In 2020, Stanford’s Future of the Major design team, tasked to detail comprehensive recommendations for curricular improvement, wrote a 32-page report that birthed the 100-unit cap proposal. The cap infamously received significant opposition and criticism. Last December, The Stanford Review published a critical article on the 100-unit cap on major completion requirements at Stanford. The opponents of the proposal frame this cap as a symbol of Stanford’s eroding education quality, alongside critics who have voiced opposition to the plan since 2019.

Let’s be clear: the 100-unit cap is not that bad. There are some underlying justifications for the cap that haven’t been discussed enough. Prior to the unit cap, the required size of Stanford majors had high variability, from 55 units to 135 units. Graduating required 180 units, which led to some students taking far more definite pathways tiered with prerequisites, limiting the elective courses taken.

Thus, the Future of the Major team argued, “Stanford as a university simply lacks a common institutional vision of what the undergraduate major is for, educationally.” Driven by principles of a rigorous liberal education, Stanford majors should emphasize both depth and exploration.

But, instead of just listing the benefits of a 100-unit cap, let’s rebut each of the arguments against it. 

Critics claims that unit limits for a major result in decreased academic rigor in several departments, but this argument is subjective. 

Fewer units do not necessarily guarantee that learning content is diluted. Instead, departments get rid of redundant courses to streamline their overall approach. This creates depth in a discipline that is both more efficient and effective. Alternatively, having unnecessarily high unit requirements incentivizes anxiety-driven course registration. This dwindles the quality of student engagement with a particular course. Increased units for a certain major encourage students to “survive” the class without true learning. The litmus test for rigor shouldn’t just be a concoction of high-unit course loads; it should also be about how students engage with the course.  

The issue of a 100-unit cap is most relevant for engineering majors, considering that in 2020, Stanford’s engineering professors signed petitions to reverse the 100-unit cap. But such criticism disregards the policy’s attempts to reconcile those real concerns. For example, majors with Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) accreditation aren’t subject to the cap. Also, any department can seek an exception from the 100-unit cap through an approval process.

Jennifer Widom, dean of the School of Engineering, was “confident that with care and thought, each of the school’s non-ABET accredited majors [would] be able to deliver a strong program with 100 units.” Even within the confines of a 100-unit cap, Stanford majors will continue to retain depth and demand intellectual curiosity amongst its students. 

The acclaimed Stanford rigor is here to stay.

A prominent motivation for the 100-unit cap was to improve accessibility to majors for transfer students or students who come into Stanford without Advanced Placement (AP) credit. Enforcing a unit limit allows most majors to be accessible to a broad range of students. High-unit majors effectively lock out students from taking a major unless they start taking relevant courses immediately, stunting academic exploration. 

The Review captures the concerns and disagreements of many students, arguing that not all majors should be accessible because “there are natural differences in human excellence that predispose some people over others to excel in any given field.” The 100-unit cap isn’t claiming to fix accessibility in terms of innate differences across human ability. Instead, it attempts to level the playing field for students who have had differing levels of access to APs, honors courses and special programs. The “cart before the horse” analogy only works if the horse is actually accessible to everyone. The problem is not that the major is being reshaped to fit students, but that barriers prevent students from approaching the major in the first place.

I agree that students have natural predispositions to excel in particular fields, but that doesn’t imply a student knows what those predispositions are immediately. Many students haven’t discovered their academic interests, which shouldn’t be an expectation for incoming freshmen. A unit cap ensures undeterred exploration for students still discovering what they’re truly excellent at. The counterfactual must not be Stanford rationing its resources to limit student accessibility in a spurious effort to achieve caricatured excellence. 

The Future of the Major team cited MIT as evidence of a sister institution that excels under unit caps. Rather than hindering a university program’s excellence, unit caps at MIT reinforce MIT’s institutional vision of balance between academic rigor and intellectual depth. This comparison is stronger than critics suggest. In terms of MIT credits, every MIT major requires 180-186 units, or 15-15.5 courses, with very little range in the actual size of majors.

Before Stanford’s 100-unit cap, Stanford was a clear anomaly in our discrepancy in major sizes compared to similar size-defined majors at MIT, Harvard, and Yale. Now, Stanford’s 100-unit cap only pertains to major units (not general education requirements) and engraves a clear institutional vision on the educational necessities of a major. Stanford hasn’t lowered the ceiling of rigor and excellence, but rather has revamped the structure beneath it to align itself with other top institutions. 

The desire to safeguard excellence stems from a deeper anxiety that excellence loses its meaning when in high supply. This confuses equality of opportunity with equality of outcomes. This fixation on excellence and selectivity, even in pre-professional settings, clubs and the classroom, is at times very necessary.

However, over-fixation on this ideal incorrectly diagnoses access as a threat to excellence. Here at Stanford and beyond, excellence dependent on exclusion is fragile, while excellence that emerges from access is durable and permanent. 

Rikhil Ranjit is a freshman at Stanford studying economics.