“If we teach a subject the same way in three different locations, that doesn’t make sense,” said prof. Ronald Seeber, industrial and labor relations. Seeber is also chair of the Management Sciences task force, one of the eight task forces in the administration’s strategic planning initiative dubbed “Reimaginig Cornell”.

At the first forum in which administrators presented Reimagining Cornell to the community, Provost Kent Fuchs described the goal of the strategic plan as creating a “better University with fewer resources.”

Through Reimagining Cornell, administrators will examine the University’s administrative and academic costs. Eradicating the inefficiencies, such as course overlap remains a key concern, and the University has set up several cross-college task forces to examine exactly that. Both Seeber and Prof. David Harris, sociology and chair of the Student Enrollment task force, have explained that it is still too early to make any statements about course consolidation or eradication, but Seeber said it is possible that in the future courses will be eliminated or moved to different departments.

Some professors in departments that teach overlapping fields have also taken this issue upon themselves. Last semester a group of professors, all of whom teach different versions of introductory statistics, met to understand the differences between their courses. According to Prof. Martin Wells, chair of social statistics, their current goal is not to eliminate or combine any courses, but to compile a clear description of the differences between each of the courses in order to give each student a better indication of which class is best-suited for his or her academic purposes.

There are currently at least five different introductory statistics courses among the seven undergraduate colleges: ILR Social Statistics 2010, Applied Economics and Management 2100, Policy Analysis and Management 2100, Math 1710 and Hotel Administration 2201.

Introductory statistics is not the only course that comes in multiple versions throughout the University. Accounting is taught in the School of Hotel Administration, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences. If students wants to take intermediate economics, they can choose between the College of Human Ecology and the arts college. Both the hotel school and ILR offer organizational behavior, human resources and employment law.

For students, multiple versions of the same subject matter offer flexibility in terms of scheduling, professor choice and grading stringency. Gary Esses ’09, majoring in AEM and biology, needed to fulfill his statistics requirement. With a plethora of options at hand, Esses was able to take statistics in PAM rather than his own major of AEM. According to Esses, he opted for the PAM class because of the shorter amount of class time and its reputation for being easy to get a good grade.

It is not completely clear why so many courses have sprung up throughout the University in so many versions. Prior to 1995, there seemed to be a greater economic incentive for each school to encourage their students to take classes within their own college.

Prof. Ronald Ehrenberg, labor economics, who specializes in the economics of higher education, writes in his book Tuition Rising: “Whenever a college can teach a course at a lower cost than what it is charged when its students take the course in another college, an incentive is created for the college to establish its own ‘duplicate’, or at least similar, course.”

For example, for each class that CALS students took in any of Cornell’s other colleges, the agriculture college needed to pay an accessory instruction fee. Therefore, according to Ehrenberg, schools established their own statistics or accounting courses in order to keep those costs down.

Prof. Robert Smith, labor economics and associate dean of academic affairs, disagrees with this reason for duplicate courses. He explained that the reasons have always been for academic purposes. With more classes like statistics, class sizes can be kept smaller and more manageable.

“The place is pretty well run in the sense that we try to put quality first and economic factors second,” Smith said.

Prof. Don Viands, plant breeding and genetics, agreed with Smith. He also stressed that the agriculture college tried to make sure that few of their courses are exact duplicates of another course, but rather have a unique angle specific to their college.

Although in essence the accessory instruction fee still exists, it no longer affects the finances of the schools in the same manner since colleges have required students to remain in their respective schools. By 2005, the contract colleges had their students taking large numbers of classes in other schools while the arts college restricts their students to only twenty credits outside the college.

According to Ehrenberg, in 2005 the arts college allowed the state-funded schools to pay a flat fee each year rather than a charge per student. In exchange for this fee, the schools would need to take on several Arts and Sciences’ responsibilities. For example, the introductory economics courses became a University responsibility, and now, rather than only being taught by Arts and Sciences professors, the course is also taught by ILR, Human Ecology and CALS professors such as Prof. John Abowd, industrial labor relations and Prof. Steven Kyle, applied economics and management.

Ehrenberg also said that part of this deal was that the state-funded schools would cross-list many of their courses with departments in the arts college. This would create an incentive for Arts and Science students to take more courses in the public schools without giving up their mere twenty elective credits. In addition, it would enable the state schools to take on some of the economic burden of teaching Arts and Sciences students in exchange for the many Arts and Sciences classes that ILR, Human Ecology and CALS students take.

Smith, however, said that ILR’s labor economics courses were only cross-listed with the economics department for academic purposes. “The reasons are not at all financial,” he said. “We want to give economics majors an incentive to take our courses simply because we think that labor economics is an extremely important part of economics.”

The hotel school, on the other hand, still has to pay and be paid the accessory instruction fee. Unlike the state-funded schools, the hotel school is in its own financial “tub,” as Ehrenberg put it, and was not part of the 1995 deal. This may mean that they still have an incentive to limit the number of classes that hotel students take in other schools, and can possibly explain their many classes that seem similar to other classes throughout the University.

For example, the hotel school’s wines class, which is an extremely popular class amongst students throughout the University, is a great source of revenue for the school.

However, prof. Steven Carvell, finance and a member of the Management Sciences task force, explained that the reasons that hotel students are required to take their own version of courses like statistics, accounting and organizational behavior has nothing to do with the costs. Rather, it is because of the specificity of the hotel school.

“What we do and our objective is quite different from the other schools,” Carvell said. “Even though the title might seem similar [to another class in the university], the course design is very different.” He added that every course given in the hotel school is focused on the service industry, uses examples from the service industry and prepares hotel students for their higher-level management classes.

Martin Wells, however, does not believe that an introductory statistics course needs to be, or should be, geared towards a particular major. “Introductory statistics courses teach general principles and if you can work the general principles you can apply those to different examples. The particular subject is really irrelevant.”