Management 101 registration to get tougher for seniors

Some Wharton students should think twice before delaying one of their mandatory core courses.

Starting next school year, Management 101 will be implementing new changes in registration policy that will make it more difficult for seniors to enroll in the class.

In an email sent out earlier this month to all Wharton undergraduates, the Wharton School announced that just two out of 25 available seats in each recitation for the course will be open to seniors during advanced registration. In addition, any seniors who still have to take the course — which is required before they can graduate — will need to request it as their first priority on Penn InTouch.

Called “Introduction to Management,” the course provides students with a framework used to describe general management issues and how they are applied in organizations. It also focuses on ways to put these skills to use and serves as a foundation for upper-level management courses.

Lori Rosenkopf, who teaches Management 101 and also serves as co-course head, explained why the changes were made.

“The percentage of seniors in the class was higher than optimal, and numerous written comments in class reviews further noted that the material was too basic for more advanced students,” she said in an email. “We actually had similar constraints on senior enrollment in the mid-2000s. We simply have returned to enforcing them more strictly this year.”

Although the majority of students in a typical Management 101 lecture are sophomores, there have historically been several juniors and seniors as well. This semester, Rosenkopf said her class is made up of 48 percent sophomores, 25 percent juniors and 27 percent seniors.

In addition, “there are typically a small percentage of freshmen taking the course in the spring, which doesn’t happen in the fall,” she added.

Engineering and Wharton sophomore Xiaolei Cong, who took Management 101 as a freshman, highlighted the group project element of the course as something he enjoyed.

“I worked on it with two other seniors and it was a really good learning experience because they were older and their level of analysis was a lot more in depth than mine at the time,” he said.

However, Cong also noted some of the potential drawbacks of the course.

“Because it is a project-based class that tends to take up a lot of time, students before senior year might not want to spend that much time working in groups,” he said.

For College and Wharton sophomore Sarah Parmacek, who is currently taking the course, enrolling before her junior year was a logical decision.

“I’m in Huntsman so I have a lot of degree requirements to fulfill, and I have a lot of classes that put other requirements at high priorities,” she said. “If I was a senior and had to put Management [101] at the top of my priorities, it would be really risky.”

College and Wharton junior Vanessa Seah, who has not yet taken Management 101, mentioned how On-Campus Recruitment influenced her decision to delay her registration for the course.

“It’s a combination of a few factors really,” she said in an email. “I thought I would be better off taking classes that I [found] more interesting and helpful for OCR, like upper-level accounting and finance classes.”

Cong added that he disagrees with Wharton’s decision to change enrollment policies.

“If you don’t want to pursue consulting or one of those areas, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to take the course senior year,” he said.

Overall, however, Rosenkopf believes that the changes will help alleviate the age gap between students enrolled in the class and level the playing field.

“It’s in everyone’s interest to ensure both that the course will best serve our target population and also that this spring’s seniors who need access to the course will have it,” she said.

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