What is a bottleneck course?
The California State University system has defined bottlenecks as anything that limits students’ ability to make progress toward graduation. Demand often exceeds supply because public universities are constrained by funding; academic program requirements; student readiness and their academic program choices; limited facilities and course requirements; faculty, staff and student schedules; and resources. There are several reasons why CSU students face these bottleneck issues:
- Student Readiness and Curricular Bottlenecks can result in D, F, or W grades, causing more students to retake the course. Enrollment demands increase through new students and students repeating the course.
- Place-bound Bottlenecks result when students must wait for their campus to schedule particular courses. This can be especially significant at smaller campuses where diversity of course offerings competes for limited resources.
- Facilities Bottlenecks can occur for a number of courses, particularly introductory STEM courses with laboratory requirements and restrictions on the number of students who may take lab sections.
- Advising and Scheduling Bottlenecks result from lack of awareness of the wider range of course and program options students have to complete GE and major requirements.
This information was taken from the CSU Course Redesign with Technology website.
