Students swarm in a crowded gym. Club officers shout to the masses like street-vendors. There is actually a chance of securing a seat in the library. Welcome to club fair.

Like many of the other freshmen, I had been warned by seniors to stick to a small number of clubs that I could reliably dedicate my time to. And so I decided only to sign up for clubs that were truly interesting to me.

Unfortunately, there was a club for everything, and everything was interesting. There was the programming club, and its sister, the algorithm club; the fast-paced challenges offered by quizbowl and science bowl; the humanities of linguistics and philosophy; and the intricacies of mathematics and economics.

By the end of the day, I had kept my promise and only signed up for the clubs truly interesting to me. That entailed about 20-odd clubs.

Would I attend all of them regularly? In short, no — by the end of the year, I had effectively signed up for five clubs. Conflicts between clubs invariably arose, and while I did attend many of the other clubs once or twice, I was forced to miss several meetings.

This is in no way a new phenomenon. Club mailing lists are filled with unfamiliar faces. While there is no immediate problem in being able to sign up for as many clubs as you wish, I posit that students would enjoy clubs much more if they were limited in the number they could join. In being able to join an unlimited number of clubs, students attend clubs less often and inadvertently impact the health of smaller clubs.

Because it is possible to join any club, there is no incentive to commit, and attendance rates plummet. When presented with a choice, prospective members will often be drawn to the larger clubs such as DECA on account of their reputation. This disproportionately impacts smaller clubs and can cause meetings to be cancelled due to insufficient attendance. When given too many options, students spread their attention across too many clubs and dilute their overall experience.

The idea of having a club limit is counterintuitive. You could sign up for many clubs at club fair, yet still only attend a few. If there is no additional cost associated with the extra options, why remove them?

Well, it so happens that more choices aren’t always optimal. In a famous study from 2000, two psychologists found that between a jam stand offering a wide variety of jams and another of just six, the larger stand attracted more customers, yet the smaller stand secured more purchases. To expand on the analogy, if there was a quota, rather than attracting more customers (signing up for excess clubs), there would be more purchases (actual attendance of clubs).

The indecisiveness brought about by being given so many options leads to overall lower student attendance and lists of nonexistent members. If the school imposes a limit to the number of clubs that a student may join — even a generous or unenforced quota — I think that students would actually attend clubs more often, not less, and enjoy themselves more as a result.

This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on August 31, 2015.