Let Harvard Shop Again

It’s time for Harvard to resurrect shopping week.

This is my seventh semester designing my own DIY shopping period. By the time I return to campus, the classes I registered for months ago are little more than a distant memory. Digging through newly updated syllabi, I re-evaluate those courses against others that have since caught my eye. I reshuffle my schedule to include them, I start assignments and hunt down the books for courses I may abandon days later, and run to sit in on lectures I am not even enrolled in. The semester has barely begun, and I’m already playing catch-up.

The culprit behind this first-week chaos? The College’s decision to axe the official shopping period four years ago.

The old shopping system gave Harvard students the rare gift of breathing room. It asked us to slow down and spend a week window-shopping classes before enrolling and committing to them each semester. For that first week, students were free — and expected — to slip in and out of lecture halls, sampling a dozen syllabi before spending a dime on their schedule. Students could peruse, explore, and decide during Harvard’s devoted shopping time, embracing indecision as an expected part of the process.

In May of 2022, however, indecision became a liability for students. More than 60 percent of Harvard faculty voted to abolish the College’s shopping period and replace it with previous-term registration, effectively forcing students to commit to a schedule months before setting foot in the classroom. Now, students can switch classes for the first week of the term, but in practice this add/drop window allows only a sliver of the exploration that shopping week once promoted.

In fact, the new system makes choosing courses far more burdensome. The add/drop period begins synchronously with the semester calendar, meaning time students spend contemplating prospective classes is time taken from courses already underway. The new approach encroaches on class instruction, unfairly punishing students who wish to explore.

What we must realize is abolishing the shopping period doesn’t eliminate the need to shop. Despite browsing the course catalog and selecting courses in advance, many students still arrive on campus unsure whether their months-old decisions will hold. Updated syllabi might reveal new expectations, classroom dynamics and teaching styles come into focus, and students’ interests may have shifted since the prior semester. And so, they must shop.

As I can attest, some students improvise their own test-drive process during add/drop. But rather than providing an opportunity to explore, these DIY shopping periods mean juggling a double workload of pre-registered courses and new ones. Harvard eliminated the designated time, but the behavior is unavoidable — and students are forced to bear the cost.

Shopping period avoided this tradeoff because both professors and students understood the opening week explicitly for what it was — a week for pitching on one side and sampling on the other. Under the current system, that mutual understanding is eroded, and professors teach from week one. Even if a first lecture is largely introductory, professors can quickly move on to assignments, participation, sectioning, and substantive course material, all while some students are still weighing whether or not to stay.

Shopping was eliminated in part to diminish instability for teaching staff caused by uncertain enrollment. But though it served as one of the motives for the switch, predictability remains out of reach as students continue to add, drop, and cobble together their own shopping period. If faculty must know how to budget teaching resources ahead of time, perhaps gauging student interest informally would be more effective than forcing pre-registration.

After all, the costs of pre-registration are incredibly high. A Harvard education is an enormous investment, and each course represents a sizable piece of it. Flat tuition for the 2026-27 academic year reaches $62,226. If Harvard itself places such a premium on its instruction, it should be equally protective of instruction time. Students should not have to spend class time doing the course shopping the College once made room for.

Behind these added burdens is a quieter consequence: less room for serendipity. The shopping period made in-person exploration the norm. The current system asks students to work around a schedule they’ve already chosen without experiencing those courses firsthand, treating curiosity as a departure from their obligations rather than an invitation.

As a school committed to the liberal arts, Harvard should create opportunities for exposure to different disciplines and methods of thinking. That exposure should start from week one, with a shopping period.

A system 96 percent of students reportedly wanted to keep is, at the very least, a system worth revisiting.

Ava M. Ribaudo ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Leverett House.