By: Natalie Rodriguez
Students may have noticed that the Spring 2025 course schedule was posted later than usual this year, which sparked questions and uncertainty. The main question that was asked was what caused the delay. When spring classes weren’t posted around the same time as usual, students like senior Amanda Banda found themselves waiting anxiously for weeks until they were posted on Oct. 1st to see how the rest of their year would go.
“It affected me because I had my schedule laid out for what I was doing for the senior year of fall and spring, ” Banda said. “I wasn’t able to see if I could or couldn’t drop a class for this semester and retake it in the following semester.”
Dominican recently restructured its schools. The School of Information Studies (SOIS) joined the Brennan School of Business in the College of Business Information Studies and Technology (CBIST), the School of Education merged with Rosary College to form the Rosary College of Arts, Education, and Sciences (RCAES), and Social Work is now a part of the Borra College of Health Sciences.
That was a challenge, according to Mickey Sweeney, English professor and president of the Dominican Collegium, which represents faculty.
“Change is hard,” Sweeney said. “For the registrar to be able to add all our coursework, all the changes… every single one of those course things had to change. There were double numbers we had to fix, new course titles — it was a lot. And in that process, we just had to make sure that the systems were speaking to each other.”
The Office of the Registrar is in charge of overseeing the system set up for registration and helps troubleshoot any issues that might arise. The spring schedule is released when course information has been approved by the colleges. Once the classes are approved, they are then entered into the system. Classes are picked for each term by a decentralized course scheduling model that involves departments, associate deans, the dean, the Provost Office, and the Office of the Registrar.
University Registrar Jennifer McClure added in an email message, “This year, classes were released more than a month ahead of spring registration, but this timeline varies each year.”
When asked when previous course schedules were dropped, McClure responded, “I can’t speak to when schedules had been released in the past. I have been at Dominican since January 2024, and I can confirm that schedule changes were constant and that this spring schedule is more stable than the spring 2025 schedule before registration.”
When given this explanation to Banda, she expressed, “This answers the questions for a delay, but students were still affected, and if there were delays or deadlines extended, we, the students, should’ve been informed.”
“I think they should have communicated this more and addressed it,” she said. “We were just left in the dark for way too long, and it did feel like we really didn’t know when we were going to get the courses. This also hasn’t happened just this semester. This happened last semester for our spring term, which made it stressful to plan out my senior year.”
McClure stated there is no formal deadline for the release of the schedule. If there are changes in the expected date, her office lets the deans and advising office know.
Despite the delays and changes, Sweeney is optimistic about a return to a quicker registration timeline next year.
“There’s no way anyone could have anticipated every single detail,” Sweeney said, “I hope that we’ve got it straight now. It’s not a plan to always register this late. We are planning to go back to normal.”
When asked what the registrar’s office’s goals were for next semester and next year, McClure answered, “The goal is to release as stable a schedule as possible in advance of student advising meetings before registration. The ultimate goal is to release an annual schedule aligned with the academic year.