13% Drop in L.A. College District Roll Predicted

Enrollment in the financially troubled Los Angeles community colleges is expected to be down by another 13% when classes begin Monday.

Despite an advertising campaign and mailings sent to hundreds of thousands of residents, all nine colleges in the Los Angeles college district said that as of Friday, they had fewer students registered than last year.

Long Beach City College and Cerritos College also begin classes on Monday, and officials say that their enrollments are running about 10% below last year’s level.

Spells Bad News

Since college revenues depend entirely on the number of students who sign up for courses, a further enrollment slide spells bad news, especially for the Los Angeles district, which has a $6-million deficit in this year’s budget.

Throughout California, community college enrollment has been sliding since 1982, and urban districts such as Los Angeles and Oakland have suffered the most severe declines.

But college officials say that they are not surprised or disturbed by the latest figures because the two-year colleges are undergoing a “change of identity.”

Chancellor Leslie Koltai of the Los Angeles college district said students interested in a job-oriented program are still coming to the community colleges, but those who are interested in a four-year degree are enrolling directly in the California State University or the University of California, bypassing the two-year colleges.

“We have almost a full house in all of our vocational programs,” Koltai said. “I could open a course in office administration or in high technology anywhere, in the desert even, and it would fill up.”

Registration at Los Angeles Trade-Tech College, the most vocationally oriented of the nine campuses, was running at 93% of last year’s rate, the best of any campus. By contrast, Southwest College near Western Avenue and Imperial Boulevard, which had about 8,000 students in 1982, only had 2,053 registered by Friday for the fall semester.

The number of high school graduates has been inching downward in California since 1980, but the University of California has recorded a steady, double-digit increase in freshmen applications each year since then. This year, the 19-campus California State University system also reported a 14% increase in freshmen applications.

The universities “are doing more recruiting in the high schools, making phone calls, giving away football tickets, whatever it takes. We don’t have the funds to match that effort,” Koltai added.

Registration Continues

Officials at the Los Angeles, Cerritos and Long Beach colleges say that students can still register for classes for at least another week, and in some cases, until the end of August.

Most other community colleges in Los Angeles County do not begin classes until after Labor Day.

Last year, the Los Angeles colleges moved their starting date back into late August so as to end the fall semester before the Christmas holiday. But since then, officials have blamed the late summer start for aggravating the enrollment slide.

“I am going to recommend that we reconsider the early start,” Koltai said Friday. However, the calendar change was included in the collective bargaining contract with the faculty union, and Koltai said the union will have to agree to any change in the calendar.

In the latest figures available, 75,997 students were enrolled in the Los Angeles district for this fall. This is 87% of the registration total of 86,913 recorded at the same time last year, said Norm Schneider, a district spokesman.

Last fall, the nine Los Angeles colleges had 102,313 students, down from a 1982 peak of 136,000.

This year, community college officials appear less inclined to blame the enrollment drop on the $50-per-semester fee imposed by the Legislature in 1983, though they noted that the most severe drops have taken place in colleges serving areas with mostly poor and minority students.

California still offers the nation’s least expensive community college education. Fees at the Cal State system campuses average about $640 a year, while those at UC are about $1,300 a year.

The Los Angeles district board of trustees will meet Wednesday to consider how to cut $6 million from this year’s budget. If the enrollment this fall turns out to be lower than last year, the trustees will have to make further cuts in next year’s budget.