With Faculty, administrators and students recognizing the advantages afforded by the program, both demand and supply of the seminars has increased.

According to Doherty, a record 1,812 applications were submitted this fall for admittance into a freshman seminar. These applications were submitted by 851 first-years, the most of any semester except for fall 1967.

And the 2,484 applications submitted for the entire academic year was exceeded only during the 1969-70 academic year.

This year, to meet the growing demand of the past several years, the number of seminars was increased by nearly 70 percent, and is expected to increase next year by another 33 percent. The 61 seminars offered this year is the third-largest amount in the program’s history.

To facilitate this growth the new position of director of the Freshman Seminar Program was created and Doherty, who had been assistant dean of the Faculty for academic planning, took on the post.

The program has also made more concerted efforts to encourage lecturers and Faculty to lead seminars.

“There was a real effort [starting last year] to ask departments to try to contribute to this program and whether they could regularly offer seminars,” Pedersen says.

Now, many Faculty and administrators have placed their support behind the expansion. Pedersen estimates that as many as 100 seminar proposals will be submitted this year. In past years, very few proposals have been turned down.

Still, nearly 400 applicants were not admitted to any seminar this fall and about another 150 in the spring.

Unbalanced Demand

Although the expansion has afforded more first-years the opportunity to take seminars, other problems still exist.

“Before expanding even further, I think the program needs to look at what is working and what isn’t,” says Jonathan S. Chavez ’05, who is currently enrolled in a seminar.

According to Chavez, the burdensome application process and discrepancies in the quality, workload and selection processes among seminars create difficulties that should be redressed.

Although these problems have lingered for a while, expansion has taken precedence over correction.

“The program itself hasn’t changed that much,” Pedersen said. “It’s just grown.”