The Facts: The University’s instructors are currently stretched thin by budget cuts and ballooning class sizes. Many instructors, who could do other labor for the University, are engaged with 100-level classes.

Our Opinion: The University must address the value its 100-level classes contribute to students’ education. If the classes are deemed ineffective, the instructors could be put to use for other, more constructive work.

Chancellor Jim Woodward and his administration came up with many innovative ways to try and reduce the impact of this year’s budget reductions on students.

Two of these solutions were to not fill vacant faculty positions or renew the contracts of many of the University’s adjunct faculty.

This may have been a necessary, and hopefully temporary, solution to the University’s issues, but it brings up a very disturbing long-term problem.

The University is going to have a serious shortage of teaching faculty for its burgeoning student body. One of the ways to remedy this is to address the necessity of tying students up in often-ineffective 100-level classes.

Many of these classes are at such a remedial level that it’s not prudent to expend a valuable faculty member on their instruction.

The criteria for these classes value cannot be addressed universally, many students and instructors would argue that there are effectual 100-level classes.

Instead, the classes should be addressed on the basis of relativity to their respective majors. Students should be challenged in these classes and forced to decide if the major is right for them, a cursory overview of the subject that is completely irrelevant to students’ future studies must be ignored.

As an example, many students find the 100-level engineering classes to be wasteful, boring and overly simple. Liberating the faculty members who teach these classes for other work would be logical. Instead of wasting their time, and the students’ time, on pointless classes they could individually advise students (not a feature in some engineering majors); teach higher-level or graduate classes; or perform additional research.

Just because some 100-level classes are ineffective, does not mean they are all inadequate. Many students in design have said that 100-level design classes are useful and an important weed-out tool.