In recent years, NC State has seen record-breaking classes of first-year and transfer students admitted to the university, meaning more people have to take required fitness classes to count towards their degree. This has led to the current issue of students struggling to enroll in these classes, a problem that the Health and Exercise Studies department is also feeling the effects of, according to Autumn Belk, the associate department head for HES.

“We typically reserve about 20% of our sections for freshman only, and that’s just because if we didn’t reserve some, there would not be any with space for them by the time freshmen are able to register,” Belk said. “This is the first semester that we’ve reserved any classes for seniors. That only happened after everyone had registered because we found there were a lot of seniors that needed a class so we added two new 100-level courses reserved for seniors.”

Trying to graduate students while still accommodating for first-years, Belk said little can be done to expand the current capacity of HES classes without hiring new staff and having space to expand. The cost of adding HES classes would include salaries for new faculty and staff, as well as the construction costs of new fitness facilities.

“We need to be able to hire more faculty to be able to meet a growing student population,” Belk said. “If enrollment increases at NC State, then obviously we need to be able to serve more students, but we haven’t gained any faculty to be able to do that.”

While the new Carmichael addition is due to be completed this fall, it is a multi-use facility shared with Wellness and Recreation as well as Athletics. HES is looking to gain some space from the project’s completion, but new hires would also have to be made for their teaching staff. 

“Most of the new building is going to be recreational space because it is predominantly a wellness and recreation building,” Belk said. “We will have faculty offices and lecture classroom space in the new building for HES, so we will be able to move out of current spaces in the gym, opening up a few more spaces for courses.” 

As for simply adding more courses, current staff are teaching an increasing number of full sections. While being compensated for the added sections, Beth Fath, the HES department head, said packing classes or adding more comes down to a matter of safety in the spaces available.

“At some point it becomes unsafe,” Fath said. “The faculty needs to be able to ensure everyone is learning properly, using safe protocols, all those sorts of things. Also, the facility constraints, not just with construction, but with things like a cycling class. You can’t add extra people to cycling because there’s only a certain number of bikes.” 

With high demand for HES classes, some are definitely more favored than others. Determined by how fast they fill up or how long wait-lists might get, Belk said the variety of HES classes is definitely appealing to students. 

“Things that tend to fill up really quickly are yoga, indoor cycling, kickboxing, outdoor classes like rock climbing, and many 200 level courses,” Belk said. “Everything usually gets full eventually, but if we notice things fill up really quickly, we try to get more sections of the really popular courses.”

Each fall and spring semester there are about 90 100-level HES classes offered and over 100 200-level HES classes available. Summer sessions are at a lower volume of approximately 30 100-level and 10 200-level courses in session one, and around 20 100-level and 10 200-level courses in session two. 

Information on the HES programs can be found here.