When USC students arrive on campus, they are met with over 100 diverse, interesting minors like law and society, medical anthropology, and Renaissance studies. However, many of the classes for these minors are rarely offered. This leads to false advertising on the university’s websites that can increase the difficulty for students to fulfill their minor requirements.
The core issue is that this information is hidden. To find the data in this article, an analysis of USC current and prior course offering pages specific to varying disciplines, such as the English department's records, had to be completed and compared to minor requirements. For disciplines where this was not available, such as speech, environmental science and geology, a more meticulous search through individual prior semester offerings on Self Service Carolina’s browsing shopping cart records had to be completed.
The data spans from fall 2020 through the current semester, spring 2026, across the disciplines analyzed. This allows for consistency across the analyses and a comprehensive, relevant dataset. The information may be available, but it requires time and effort to search through individual semesters and cross-reference coded class numbers with minor requirements. Therefore, for most students, information on the frequency of minor classes offered is not easily accessible.
One example of a minor with limited course offerings is the professional writing and communication minor in the English department. It requires four courses of a student’s choosing from a list of 13 options. One of these courses is an independent study internship class, and students must seek approval for a section to be created. Among the other 12 classes, only three are commonly offered.
The English class records going back to fall 2020 depict concerning data. There are three commonly offered — advanced, business and technical writing — English classes for the professional writing minor. The four other English courses for the minor have collectively been offered a few times since fall 2020. What is most concerning is that only two of the five speech classes available for the minor have been offered at all, and a total of only four times in the past 12 semesters.
This also limits the speech communication minor, which requires three 300-level or above speech classes. Since fall 2020, only five of the 18 —less than 1/3 — of speech classes 300-level or above have been offered. Notably, the entire 2022-23 school year and fall semesters of 2020, 2022 and 2023 offered none.
An average of 1.5 speech 300-plus courses were offered per semester since fall 2020. The only classes commonly offered were SPCH 387 and SPCH 399, an independent research study. This severely limits speech communication minor students’ choices and completion of the three 300-level or above speech course requirement.
Outside of the humanities, this issue is seen to a lesser degree. The climate and society minor, for example, requires one to choose four courses from 12 geology or environmental classes. The minor averages about 3 class offerings per semester from fall 2020 to spring 2026. There was notably more course variety offered for this minor, with almost all courses listed for the minor being offered at some point from fall 2020 to this spring.
Three classes for the minor, GEOG 568, GEOG 335 and ENVR/GEOG 517, have not been offered at all since fall 2020. Many other classes for the minor were only offered two or three semesters of the past 12, making them inconsistent. While this is an improvement compared to the professional writing and speech communication minors, it still is not ideal, considering that about half of the advertised classes cannot be relied upon to be offered.
When students sign up for a minor, they are likely to check the courses to fulfill it, not how often they are offered. This leads to students signing up for minors that have potentially become difficult to complete over time. Seeing a list of 13 courses, but only a small portion them being commonly offered, creates student frustration.
For students who are only interested in a few of the classes listed for a minor, there is a large chance that they may never get to take the ones they actually desire. Students are then stuck taking classes they do not enjoy to get a minor they may no longer want.
It makes sense that some classes are consistently only offered in certain semesters, and some are prioritized over others. But for certain minors, classes are not merely inconsistent, but additionally rarely or potentially never offered, creating a false perception of what the minor will be.
The solution is simple: communicate to students more openly whether classes for unique minors are or are not offered often. On the list of classes counting toward niche minors, designate the rarely offered (only once every few years) classes with asterisks, and designate those that have not been offered in the past six years with a double asterisk or into an entirely new section. This way, students are immediately aware of the likelihood of getting into the classes and knowledgeable upfront about potential risks.
The university has to base class offerings on demand and general requirements. While the system is effective for supporting majors and some minors, it fails to serve more niche minors. Time may need to be allocated toward courses with higher demand, but this allocation of fewer resources to certain classes should be communicated, not hidden.
Ultimately, if niche minors are to be offered, their limitations need to be communicated. Clearly divulging information on courses that are rarely or never offered to students would be vital to their minor decision-making process. For the students to get the most out of the university’s specialized minors, it would be best to clarify their course offerings so their exciting potential does not become an undesirable chore.
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