when The Collegian announced just over a month ago that WebAdvisor is being replaced. As the last registration cycle of WebAdvisor is beginning, many students seem to believe their registration woes will be resolved. Unfortunately, I do not think that will be the case.
What are these “registration woes”? The difficulty or inability (or the stress of potential inability) to get the classes they want or need in order to graduate. Currently, WebAdvisor is a great target of blame. After all, you can press “register” the millisecond it hits 7 a.m. and then you wait. Your browser crashes and you sit in the silent agony of your dorm room, the library, or a coffee shop in town waiting for a confirmation email and WebAdvisor to reload. After 10 to 15 minutes, you finally see the results, discovering you did not get the classes you wanted. It is common for students to get only one or two of the classes which they are attempting to register for.
At the same time, it is a mistake to conflate WebAdvisor with all registration issues. In addition to WebAdvisor’s technical issues, there are two main reasons for student frustration: course offerings and registration priority.
The fact that Hillsdale has small class sizes will always mean the popular classes and popular professors will fill up fast. As long as we offer 28 sections of the Heritage classes per semester, but only nine sections for all the fine arts requirements (and shockingly only one section for each of the Art History classes), it is obvious that students will have greater difficulty getting into these mandatory classes with fewer sections. Expanding offerings would require both an increase in faculty members and classrooms. This is no small task, which is why we are likely to find a more realistic solution in turning to registration priority.
Students of different classes register for classes on different days. In the spring of 2019, the college changed its policy for registration priority. Instead of counting the total number of a student’s credits when determining their registration day, the college now only counts the number of credits earned at Hillsdale. At the time, Vice President of Student Affairs Diane Philipp said “freshmen were coming in with 40, 50, 60 credits, and so were able to bump sophomores, juniors, and in some cases, even seniors out of classes.” The change was meant to remedy that problem. Unfortunately, it created plenty of unintended consequences.
First off, transfer students who have already spent at least a semester at another college and hope to graduate at Hillsdale in less than four years do not get preference in such a system. Instead of registering with the seniors during their senior year, they are registering with juniors, meaning they have the potential to be bumped out of classes they need to graduate.
Junior Jack Hammons transferred to Hillsdale in spring of 2020 and, despite his plan to graduate in May 2023, he must register with the class of 2024 each fall semester. During registration last spring, Hammons said he saw a required politics class had only one section offered, and there were only a handful of spots left by his registration day. Between the time he pressed “register” and got his confirmation email, the class filled up, presumably with sophomores. Fortunately, the professor had mercy and was willing to let Hammons in the class; however, it does not always work out that favorably.
Most Hillsdale students are not transfers, but some do come in with dual enrollment and AP credits, hoping to graduate early. Others use those credits to take a lighter semester load at Hillsdale. Junior Joseph Coleman is one of those students. After coming to Hillsdale with college credit earned through his high school’s International Baccalaureate program, Coleman opted for a few lighter semesters at Hillsdale. Students are required to have 90+ institutional credits to register as seniors, an average of 16 credits per semester at Hillsdale and higher than the 14 credit average requirement for juniors and 13 for sophomores. Because of this requirement, Coleman and others like him are facing issues registering on the senior registration day. Since he is five credits shy of the 90-credit requirement at Hillsdale, he will be registering with the current sophomores next week. Even though he is well on his way to graduation, having already completed his Spanish minor, a few classes from finishing his history major, and close to the 124 credits to graduate, Coleman has the potential to be bumped out of a class that he will have no future opportunity to take by a rising junior.
Going back to the old systems and merely counting all credits comes with the exact same problem: underclassmen kicking upperclassmen out of classes. Both systems end up with the same issue.
I propose a system that gives students with transfer credits priority above their fellow class members, but not ahead of the class above them. Currently, registration lasts seven business days (at least in the fall) but there is a business day between each class’s registration day: seniors register on Monday, juniors on Wednesday, sophomores on Friday, and freshmen the following Tuesday. On the days in between–Tuesday, Thursday, and Monday–I propose creating additional registration divisions, based on a combination of total earned credits and Hillsdale matriculation year (or the equally good metric of high school graduation year).
How would this look in practice? If such a system were implemented immediately, a student with 90+ total credits who matriculated in or before fall 2020 would be able to register on the Tuesday following senior registration and before junior registration. This would still put transfer students like Hammons and those like Coleman behind other seniors, but it would keep them ahead of juniors making it less likely that someone planning to graduate in 2024 would take their seat in a required class. A student with 56+ credits who matriculated in or before fall 2021 would be able to register on Thursday after juniors and before sophomores, and so on.
Spreading out registration to seven rather than four days also has a positive side effect: fewer people will use the same servers for registration at once, meaning faster results for students at 7 a.m.
I grant that this proposal would make the system more complicated. I would hope that the incoming registration program, Self-Service, will be able to tell students their registration day so that Registrar Doug McArthur’s office is not inundated with confused emails and phone calls. Nonetheless, I believe that the downsides of complexity are greatly outweighed by the benefits of restoring fairness by a fine-tuning of registration preferences.
