A methodology to optimize foundation seminar assignments

First-year students entering the College of Arts & Sciences at Bucknell University (USA) are required to enroll in a first-year experience course called a foundation seminar during their first semester. A few months before arriving at Bucknell, students submit a prioritized list of foundation seminars of interest to them, given course descriptions of all available foundation seminar sections. Then, based on capacity and scheduling constraints, each student is assigned to a particular seminar. Currently, this assignment of students to specific seminars is carried out using both manual and heuristic methods. We propose to apply an optimization methodology to this interesting real-world problem in an attempt to determine assignments that better satisfy the highest preferences of entering first-year students.