Why are there classes on Labor Day?

By Karina Rajtar
Copy Editor

As many students in the United States spent the first Monday of September, Labor Day, going to a State Fair or spending time with friends and family, Saint Mary’s University students were already in class. Many could be heard grumbling about the unfairness of it, while some others simply wondered “why?”
Read more...

There are three reasons for the university’s decision to hold classes on the federal holiday, according to Dr. Thomas Mans, vice president for academic affairs. The first involves the registration adjust, which is the Monday before Labor Day. If Monday classes and labs wait until after Labor Day to meet, they would be starting after the drop/add deadline. This could potentially cause problems for students who would want to change their schedules.

The second reason, said Mans, is that federal financial aid regulations require that there be a fixed number of classroom minutes in every class. Because we tend to take out a lot of Mondays throughout the semester with other breaks, said Mans, it is not entirely possible to take off another one. Mans said that one potential solution could be to have classes the Monday after Thanksgiving, thus allowing the university to cancel classes on Labor Day and meet regulations, but that would depend on whether the university wanted SMU students to be driving back to campus during the busy Thanksgiving weekend.

The final reason SMU holds classes on Labor Day is to allow students, especially freshmen, to get into a routine at school in order to be more focused on academics. Because students move in just a week before the holiday, Mans said, it does not make a lot of sense to send them home right away. “If you go home and you sit out a little bit, you do lose some steam,” Mans said. He believes that the week of classes before Labor Day is only part of the adjustment process for new students.

“I’d be willing to take a risk on the third (reason) if I could figure out the other two,” said Mans, adding that he would welcome a better solution if there were one.

The university begins classes before Labor Day in order to give students a reasonable break between semesters, Mans said. If classes had begun after Labor Day last year, for example, students “would’ve been really literally finishing exams about two days before Christmas,” Mans said. For this reason, classes start earlier in order to finish a little earlier in December.

As a private university, SMU is not required by law to close on Labor Day. Many other private universities have classes on Labor Day as well, including the University of Saint Benedict, Saint John’s University and Concordia College in Minnesota.