Effects of course selection flexibility on academic and social opportunity structures

Undergraduate students’ social connections influence their academic performance (Vargas et al., 2018), persistence (Zwolak et al., 2017), and mental well-being (Poole et al., 2023). Thus, it is important to consider university features that facilitate or constrain peer relationships from forming, such as curriculum. Students in majors with rigid curricula frequently co-enroll in courses with same-major peers, increasing the likelihood of forming meaningful relationships. In contrast, students in flexible majors co-enroll less often. Beyond this social role, the range of courses students take determines the disciplinary foundations to which they are exposed. We investigate how curricular flexibility influences students’ academic opportunity structures (the content students’ access through coursework) and social opportunity structures (the peer relationships students have the opportunity to form). For example, we are interested in the academic diversity of peers students co-enroll with, and the disciplinary clustering of electives. We analyzed enrollment data for a cohort of students at a college of life sciences at a large Canadian university. This includes 2,556 students across 13 majors, 11,630 offerings of 1,303 courses they took, and 62,376 co-enrolled peers from across campus. Our investigation is comparative, focusing on differences between students in the college’s most flexible major (30% prescribed credits) and those in more rigid majors (>60% prescribed credits). The study has been approved by the institutional Research Ethics Board.