Gateway and Bottleneck Courses

The goal of this project was to identify gateway and bottleneck courses for students. A gateway course is one that is early in a student career that is either necessary for their degree or is an important prerequisite to many other courses. These courses are sometimes hard to register for due to the demand. Additionally, these are generally larger sized courses with many enrollments. A bottleneck course is one that is major specific, difficult to register for, and is necessary for a student"s completion of their major requirements. This is not necessarily a course with many enrollments, but it can be. By identifying these courses, we can better help students prepare and plan in order to reach a successful graduation. I used Python to aggregate and analyze course enrollment data to identify these courses. The results of my work are being integrated onto an internal student site.