Good afternoon,
This email provides key items for course scheduling for the Fall 2026 semester: changes to course cancellations, making adjustments to your schedule, and possible seat shortages.
Change to the Course Cancellation Process for Low Enrollment
As a reminder, departments and schools can cancel courses due to low enrollment. We would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of the process.
If a course needs to be canceled due to low enrollment, the department/school must email registrar@rice.edu to request cancellation.
Once OTR receives the request, we will immediately cancel the course, drop the students, and email the students to notify them of the cancellation. This process will give students more time to register for a new course and provide a uniform process across the university.
Making Adjustments to Your Schedule for Fall 2026
If you plan to make adjustments to your course offerings, please be aware that the changes will be made “live.” For example, if a course currently has 15 enrolled students and a max enrollment of 15, adding 5 seats will open those 5 seats to continuing students. If you plan to open seats like that for incoming students, we suggest waiting until the start of O-Week to add them. This is because student registration for continuing students is paused during O-Week, and you will have time to add seats before incoming undergraduates register.
Possible Seat Shortages
As you may recall, there were some challenges in previous Fall semesters with incoming students registering for some courses because there were not enough available seats.
We are writing to provide you with information to help you and your department make an informed decision regarding the Fall 2026 schedule before incoming students register. The hope would be that this could assist you in adding more seats or sections, should that be an appropriate action.
We realize there are additional constraints—including pedagogical and curricular reasons—why a class should not increase in size or why additional sections cannot be opened. To be clear, OTR is not requesting that you add seats or sections; rather, we are simply providing you with information well ahead of incoming student registration so that you are not surprised and can make adjustments if your department chooses to do so, and those adjustments are appropriate.
We have created a Tableau dataviz titled Fall 2026 Possible Seat Deficits, which presents a subset of courses that appear to have potential seat deficits, which may make registration difficult for incoming students. If you are unable to access the report, please let us know.
What we did:
- Reviewed historical data: We looked at courses slated to be offered in Fall 2026 that were also offered in Fall 2025, using the Fall 2025 12th Class Day registration data as our baseline.
- Applied a growth adjustment: We adjusted the historical data to account for an expected 7.75% growth in the incoming undergraduate population.
- Filtered for demand: We isolated courses that project an enrollment of 3 or more incoming students.
- Compared seats to projections: We compared those projected incoming enrollment counts to the currently available seats for Fall 2026.
- Flagged deficits: We flagged any courses where the currently available seats are fewer than the projected incoming student demand.
Notes:
- This is not a perfect science; however, we have done something similar for several years in a row now, and the results have been close to the actual demand for those courses.
- If you do not have any courses on this list, then your courses currently appear to have enough seats. This, of course, may change based on actual student registration.
- This report does not include courses offered in Fall 2025 but have not been scheduled for Fall 2026; it also does not include Fall 2026 courses not offered in Fall 2025.
Questions? Need help?
If you are attempting to do something specific to your course offerings and need assistance, please don’t hesitate to ask—we would be glad to help you get what you need done.
Thank you,
Office of the Registrar
