Swollen enrollments

It wasn't too much work to push the cart away, but the lab assistants never did it. Instead, they complained about it during the department meetings how the undergrads were careless with leaving the carts around and they had to clean up after they perhaps the professors could spend a lecture or two teaching them about the importance of being organized and clean and respecting your workspace. That wasn't going to happen because the schedule was already tight as it was but they were hoping to sneak in some trick questions regarding office hygiene and taking care of your belongings during the midterms. Sneaky questions that the professor should at least give the kids a hint about, they thought.

Things were bad, they knew, because things had been so great lately. Biology enrollments had tripled in the preceding three years, with the intro classes outsizing everything else by far even intro computer science and econ courses. The number of majors had grown by an astounding 220 % and no one at the department was quite sure what the cause was. Nationally biology enrollments had increased due to prediction of increased demand for biologists and bio-engineers, but the increase hadn't been so drastic in peer institutions. The new professors were student favorites though it was still unclear how that would have affected the incoming freshman interest. Something was definitely up and the University had set aside a task force to figure out what.

The most obvious approach turned out to be the least helpful. When the students were given a survey to explain why they had chosen biology as their subject of interest, the results were all over the place, and not significantly different from years previous. One-on-one personal interviews hadn't revealed anything interesting either save for the fact that the students seemed to be aware of the surprise increase in the number of enrollments in their field at the University, and didn't seem to have any clue on what had happened either. What they did know was their friends, and friends of friends, were all taking those courses, and they needed to be get on the train to wherever it may be going.

The complaints weren't just coming from the teaching assistants. The biggest complaint from the new enrolls was about the teaching assistants. They were too advanced in their approach in the teaching sessions and did not accommodate for students who hadn't taken a biology course previously. The TA's were aware of that, there was nothing they could do about it. The University had aligned it's biology program towards a more advanced student population that was more passionate about the subject and had a good understanding of the basic topics from high school. That was one of the reasons why the school's program was considered so good, it tended to produce a lot of Phd applicants and future doctors since they had free courses to cover advanced topics. The swollen sizes of incoming courses would change that, harming the performance and stats of the entire department. Senior staff were not sure how they would approach that, and the TA's weren't instructed to improve their approach. The hope was that, at some point those that had trouble with biology would just drop out, not messing up the statistics for the department. It would be difficult to explain why all the metrics had shown negative improvement.