California Colleges to Help Gulf Students

California’s two public university systems and colleges around the country said Thursday that they would act quickly to find room this fall term for some of the thousands of students whose campuses were closed by Hurricane Katrina.

The 23-campus California State University system, the nation’s largest public university, will take in “a good couple hundred, at least,” of the affected students, spokeswoman Colleen Bentley-Adler said. Cal State’s overall enrollment is about 400,000.

One of Cal State’s most popular campuses, San Diego State, said it had begun enrolling about 20 students, mainly freshmen who were planning to attend Tulane University and Loyola University of New Orleans.

However, the Cal State system said most of the openings for students dislocated by the hurricane would be at its seven least-crowded schools: Cal State L.A. and the Bakersfield, Chico, Dominguez Hills, East Bay, Humboldt and Sacramento campuses.

Details remain to be worked out, but Cal State officials said they would absorb students from California who had planned to attend Gulf Coast schools along with out-of-state students from the affected campuses. “We will do what we can, as fast as we can, to help out these students and their families,” said Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed in a news release.

Among other things, Cal State officials said that the system would waive nonresident tuition charges for affected out-of-state students and that it would suspend some entrance requirements, including the English and mathematics placement tests that new undergraduates normally have to take.

Meanwhile, the flagship of the 10-campus University of California system, UC Berkeley, said it would accommodate about 70 students affected by the hurricane, including 20 law school students. Campus spokeswoman Janet Gilmore said Berkeley had not determined whether the students would be permanently enrolled or offered a single semester on the campus.

UC officials said other campuses also were looking into taking affected students. In addition, private schools around California, including the law schools at USC and Stanford, said they would take some students from the Gulf Coast, at least for one term.

Los Angeles’ Loyola Marymount University, for example, said it had received inquiries from more than 200 affected students, including many from a sister Jesuit school, Loyola University of New Orleans. It has begun to admit some students for the fall term, which began Monday, with a non-degree status, “with hopes that the course work here will easily transfer at whatever point students can return to their home universities,” Ernest Rose, LMU academic vice president, said in a statement.

As many as an estimated 150,000 students in the New Orleans area, Mississippi and Alabama were enrolled in the roughly 30 two-year and four-year campuses hit by Katrina.

Elsewhere around the country, numerous schools, including Indiana University, Pennsylvania State University and University of Nebraska, said they would open their doors to affected students.