You add a simple and reasonable (until it gets abused) assumption to your model which allows a lesser data collection burden on thousands of universities. I wouldn't call it a restriction.

> which allows a lesser data collection burden on thousands of universities.

How's it supposed to do that? Universities all already collect the data on enrollment for every class they offer.

Spoken like a software engineer! Now imagine every form is being filled out manually by an administrator with a calculator.

Maybe the forms should be made too complex to be filled with a calculator, to encourage doing things the right way…

Wouldn’t work. Entire state budgets are accounted for by spreadsheets without formulas, emailed between people in an office with no revision control.

A few years ago when 50 million went missing, I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen the budgeting process, and it was worse than you could possibly imagine.

There was an attempt to go the software route, but a nepotism deal left the budgeting department with a worse system than manual spreadsheet entry.

lowest bidder took the 50mil. on a serious note tho, this is craziness. technical education and knowing how to code should be mandatory for these kinds of jobs.

Most of the budgeting department is highschool graduates with a few higher ups with accounting degrees.

The pay is abysmal either way. You would make more money at an entry level software job anywhere.

“Hire a coder” appears to be good advice for many organizations, but there’s not enough coders for everyone to do it, so most will do without.

But it's not.

I don't agree that there's a good argument for ignoring the class sizes for half the year to decrease data collection burden. The data they're ignoring is of utmost importance to the statistic (well to the statistic as basically everyone will understand it since no one reads "average class size" and thinks "average class size of only half the classes").

In any case, the quality of the argument doesn't really matter. If the number is being gamed so trivially and yet US News continues to ignore spring classes, then the restriction has gone from bizarre and unnecessary to actively malicious. US News is basically colluding with the universities to engage in fraud.

Parents helping/guiding their near-adult children in the final spring of highschool to apply at or choose universities, where they would start university that same fall seem to be the target audience, here. Fall is when "most" incoming freshmen will start.