Students listen to a lecture given by former Clinton speechwriter Michael Waldman. The class, entitled “The Arts of Communication,” has limited enrollment and is given in the Starr Auditorium at the Kennedy School.

When Kerry Greeley applied last fall to take four courses taught by some of the biggest names at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), she wound up empty-handed.

“I finally ended up being able to take one because I begged,” the mid-career master’s in public administration (MC/MPA) student says. “I groveled.”

Greeley’s story is an extreme case, but she wasn’t alone.

A system which for the past several years had allowed faculty members to hand-pick students in limited enrollment courses sparked anger and confusion last semester among some students who were shut out of the courses they wanted to take.

Students questioned the unpredictable criteria used by instructors to select their students—and school officials took note.

“In general, people were paying a lot of money to come here and—for reasons that weren’t clear—not getting into classes that they felt were critical to their education,” says Frank V. Paganelli, a MC/MPA who co-chaired the KSG committee that investigated the issue last fall.

After several months of deliberation, students, faculty and administrators hashed out a new system which Paganelli describes as “preregistration lite.”

Most students say KSG’s new system—which comes as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is considering its own move to early course selection—seems to have worked.

Not Dropping Shopping

Now, students who wish to take classes with high-profile pundits and former top policy makers will depend on the registrar.

The committee which recommended the change at the end of November of last year, explored a range of options, including a “hard” preregistration system—where course rosters would be determined in advance of the beginning of the semester. But the committee decided against it in order to retain some element of shopping period at the school, he says.

“One of the problems with preregistration—especially for a school like the Kennedy School—is that you have a lot of people who are there for only a year, so you don’t have any information other than a course catalog,” he says.

Though the plan under consideration by FAS uses similar terminology, the time frame of the proposed system and the motivation behind it are quite different.

Advocates for the proposed FAS preregistration plan say it aims to provide professors with better information about interest in their courses for planning purposes. And students would be required to file study cards as early as a month and advance.

The new KSG system requires students to submit their top two limited enrollment course choices to the registrar during the school’s two-day shopping period. The registrar’s office then assigns 90 percent of the spaces in the classes, giving priority to those students who rank a course first, as well as to those who are in their graduating year at the school.