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When interest in medicine headed up in the late 1980s, the number of biology majors at the university exploded. At the same time, the number of faculty positions at the School of Life Sciences (in which students intending to major in biology enroll) has been steady or slightly decreasing as the Illinois state legislature has limited funding for higher education. As a result, class sizes have climbed steadily. "Even our small classes have grown in size," says Sondra Lazarowitz, professor of microbiology. At some institutions, the response to swelling enrollments might be to make courses tougher so that more students will drop out, adding to an already serious problem of attrition in biology. Biology faculty members at the University of Illinois have worked hard to avoid such losses. "It's an issue of how you see your job," Lazarowitz says. "When students are admitted into the School of Life Sciences, we think that they have the potential to make it. Our job is not to haze students so that only a small percentage make it through. Our job is to see that they succeed and get a good college education." Their efforts are paying off: attrition in the School of Life Sciences is minimal. The school emphasizes retention in a number of ways. A portion of the resources for the undergraduate research program go to students at risk of leaving biology. "We particularly want to reach out to students who have a tendency to fall through the cracks, including women and minorities," says Lazarowitz. Curriculum reforms also have helped maintain student interest. At the beginning of the 1990s, for example, the school revamped its introductory biology sequence. "We decided that the life cycle of the liverwort just wasn't that relevant for today's students," says Melissa Michael, one of the laboratory coordinators for the new sequence. Technology has helped faculty members counteract the depersonalization of large courses. Students can send questions by electronic mail to professors and teaching assistants at any time of the day or night, and replies often come back immediately from instructors working on the network. Homework goes out over the network, and students compare notes with instructors and each other to get assignments done. "What we're doing is creating communities of people who might not even have known that they wanted to belong to such a community," says Roy Roper, coordinator of the computer network in the School of Life Sciences. The changes of the past several years have enabled Illinois to keep pace with growing numbers of biology students. But will the pressure eventually ease? Most faculty members think not. Even if graduate school enrollments contract and interest in medicine drops, many professors believe that enrollments in biology will remain high. "I don't think these enrollment increases are just a fad," says Donald Ort, professor and interim director of the School of Life Sciences. "I think biology is the science of not just this decade but of the next few decades. And it's more than just new jobs. It's the impact of biology on society in general."
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As an undergraduate biology major at the University of Illinois, Rosetta Dalton hoped to become a conservation biologist. But now she's training to put biology to work in another way: as a high school teacher. After graduating from Illinois in 1990, Dalton
spent the next several years raising her daughter and working at assorted
jobs. Eventually she re-enrolled at the university in a master's program
in biology, where she took a course on teaching. That changed her career
plans entirely. "I loved teaching," she recalls. "I realized
that this is what I should be doing." Dalton switched to a master's
program in biology teaching and plans to begin teaching the subject somewhere
in Illinois after she graduates.
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University of Illinois professor Sondra Lazarowitz
says growing student interest in biology has led to much larger class sizes.
or many biology departments, the squeeze between enrollments and resources
has been the single most pressing issue of recent years. The experiences
of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are typical. The university
has a reputation for preparing talented Illinois students for careers in
medicine, with more than a third of its biology majors applying to medical
school. 
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