Enrollment, class cuts, and the balancing act that comes with the two are all complicated issues.
We need to re-examine how we balance class cuts and the full-time equivalent student load needed to keep the college afloat and best serve its students.
We need students to stay at Palomar.
Palomar College doesn’t exist without its students and students don’t come unless there are open classes.
Funneling us into only the most efficient number of classes ignores that most students have lives outside of Palomar.
As Daniel Sourbeer, interim vice president of instruction, said, there is an unavoidable human cost to class cuts. Students are thrown into frenzy over finding classes last minute and in the case of faculty it means hours upon hours of lost pre semester work.
But at the same time the college needs to balance its expenditures.
The question of rather or not 20 students is enough for a class to pay for itself and the college comes into play. While the idea of only needing 10 students to pay for a class is certainly novel, it’s not just the class we have to pay for. But in the same breathe we need to protect certain, low-enrolled programs.
What the college needs is a dialog between the faculty, administration, and students to resolve the issue of efficiency and class cuts.