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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

I've never fully understood why a college would have a class that was wanted so badly it was nearly impossible to sign up for, but not just have more classes of it. It seems awful silly.

I could understand if it was a certain professor that was wanted, and not a subject.

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Four years of signing up for pistols, never once got in (I signed up fairly early too. Guess I shoulda automated it). This new degree will now make it even harder to get in! Maybe as a result they will look into expanding the class.

I'm not really surprised that the availability is still pretty low. Regular lecture-oriented courses don't have to deal with requirements like "there is only one room on campus where this course can meet," but this becomes a problem _very_ quickly for pistol, archery, etc. I've never seen MIT's range (didn't even know there was a range in Cambridge until now), but I'd guess it can't handle too many students at once. On top of all that, I'm not sure how easy it is to find instructors for hire in the Boston area (it looks like they have one instructor teaching all sections of pistol and rifle).

Lack of land to have multiple classes of the same kind at once... That I can understand, too.

Sadly, I can no longer cite some of the ridiculous ones from my college years that merely required any classroom.

budgets?

Well, obviously, but I believe what he's getting at is: if so many students want to take a course, why aren't they allocating more resources toward that course to support demand?

This is all speculation.

Possibly because they treat it as an extra curriculum activity

And as such:

a) Perhaps the lecturers teach in their spare time because they enjoy the activity.

b) It's a fairly specific skill set that would mean hiring new resources for an extra curricular activity that means diverting resources from your primary operation (teaching) which you don't want to do.

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