Samad Hakani, Photography Editor

As course registration comes to an end, registrar data reveals the most popular Yale College courses for the spring 2025 semester. This year, economics, political science and psychology departments top the leaderboard. 

Excluding laboratory courses, the three most popular courses are “Introductory Macroeconomics,” “Bioethics and Law” and “Psychology and Global Capitalism” with enrollments at 358, 275 and 250 respectively, according to the Course Demand Statistics site as of Dec. 1. Enrollment numbers will likely fluctuate until the end of the add/drop period. 

While the News has excluded laboratory classes from course popularity rankings, some laboratory classes outnumber their co-requisite classes in enrollment. For example, 265 students are enrolled in “General Chemistry Laboratory II” and 263 students are enrolled in “General Physics Laboratory.” 

Economics professor Aleh Tsyvinski, who teaches “Introductory Macroeconomics,” wrote to the News that he designs his course to equip students with the tools to analyze and understand the world on a large scale. 

“This class is not just about acing your investment banking internship interview (though we will give you all the tools to do exceptionally well in those),” Tsyvinski wrote. “It’s about building an analytical foundation that remains relevant decades after graduation, whether you become a diplomat, an artist, a scientist, or anything else.”

Tsyvinski also said that since he began teaching the course, he’s consistently surprised by how frequently he encounters former students who took his “Introductory Macroeconomics” class, whether it be in “Beijing, Los Angeles, or Rome.” 

As a prerequisite for majors like economics and ethics, politics and economics, the course’s high demand also reflects the popularity of economics-related majors at Yale. Economics was recorded as the most popular undergraduate field of study, according to Yale’s 2023-2024 Facts Report, with about 11 percent of Yale college students completing the major. 

“Bioethics and Law” is taught by Stephen Latham, a political science professor and director of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center of Bioethics. It was also the second most popular course last spring. According to the course description, the class focuses on the intersection of law and contemporary biomedical ethics, including topics such as abortion, informed consent, assisted reproduction and stem cell research. 

Alex Bonn ’27 said that she enrolled in the course because of recommendations from friends. 

“It was highly recommended by the older girls on my team, and they said I couldn’t graduate from Yale without taking this class,” Bonn said. 

The psychology department is a new department on the leaderboard for most popular courses in the spring semester. Psychology professor Tariq Khan wrote to the News that he “can’t say for sure” what drives high student interest in his course specifically, but that he has consistently witnessed Yale students express genuine care for socioeconomic world issues. 

“My experience at Yale has been that students care deeply about intertwined problems such as economic and social injustice, war, ecological crisis, mental health crisis, and the seeming ascendance of anti-democratic authoritarian ‘strong man’ control over political institutions in the United States and globally,” Khan said. “Students are eager to find courses that will help them better understand and grapple with these problems.” 

Khan noted that though the class is listed as a psychology course, he hopes students will take away a more developed consciousness of the relationship between individual, social, political, economic and even cultural problems they see in the world to underlying systems, structures and histories. 

Due to the large sizes of these lectures, promoting student engagement can become a challenge. To Khan, fostering engagement is not about any “specific tricks, techniques, or activities,” but about centering the course around relevant and intellectually stimulating content. In other words, “no boring or irrelevant readings.” 

Ilse Lindenlaub’s “Intermediate Macroeconomics” and Paul Cooper’s “General Chemistry II” were the fourth and fifth most popular courses, with 240 and 227 students respectively. 

Correction, Dec. 5: The article has been updated to clarify that the course registration is still open.