Over the past few years, Wesleyan has increased the number of faculty while student numbers have remained stable. From FY14 to FY17, faculty FTE increased by 35 (354 to 389), while our undergraduate student FTE increased by 11 and our total student FTE fell by 27. As a result, in FY15 Wesleyan’s student-to-faculty ratio improved from our standard of 9:1 to 8:1, where it has since remained. These changes should help alleviate course access difficulties for students, and some evidence to support these hopes may be emerging. In spring 2017, student satisfaction with course availability as reported on the Enrolled Student Survey increased five percentage points over 2013 and 2015 levels (81%, 75%, and 74% respectively).
The structure of the undergraduate curriculum remains much as it was at the time of the comprehensive review in 2012, but there have been some changes and additions made in keeping with the first overarching goal of Wesleyan 2020: Energize Wesleyan’s Distinctive Educational Experience.
Wesleyan is known for the interdisciplinary opportunities it provides its undergraduates. To energize those opportunities in the sciences, Wesleyan has developed a new College of Integrative Sciences (CIS), which began in fall 2014. CIS offers a linked major, thus requiring that students combine depth in one area of the sciences (one of the traditional science majors) with breadth achieved through the courses and research in the linked major. Key components of the CIS are a Research Frontiers Seminar for sophomores, required research credits, one summer research experience, and a Senior Capstone Colloquium. CIS provides common experiences for students who are deeply invested in the sciences, including similar curricula, academic mentoring and research opportunities. We currently have nine (update # in spring) students enrolled in the CIS linked major.
Another important addition to the academic program is the creation of academic minors. Minors and certificates alleviate the pressure some students feel to double or triple major while still providing recognition of curricular achievements. The first minors were approved in Spring 2012, and there are now minors available in fifteen disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas of study: African Studies; Archaeology; Art History; Caribbean Studies, East Asian Studies; Data Analysis, Economics, Film Studies; French Studies, German Studies; History; Medieval Studies; Planetary Science; Religion; and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Wesleyan has also approved one new certificate, in Applied Data Science.
There is also a new graduate degree: a Master of Arts in Performance Curation, offered through the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). See the Response to Area of Emphasis on Graduate Programs for more information.
Energizing the distinctive education Wesleyan offers also involves discontinuing parts of the curriculum that lose relevance or are supplanted by new constructs. The Mathematics-Economics major was phased out over a few years and finally discontinued with the class of 2015, as the two departments felt that the new Economics minor, together with an increased emphasis on mathematical skills within the Economics department, made the joint major superfluous. Majors in Spanish and in Iberian Studies were replaced with a major in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures, and a major in Russian was replaced with a major in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
We have also made significant improvements in our advising program over the past five years to ensure that faculty are working closely with students to keep them on track in their academic program. For details, see Response to NEASC Area of Emphasis: Advising. We are also paying attention to certain points in the student experience, including the first year, mid-point, and the final year. We have significantly increased the number of First Year Seminar (FYS) courses that emphasize writing and the use of evidence in scholarly argument. In 2012-2013 we offered 24 FYS courses with 40 percent of first-year students enrolled, and in 2016-2017 we are up to 57 courses with 77 percent of first-year students enrolled. While we strongly recommend all incoming students take an FYS, taking an FYS is not a requirement, and not every incoming student chooses to do so.
Wesleyan has also significantly increased the opportunities for students to pursue internships in conjunction with academic courses at some point during their years here. Over the past few years Wesleyan raised money to endow many new internships to support faculty research and to stimulate more opportunities for collaborative faculty-student research. Wesleyan went from zero University funding for student internships in 2010-12 to $40,000 in each of the next two years, $98,000 the following year, and $105,000 for each of the past two years. Some of this funding supports research in the sciences, but by no means all. In 2015-2016, we supported over 200 internships through various funding pools (including the centrally managed Academic Affairs student research assistantship funds, Quantitative Analysis Center research apprenticeships, Davenport summer travel grants, College of the Environment and CIS internships, Mellon, McNair, and Sonnenblick funds), and we usually manage to fund even more students beyond those that are officially tracked; this year, for example, there was an additional $45,000 gift that funded yet more internships on top of the baseline. CIS (which uses two mentors in complementary fields for each student) has 31 full internships, which are now permanent. Internship funding of summer research (on and off campus) is now larger than ever before – indicative of the importance we attach to collaborative work between students and faculty.
In the final year at Wesleyan, we encourage all students to do some kind of a capstone experience. All majors offer one or more capstone options, as do many certificates, and about half of the majors require a capstone to complete the major. Students may also define their own capstone experience that is not specific to a department, which has made it difficult to collect accurate data on the number of capstones completed. In 2014 we developed a new data collection system through our major certification process in which we ask students whether or not they completed a capstone. That year, 67.3 percent of the class of 2014 stated that they had completed a capstone. In 2016, fully three-quarters of the graduating class (75.9 percent) stated that they had completed a capstone. This spring, we are in the process of developing a brief video about the capstone to try to highlight the experience and encourage even higher percentages of future Wesleyan classes to complete a capstone. In addition to encouraging individual research experiences, we are also considering ways to encourage more collaborative capstone experiences, as well. Indeed, Academic Affairs is exploring a number of new areas – design and engineering, project-based learning, design thinking – that lend themselves to collaborative student work.
Academic Affairs and the EPC work together closely to regularly review and oversee the academic program at Wesleyan. Two examples of this oversight are external reviews and oversight of the credit hour. Academic Affairs runs a full external review of two to four academic departments or programs every year. The goal is to run an external review of each academic unit approximately once every ten years. Over the past few years, we have committed significant resources toward expanding our annual external review process to include some larger academic units beyond the traditional academic departments and programs. While this expansion has made it harder to meet the ten year goal, it has allowed us to conduct reviews of large units that have a broad effect on the curriculum, including the Office of International Studies (OIS), the Library, and Writing Programs at Wesleyan. Over the past five years, we have also reviewed: African American Studies; Science in Society; College of Letters; Molecular Biology & Biochemistry; Art History; Music; Physics; Sociology; History; Government; and Earth & Environmental Science. These reviews sometimes lead to curricular changes, restructuring of the major, or to additional hires when expansion is warranted. In the case of OIS, an even larger change occurred – recommendations in the review led to the creation of a new Center for Global Studies in which the OIS, renamed the Office of Study Abroad, now resides as one part of a larger curricular (and co-curricular) structure.
The EPC is also charged with ensuring that all our courses meet the federal credit hour standard. EPC and its delegates–the academic deans–regularly review course course offerings to ensure that courses are listed at an appropriate amount of credit – usually 1.0, .75, .5, and .25 credit, depending on the amount of work. The University’s policies regarding the award of academic credit are made clear to students and faculty in the Academic Regulations (http://www.wesleyan.edu/registrar/academic_regulations/general_regulations.html). We have also added a discussion of the credit hour to our faculty orientation program so that new faculty understand our expectations in this regard, and credit-hour expectations are discussed annually with department chairs.