Shutting students out not the right answer

By Editorial

In the fall, Santa Clara will open a new building, an 86,000-square-foot business school. The new location will give the Leavey School of Business two-and-a-half times more space than its current location, and provide a centralized location for business for the first time since the 1920s.

But while the size of the business facilities are expanding, the number of students who will get the chance to use the brand new building will be dropping, after the business school announced plans to cut enrollment by more than a third, 34.2 percent, in upcoming years. The business school will be requiring incoming students to apply in order to transfer into the business school.

The goal is to reduce the business school to 25 percent of undergraduates. Currently, there are about 1,833 students in the business school -- 38 percent of undergraduates -- according to Institutional Research. To reduce the class size to 25 percent, the business school will have to have about 627 fewer students.

While it's understandable that the university wants to keep its business school small, Santa Clara is taking the wrong approach in dealing with the spike in business students.

By restricting enrollment in the business school, Santa Clara is ignoring the demands of students, who are following a national trend of more business majors. Rather than aiming for an abstract percentage, we should cater to what students actually want to study.

The real solution would be to hire more faculty in the business school in order to keep up with demand. This isn't a trend that is going to magically disappear. If anything, business is going to become more popular in today's climate, both in Silicon Valley and nationally.

Reducing the size of the business school by a third means that the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering will have to accommodate more students. If the students would gravitate toward under-enrolled majors, like classics, then there wouldn't be an issue. But what's more likely to happen with students shut out of the business school is they will gravitate toward popular arts and sciences majors.

With public relations and marketing, communication is likely to be a big draw, but those classes are full, too -- all but one upper division class this quarter was closed. While eliminating 627 students will unclog the business classes, the result will be a logjam in other majors.

Restricting admission into schools is common at many universities. But one of the big draws of Santa Clara is that it is a small school where students are able to take classes in almost any subject they choose, and transferring between schools is always an option.

With this new policy, that door is closed, and students who are denied access to the business school may be forced out altogether if they are set on studying business.

This will also force under-classmen to commit to the business school sooner than they are ready, for fear of getting shut out. Many freshmen don't know what they want to study, which is why transferring into the business school is so common in the first place.

We hope that the university follows this change with a close, critical eye, ensuring that the needs of students are given priority over the needs of the administration.

Santa Clara's slogan is "The Jesuit university of Silicon Valley," an homage to the business-oriented area that we live in. With its new business building, the university has shown its commitment to 21st-century business. But the university is failing to uphold the same commitment to its students who want to be in the program.