Campus Connections: Student and Course Networks in Higher Education

Residential higher education brings thousands of students together for multiple years and offers them an array of shared intellectual experiences and a network of social interactions. Many of these intellectual and social connections are formed during courses. Students are connected to students through courses they take together, and courses are connected to one another by students who take both. These courses and the students who take them form a bipartite network that encodes information about campus structures and student experiences. Because all institutions of higher education collect and maintain precise records of what courses students take, it is possible to assemble a student-course network that quantitatively describes the interactions among students and courses. We provide an example that demonstrates the identification of courses effective at creating unique connections among students and reveals how students and majors can be strongly connected or dispersed. We show how social network analysis can be used to improve our understanding of the learning environment at the University of Michigan, and we hope that this kind of analysis is of interest to persons at other institutions.