Between 2019 and 2025, Middlebury’s undergraduate population rose from 2,580 to 2,653 students, according to data from the college’s Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. Enrollment saw large surges after students took time off during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions in 2020 and then returned to campus in 2021 and 2022, causing a record peak of 2,858 on campus students in the fall of 2021.
While overall numbers have calmed since the largest surges, the pressure on academic departments caused by these increases has not ended, especially in increasingly popular majors that require prerequisite courses, such as Economics and Psychology.
Middlebury’s website claims that the average class size is 16, a boasted norm that does not reflect the experience of many students and professors. First year seminars are capped at 15 students per class, but in other classes, students enter rooms of around 30 students, in some cases rising to 50 or 60. Students continue to struggle for seats in their desired classes, join waitlists with dozens of their peers and attend lectures larger than expected for a seminar style.
According to the institutional data, the college granted approximately 50% more Economics degrees in 2025 than 2021, rising from 97 to 147 department graduates in those respective years. The number of graduating Spanish and Psychology majors doubled, respectively increasing from 10 to 20 and 29 to 65 in the same period.
Concerns over class sizes from over a dozen students led the Student Government Association (SGA), to meet with Faculty Council last year to address the issue, according to Jeffrey Teh ’28, SGA speaker of the senate. Teh said that faculty and students shared similar frustrations. Large class sizes can hinder the personal relationship between students and professors, relegating student-instructor conversations to teaching assistants or smaller discussion sections.
Teh raised the example of Professor of Political Science Jessica Teet’s Authoritarian Politics class. The class had 18 students when it was taught in fall 2021, and last fall taught 54 students, nine greater than its target capacity of 45. It is common for professors to allow more students into classes than allotted by the original enrollment cap.
Megan Mayhew Bergman, assistant professor of English, emphasized the importance of small class sizes in a workshop-driven class — an opportunity that has become more rare.
“I think there’s a certain intimacy and trust in dialogue that can happen in a small class,” Bergman said. “Sometimes we can offer that in our more advanced classes, but generally, I think we’re all walking the line of, ‘are we serving the right number of students?’”
Introduction to Creative Writing is the only prerequisite for more advanced creative writing courses, making it sought-after by English majors and aspiring student writers. Creative writing courses at the college’s Bread Loaf Campus have 10 students, while Introduction to Creative Writing hosts 22. The classroom is crowded, Bergman said, with only one chair to spare. Every semester the waitlist for the class hovers at around 20.
Introduction to International and Global Studies (IGS), a requirement for all prospective IGS majors, leans on the larger side. This year the number of students per lecture has decreased from 80 to 60, making it slightly more manageable for professors Amit Prakash and Shinkyu (James) Lee to grade and engage with students.
“It’s only when we subdivide the class that we have the space for people to really articulate themselves, for us to get to know them, and vice versa,” Prakash said.
IGS is a particularly discussion and writing-heavy class, so the majority of student participation occurs in discussion sections. Although Prakash and Lee try to engage students during lectures by splitting up the larger group into smaller discussion groups, it remains a challenge to prevent one-way teaching.
“Teaching is a relational practice, so we need to have the back and forth as well, right?” Prakash said. “It has to be a dialogue.”
Language departments are also heavily reliant on smaller classes for efficient pedagogy. Jonah Reynolds ’28 expressed his frustrations with the large size of his Spanish class.
“[There’s] such a divide already between native and non-native speakers that we often feel an internal pressure to be precautious with our thoughts,” Reynolds said. “This is worsened when there are 20 students in a course that should have significant discussion and certain people hardly ever speak as a result.”
For professors, large classes make relationship cultivation and grading a much lengthier process.
“I think when we’re overloaded and harried, it’s hard,” said Bergman. “When we have a larger class size and grading is more difficult, it’s harder to offer that depth.”
“When you assign a paper and give 80 comments and midterms and another paper, it adds up. Even 60 is quite demanding,” Prakash said.
Some departments, like Economics, have adopted strategies to manage ongoing enrollment pressures to allocate limited class seats. In a department-wide email, Professor and Economics Department Chair Andrea Robbett outlined the centralized waitlist system used for all non-introductory Economics and International Politics and Economics courses. Instead of a first-come, first-served model, students complete a single survey after registration closes, allowing seats to be reallocated based on academic need, such as major or graduation requirements. Seniors and Senior Febs can also reserve seats in advance through a departmental survey for 400-level seminars. Professors from the Economics Department declined to comment on this system.
As part of the budget cuts announced last spring, the college committed to increasing target enrollment from 2,500-2,600 to between 2,600-2,650. While reaching this target would mark an overall decrease in students on campus from the current number, it would sustain a substantial increase since pre-pandemic numbers. No plans have been announced to hire more faculty overall to accommodate this change.
