Expand the Menu of Minors

Background and Proposal

We frequently tell prospective and new students that one of Mills' virtues is that you can do so many different things here academically. And they can -- in addition to established majors and minors there are any number of curricular combinations a student can put together and we even allow a student to create her own major if she is particularly enterprising.

Suggestion: promote the proliferation of minors.  We should consider adding a wide range of interesting multiple discipline minors that package intellectually valuable sets of courses in extremely attractive manner.

Logic Model

Students who are looking at colleges often begin their search by typing the names of majors and minors into a search engine.  The portfolio we present plays a role in whether we initially catch a prospect's eye at all, and the interestingness of the portfolio of majors and minors affects whether we sustain her attention long enough to have a chance to say what Mills is all about.

Practically cost-free.  A minor is really just a way to help a student create a subsidiary coherent academic experience outside of her major.  In general minors cost very little to administer and distract very little from other pedagogical activities.

Benefits? In truth, minoring in X or Y probably does not significantly enhance many alumnae career trajectories, but minors figure prominently in how undergraduates think about their education (and how they talk about it with their parents -- often minoring in X is what allows them to major in Y).

Commentary.  This might be seen as mere "packaging" and so it is, at one level.  But packaging matters.  We are talking about getting explicit about some of the exciting things you can do at Mills, naming them, telling students about them in explicit terms rather than just waiting for students to stumble on the packages.  But it's not mere packaging as it involves us as teachers really thinking through clusters of courses across different programs that CAN be built into a coherent supplement to a student's major.  Surely we would agree that there are more minors out there than simply those that are majors-lite.

How to Do It.  Set a goal of, say, getting ten to fifteen minors on the books for early fall 2013 so that they'd be a part of the information mix potential members of the entering class of 2014 would see.  Get volunteer group of 6 to 10 faculty who are interested in this idea.  Buy them lunch a few times.  Use rapid prototyping to develop three or four pilots.  Fine tune and publicize.  Work with EPS to develop a streamlined approach.  Look around for most interesting minors at other institutions; any we should imitate.  Etc. until we get to a dozen or so.