The Dickey Center sought to understand why enrollment in the International Studies Minor has declined and determine whether there is still a need for this program on campus.
“How might the Dickey Center innovate its curricular offerings through the International Studies minor?” and “How might the International Studies minor be improved to make it more attractive and appealing to students?”
Through insights, the Design Corps Team determined that there is a need for the minor, but it does not align with the need the minor was originally created to fulfill. They determined that students seek community, cohesion, and flexibility when completing a minor, and the minor needed to be redesigned in order to meet these needs.
Their solution involves two parts:
Project Details
Project Partner: Casey Aldrich, Associate Director, Global Studies
Project Timeline: 3 terms
The Dickey Center has started to be more flexible with minor requirements, and are already seeing an uptick in International Studies minors filed.
Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding offers a range of curricular and co-curricular programming aimed at helping students enhance the global dimension of their study. On the curricular side, the Center houses Dartmouth’s International Studies (INTS) Minor. Initially very popular, student enrollment in the minor has decreased dramatically in recent years.
In the fall and winter, the student team studied the individual goals and visions of the Dickey Center with respect to the minor. They conducted both secondary and primary research to determine if the minor still served a need and a role on campus.
In order to better understand the problem the International Studies Minor is facing, the student group compared the INTS minor to other minors at Dartmouth. Through researching the structure of other minors and reaching out to the Registrar, the team worked to decipher whether the declining enrollment was an overall campus trend or specific to the INTS minor.
In order to understand why fewer students are completing the International Studies Minor, the team identified and interviewed the following stakeholder groups: