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.

In past years, students could apply to an unlimited number of limited enrollment classes.

Faculty members are still allowed to select 10 percent of the seats in their sections—using any criteria they choose—and fill slots that open up after other students drop the course.

And for this spring only, the new system gave an advantage to students who were not accepted to any limited enrollment classes in the fall.

‘Mass Psychosis’?

Student reaction to the new preregistration process has been mixed.

“I think it’s a good system…it was created amid a lot of pressure so I think it’s hard for them to really hit a home run,” says MC/MPA student Andrew O. Ott. “But at the same time, it’s kind of a pain in the ass system because you have to decide, before you’re even finished shopping, what courses you want to put down on limited enrollment.”

Barnaby B. Dow, another MC/MPA, says he wondered whether the old system needed to change.

“I have a saying, ‘in the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty,’” he says. “There’s kind of a mass psychosis that’s going on around here where people are glomming on the classes that they think they have to have. I suspect that that’s really not true”

But Senior Associate Dean Joseph McCarthy, who co-chaired the committee with Paganelli, says the old system “was given more than due process.”

And student feedback has been positive, he says.

“It’s been one of those rare occasions that students have approached me and said, ‘gosh, this is working well,” he says.

Some attribute the positive response to the substantial student involvement in shaping the new policy.

“You have to remember, this was a system that was built with the input of everybody—faculty, staff and students,” says Judy Kugel, the Kennedy School registrar.

Eric M. Berger, course assistant for the limited enrollment class “Understanding the Dynamics of Negotiation,” says faculty members and course assistants welcome the new system.

“It just makes the professor’s job a little bit easier,” Berger, who is a second-year master’s of public administration student, says.

Because the course is taught by Dennis Ross, who was a key player in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process, Berger says selecting students in past years had been a challenging task.

“[Ross] was looking through the applications and he had the hardest time picking, because he said the quality of the students here is great,” he says. “This is a wonderful problem to have, but at the same time it’s like picking between 18-carat gold and 14-carat gold.”

Supply and Demand

Before professors began selecting students for their limited enrollment courses several years ago, the registrar’s office assigned students spots.

McCarthy uses an economic analogy to describe changing control over course enrollment—shifting between regulation and deregulation.

“We said, ‘well you know, faculty should have that discretion,’’ he says. “So we tried it. It chugged along.” Until this fall, when “the free trade economy collapsed.”

Why did the faculty-centered system break down? Some say a disproportionate distribution of sections taught by well-known faculty in the fall contributed to the problem. Others suggest that fewer sections of a few popular courses were offered.

All agree that demand far exceeded supply.

And the demand often followed particularly popular faculty members—a problem which Paganelli says could not be easily fixed.

“While the school can bring in other faculty members to offer certain popular classes...what you cannot do is reproduce certain personalities,” he says.

But Paganelli and others who shaped the new system say it will provide a more level playing field to students seeking class time with some of the Kennedy School’s top professors.

For Greeley, at least, the changes have paid off. She was accepted into both of the limited enrollment classes she chose this semester.

“For taking a very severe problem and giving it an immediate fix that is equitable, I think this worked out really well,” she says.

—Staff writer William C. Martin can be reached at wmartin@fas.harvard.edu.