Cal State Fullerton Enrollment Hits All-Time High

Enrollment hit a record for the third year in a row as the fall term began Tuesday at Cal State Fullerton.

Campus officials said they expect final figures to show about 23,600 students, an all-time high. The official fall census will not be available until early October.

But university officials said there is no doubt that this year’s enrollment will exceed last fall’s 23,445. “We continue to enjoy a strong applicant pool. . . ,” said Cal State Fullerton President Jewel Plummer Cobb, in a welcoming speech to the faculty.

The Fullerton campus of California State University has had a fairly consistent pattern of growth, marked by a few years of slight downturns, such as the 402-student decrease in 1983 from the previous year.

Grown Continuously

Mostly, however, the campus has grown continuously since it opened in 1959 with 452 students using leased high school buildings. The following year the new institution moved to buildings being constructed on 225 acres of orange groves near the Orange Freeway.

That clearing in the Fullerton orange groves is now the largest four-year institution of higher learning in the county. And in addition to its record student enrollment this year, the campus is growing physically.

“We are on the threshold of our biggest construction boom in over a decade,” Cobb said. Work began Aug. 21 on the first on-campus residence halls. Construction also is due to begin this academic year on the Gerontology Center and on a five-story addition to the Engineering Center.

The new dormitory will house 390 men and women students and is scheduled to open next fall.

Cobb has strongly pushed for on-campus housing. In urging the Legislature to provide the money, Cobb noted that Cal State Fullerton and Cal State Hayward were the only schools in the 19-campus California State University system without dormitories.

Unable to Find Apartments

Thousands of Cal State Fullerton students who don’t live within commuting distance have been unable to find affordable apartments near campus, Cal State Fullerton officials have said.

Jerry Keating, director of public affairs, said Tuesday that the new dormitory will help the university become less of a commuter college.

“This could change the whole character of the campus,” he said. “With the dormitory, there will be a 24-hour presence on campus and an audience for events and activities after school. We are hoping that those events will draw many commuting students back in the afternoons and night to take part in campus activities.”

Cobb, in her speech, also said: “Residential student life is an experience that enhances the university and enriches the scholar. Residence halls contribute significantly to the educational and social life on campus.”

Cal State Fullerton’s continuing growth is not without problems. And some academic programs, notably engineering and computer science, are chronically overcrowded. Also, parking is increasingly scarce.

But overall, campus officials were pleased Tuesday about the continuing growth of Cal State Fullerton. They said that the college is providing quality education to a diverse body of students, many of whom could not afford or would not be academically admitted to University of California campuses.

Cal State Fullerton’s new director of admissions, Jim Blackburn, said Tuesday: “I see this as a place that has a lot of quality but also a lot of access (for student admission). Those are the two big issues in higher education in this decade--increasing quality and increasing access at the same time. In some people’s minds, those goals are tangential at best.

“But I happen to think they can work together. And this is a place that does it. I like the idea of our having a people’s university.”