First, recognize that the Intro course is the MOST important course in recruiting students majors. Until taking Introduction to Sociology, the average student has no idea what sociology is. Therefore, chairs should 1) do everything possible to assign their most engaging full-time faculty to teach this class, and 2) incorporate mandatory field trips/experiences into the intro course. Most traditional age college students have limited experiences of the world; nothing rattles their understanding of the world more quickly that being confronted by the overwhelming experience of difference, and such experiences do much to capture the interest of the best students.

Second, double-majors are the few, the brave, and the bright – seek them. We increased the rigor of our department requirements (6 credits of theory, 12 credits of stat/methods, a senior seminar with internship requirement, and 15 credits of department electives), but lowered the overall number of required credits, making it much easier to complete a double-major in sociology. We now have a growing number of psychology-soc, history-soc, english-soc, communications-soc, politics-soc, criminal justice-soc double majors, and they are uniformly strong students. They also make our classes much more exciting to teach, by introducing ideas and findings from their other major.

- Tim Clydesdale, The College of New Jersey

In all of my courses I have students fill out information cards the first day of class. These include their name, local contact information, class standing, reason(s) for taking the course, particular topic interests in the course, intended major, and something interesting or unusual about themselves. Throughout the semester, as I hand back data assignments, quizzes, and tests, if a student is doing particularly well in the course I write on the top of the assignment/test something like: "Have you considered a sociology major or minor? Please feel free to stop by my office and visit about that possibility." (I don't typically do this if the student is a senior majoring in something else. . . ) Each year this results in several students talking with me, and one or two adding a major or minor.

- Ed Kain, Southwestern University

Our department has found that one of the best ways to recruit good students is to recruit good teachers for Sociology 101. Too often Sociology 101 is filled with badly trained young graduate students, hastily hired adjuncts with poor credentials, and the full time faculty members who are being kept away from more important courses. When we put the best teachers we have into SOC 101, then more students tend to come back for more.

- Marty Schwartz, Ohio University

OUTCOME REPORT: IDEAS FOR RECRUITING MAJORS AND MINORS IN SOCIOLOGY

During an Academic Workplace Workshop on "Ideas for Recruiting Majors and Minors in Sociology," at the 2000 Annual Meeting, panelists and members of the audience offered suggestions on how to recruit majors early in their college careers, reflecting our own experiences on a range of campuses.

I'll offer these suggestions in the form of firm and unqualified, even extreme, declarations, though we offered this advice more tentatively at the workshop and though we realize many suggestions need qualifications because they fit some departments much more than others.

Suggestions about departmental curriculum:

Make it harder: Increasing the demands on students by raising standards for their performance will entice more students to stay with sociology, will raise the perception across campus about the discipline, and will improve student morale.

Create more sequence in the major: A typical grab-bag curriculum not only overlooks the ASA's own advice about how best to design sociology curricula, but also deters departments from providing curricular depth. Sequenced curricula permit students to take increasingly demanding and sophisticated courses.

Ensure that your department's best teachers offer the introductory courses: Catch students with your intro courses; since few of them learn anything about sociology in high school, a bad first experience will probably be their last.

Make mentoring of faculty an important part of departmental culture: Take seriously your responsibility to help junior faculty develop their skills in the classroom, and your responsibility to help senior faculty retain their enthusiasm. Make faculty members' active and successful involvement in mentoring part of the formal evaluation process.

Suggestions about departmental pedagogy:

Emphasize active learning in courses, beginning with the intro course: Students learn material more fully and become more excited about sociology when they are more actively involved in the process of learning it. They find appealing the opportunity to connect their first-hand learning to their course work.

Either avoid large lecture classes or ensure that discussion sections are kept small: Real discussion rarely happens in large groups and instructors sometimes fail to value discussion sections. Keep a human-scale wherever possible and ensure that what happens in sections matters in the course.

Increase the opportunities for majors to engage in independent and mentored research experiences: Advanced majors in particular revel in the experience of actually doing research and such excited students create good advertising. Moreover, students who work in small teams on research find the experience more positive while their faculty advisors often have reduced time-commitments since the students act as colleagues for each other. Paying more attention to even a select group of students in such opportunities can stimulate interest in the overall department, if those students to talk about their experiences and other students believe they too can obtain similar benefits.

Use "real" texts by sociologists rather than textbooks: Textbooks encourage passivity in learning; textbooks used in introductory courses also encourage breadth of coverage rather than depth of understanding. Students like to learn first-hand about sociology, not simply to read textbooks about it.

Incorporate service learning opportunities in courses: Service learning helps integrate hands-on experience, theory, and close analysis; service learning attracts students.

Upgrade the typical internship program: Create a selective "practicum seminar" for at least a set of majors doing internships. Such a seminar, in which a handful of interns meet weekly with their instructor to discuss common readings about organizations and to exchange perceptions of their internship experiences, can increase the academic rigor of the internships which you sponsor, making them more useful as academic tools while retaining their valuable experiential character.

Suggestions about the department's campus reputation:

Be visible: Let others know what you are doing! Help your department be unabashedly self-promoting about all your successes in the classroom, on campus, and in the community. In particular, let your administration know about your department's and faculties' work in the academic and scholarly worlds beyond campus.

Get your own space on campus: Beg, borrow, or steal your own space, identified publicly as yours, and make it available to your students and especially your majors, particularly if your campus mostly serves commuters. Space with resources like computers or study carrels is better than space without, but space without is better than none at all.

Suggestions about relations with students:

Get to know your students: A key way to improve your departmental climate and make students feel welcome is to get to know them.

Increase the flexibility of your program to match the needs of your students: If they work during the day, figure out how to offer courses at night. If they need help with writing, make arrangements with the campus writing lab. If they need more access to computers, work to get it.

Make student advising a priority: Students want positive contact with faculty, so try to widen the advising process to include faculty, including all members of the department, not just a few overworked volunteers or draftees.

Explicitly recognize all faculty for student-centered work: Make clear to faculty and to administrators the value of work which faculty have done to enhance their courses, to mentor students, and to advise students who are engaged in independent research projects. Include strong supportive statements about such activities in faculty activity reports and in departmental letters on raises, recontracting, tenure, and promotion.

Inform majors and potential majors about career options: Students often need help imagining how their major may connect to their career. Help them by distributing information from the ASA and other sources.

Convince parents that sociology major a good idea : Parents need to know, even more than their children, that the sociology major will lead to a good career. Help parents understand how sociology can be useful.

Bring alumni to campus to talk about careers and how their major helped them get work and succeed: Such visits provide current students with living models of "where they can go" with their major. Thus they constitute important additions to the mentoring process and show students how sociology is relevant to their lives. And students so informed are better able to convince their parents that sociology is a good major.

Involve majors in the life of the department: Create an honors group or sociology club to encourage students to see the department as a community. Intentionally and consistently involve students in departmental life, by involving them in advisory committees or inviting them to brown-bag discussion sessions.

Conclusions:

Our own experiences as we discussed in the workshop suggest that students respond well to greater rigor, to more active learning styles, to greater access to their instructors and involvement in the department, and to the perception (created by the nature of their courses and by courses' perceived scarcity when enrollments are capped, and by alumni/ae's post-graduate experiences, among other things) that our courses are valuable. Of course, creating departmental change is hard, so connecting with others who can help motivate, make suggestions, and offer encouragement is important; create those ties!

- Christopher Hunter, Grinnell College