After receiving Dartmouth-Plan requests from all freshmen yesterday, the Registrar's Office will examine students' proposed D-Plans early next week to see if there will be another over-enrollment problem Fall term.
Registrar Thomas Bickel said if his office finds that there will be a problem with Fall term enrollment, the Enrollment Committee will discuss how to pare down the excess requests at its meeting on Wednesday.
For instance, Bickel said the Registrar's Office may randomly pick freshmen and not give them their first choice D-Plan. In the past few years, every student has received their first choice D-Plan.
Students who have at least one Fall term off will get their proposed D-Plan, Bickel said, but students who apply to be on campus all four Fall terms may not get their first choice D-Plan.
The office hopes to tell students which choices they have been given by the end of next week.
The Registrar's efforts to limit enrollment is a response to one of numerous suggestions made by a subcommittee of the Enrollment Committee to reduce the high demand for Fall term residence. The Enrollment Committee is a group of upper-level administrators that handle issues related to the D-Plan.
The proposals included moving popular Fall term classes to other terms, shifting Fall-Winter sequence classes to a Winter-Spring format and moving more off-campus programs to the Fall term.
In addition, the subcommittee suggested Dean of Residential Life Mary Turco talk with the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council to try to reduce the number of sophomores and juniors who feel they must be on campus in the Fall to participate in Greek house rush.
Bickel said the proposals are essentially designed to make Fall term less attractive to students choosing their D-plans. He said if the proposals successfully stave off an enrollment crunch, the Registrar's Office will not be forced to deny many students their first choice D-Plan.
"We're trying to move demand away from the Fall," Bickel said. "Last Fall, if we'd had 100 students change their minds that would have been all we needed."
There has been an on-campus housing crunch the last two falls. This year, more than 100 students were still on the wait-list for on-campus housing at the end of August.
Over the last four months, Bickel said many College departments are working to try to make Fall term less desirable.
"There has been some action on all those fronts," Bickel said. "I've talked to all the department chairs about moving their courses and a few have been moved starting fall '96."
Acting Dean of the Faculty Karen Wetterhahn, who chairs the Enrollment Committee, confirmed that a few classes have been moved.
"We wanted to be careful not to overreact," she said. "We didn't plan on moving very many."Moving a large number of classes might lead to other problems, Wetterhahn said.
Bickel said the proposal to move sequence classes to a Winter-Spring format is not feasible, because of the complications of lab space and prerequisite courses.
Bickel said some of the faculty have not been enthusiastic about moving many classes from the Fall term.
"They don't want to make academic changes for what they see as a problem due to Greek rush and I agree with that," Bickel said.
Turco said she has talked with CFSC President Matt Raben '96, and asked that the Greek organizations to encourage juniors to not be on campus in the fall. She said there has been an increase in the number of juniors who are in Greek houses who decide to stay on campus and participate in the selection of new members.
"We don't want the CFSC to exacerbate the enrollment problems," she said.
Turco also partly attributed high Fall enrollment to the number of students who stay on campus sophomore fall in order to rush Greek houses.
"One of the things is to make it clear to first-year students that rush takes place all year round," she said. "Students do not have to be here in the Fall to join these organizations."Another proposal of the committee is to move more off-campus programs to the fall. But Bickel said some academic departments are concerned students will not go on certain programs because they are offered in the fall.
"There may be one or two [off-campus programs] that do get moved," he said.
Many programs have factors that make them relatively inflexible.
Russian Professor Lenore Grenoble, co-organizer of the Russian/Environmental Studies Foreign Study Program in Siberia, said the College asked that the program be moved from the Spring term to the Fall term.
"The College asked us to look at it and we looked at it seriously," she said.
But the program remained in the Spring due to the harsh Siberian winter.
