Promoting Upper Division Sociology Courses

Abstract

The drop in the number of sociology majors nationally has pushed many sociology departments to reduce their offerings in upper division courses and to increase their offerings in lower division courses to serve students majoring in other disciplines. These pressures have been experienced at my institution as well, but for the last eight years we have implemented a program to enable the enrollments in our upper division courses to remain relatively stable. In this paper, I explain our program so other departments might consider implementing it, or some variation of it, to help maintain or increase enrollments in upper division sociology courses. Although my institution is a small college (approximately 1,000 fulltime students), our program may also be useful to departments at large institutions that are also experiencing the pinch of reduced enrollments in upper division courses. The program begins when decisions have been made as to what courses will be offered the next semester. When the upper division courses have been determined, general course outlines are collected from the instructors. About a week before students begin preregistering for the next semester, I send a letter and a number of copies of these course outlines to the chairpersons of departments whose students might be interested in one of our upper division courses. I explain how the course might benefit their majors, as well as what texts will be used, and the time and days the course will be offered. The department chairperson is asked to distribute the course outline to faculty who will be preregistering students in the department and to interested students. We keep copies of the outlines ourselves for interested students who come in to inquire about the courses. In small colleges, where faculty from different departments are more likely to know one another, this letter contact before preregistration appears to work well. In larger colleges and universities, it may be necessary to meet with the faculty from other departments and to distribute course outlines (perhaps during one of their departmental meetings right before preregistration) to promote upper division sociology courses. Below is a list of some of our upper division courses, followed by the departments contacted each year to promote these courses: