Registering Disapproval : SDSU Students Getting Crash Courses in Psychology, Patience as Campus Bursts at Seams

Brendan O’Mahony needed a marketing class, and the hordes of competitors in San Diego State University’s College of Business Administration weren’t about to stop him.

On the first Monday of the semester, he showed up for the 9 a.m. section, hoping to find an opening. No luck. He stayed for the 10 a.m., the 11 a.m., the noon and the 1 p.m.--listening to the same lecture five times for the privilege of begging instructors to let him into the class.

He did the same thing on Wednesday and again on Friday before the competition thinned and O’Mahony won a coveted spot in the course.

“Crashing courses is basically an art,” he said. “It’s a gamble. You tend to have to be persistent.”

Persistence is just one of the virtues needed to survive at SDSU in an era of record-setting enrollment, as the booming student population has outstripped the services that the landlocked university can offer.

While colleges outside the Sun Belt are scrambling to attract applicants, SDSU officials are trying unsuccessfully to cut back the number of students bulging the seams of classrooms, gyms, the library and other facilities.

“San Diego State is a very crowded campus, and there’s a lot of culture shock, particularly for students from the junior colleges,” said Tom Achison, chairman of the department of management in the 7,000-student Business Administration school. They are surprised “by the crowding and pushing kind of atmosphere, the harried atmosphere, this campus projects.”

In September, 33,710 students enrolled at SDSU’s main campus and 967 enrolled at its North County extension; about half of the latter group also takes courses at the main campus on College Avenue. The 34,677-student total is the third consecutive enrollment record set by SDSU and makes the university the largest in California.

This fall’s enrollment jump occurred because SDSU officials slightly underestimated the number of admitted freshmen whom they expected would choose to attend the school and the number of enrolled students who continued, said Nancy Sprotte, director of admissions and records. The calculations were off just 1% or 2%, but in a school the size of SDSU, a bad guess translates into several hundred people.

A larger percentage of California high school seniors are enrolling in college, said William Vandament, academic vice chancellor for the California State University system.

“I don’t think it’s a transitory (phenomenon),” he said. “I think it actually is related to a higher level of consciousness among California’s young people about the value of a higher education.”

In an attempt to trim enrollment for fall 1986, SDSU had pushed forward the deadline for freshman applicants to Jan. 24 but met with little success. Total enrollment still jumped by 664. For fall 1987 enrollment, freshmen must apply by Nov. 30, the earliest deadline allowed by California State University regulations.

At SDSU and the other increasingly popular CSU campuses, “we’re really walking a fine line between denying service to people by denying admission and not serving them well by admitting too many students,” Vandament said.

Of the system’s 19 schools, which together set a record student enrollment of 333,613 this year, San Diego and Cal State Northridge are easily the most crowded, Vandament said.

“The pressures on the San Diego campus are incredible,” Vandament said. “They are limited to the extent which they can increase space on the main campus.”

Little change will occur until the planned North County campus is built and siphons students from the main campus, he said.

For students, the big numbers translate into a palpable decline in the quality of life. Lines for everything are an inevitable frustration early in the semester, when a competitive and resilient spirit is a big advantage.

Alvord Branan, associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters, said, “It’s everything from parking to trying to get a place to eat to finding a quiet spot in the library . . . to marching around and sitting in classes in which you’re not scheduled.”

The long-term effect is more serious: For many students, the crowding delays graduation, said Albert Johnson, SDSU’s vice president for academic affairs.

“There’s a lot of people who can’t get their courses, and the outcome of that is that it takes longer than it should for them to graduate,” Johnson said.

Bryan Jacobs, president of the student government, agrees: “It extends your time here. You have to do one of two things: You take a lot of summer sessions and winter sessions, or you go longer.”

Because of overcrowding and the increased number of part-time and working students, the average time needed to graduate is now five years, according to the school’s institutional research department.

Attending SDSU means trying to study or conduct research in a library that is no longer adequate. The building, which should have 5,000 seats, has 2,800 for the 10,000 to 15,000 people who use it daily.

“The impact is that students have to put up with a lot of noise, they’re on top of each other, and they do study in corridors and places where they’re not supposed to study,” Don Bosseau, university librarian, said.

The library is 94,000 square feet short of adequate size according to CSU formulas--partly because some of the building is used for office space--leaving too little space for books and periodicals. Shelves that Bosseau said should be 75% full are 95% full. Books sit in handcarts because there is no room for them.

“Primarily, it seems to serve as a deterrent in keeping the faculty out of the library,” he said. “It’s not conducive at all to a research atmosphere.”

Plans are being made to remove some of the offices, but that won’t come close to solving the problem. Automation may be the ultimate answer; SDSU students and faculty may someday find themselves in a library where automated forklifts retrieve books from storage areas for them.

Athletic facilities are a tougher problem. SDSU’s recreational spaces were built for 16,000 students--half the number that now attend. Recreation space is generally unavailable to students until 7 p.m., and then is extremely crowded.

Intramural basketball games run as late as 12:30 a.m. to make room for the 150 teams that want to play.

“Next semester, people will be killing each other to get in there and practice basketball,” said Tom Roberts, recreational sports manager.

The weight room and the pool can handle about one-third of the people who want to use them, and they are still overcrowded.

“People have already given up on using the facilities and have gone to Jack LaLanne or other private facilities,” Roberts said last week.

With varsity teams, clubs, physical education classes and intramurals using every available inch of the fields, there is no time or space for informal, pick-up softball or soccer. “Those are the people who are being cheated the most,” Roberts said. “Between my program, phys. ed. classes and athletics, we use every bit of every field all week and during the weekend.”

Frustrated students complain constantly.

“This school is the worst in regard to sports for anyone besides the football players--and their program isn’t even .500,” wrote one outraged student in a complaint to Roberts. (Actually, the Aztecs are 5-3 this year.)

But twice this decade, students have turned down plans to assess themselves fees to build a recreation center. Many said that they didn’t want to pay for a facility they wouldn’t be around to use.

Students are also straining the capacity of SDSU’s Health Center. In an effort to cut down on two- and three-hour waits for service that were typical last year, administrators switched this fall from a walk-in system to an appointment system for routine care.

“What we’re hoping to do is have a smaller number of people hanging around the building,” said Dr. Kevin Patrick, director of health services. “It looks more comfortable and more professional, and you’re less likely to sit next to someone for two hours who is sneezing all over you.”

Another improvement came this fall when SDSU opened a parking garage that added 2,000 spaces and has made a marked difference in the university’s legendary parking wars. Some faculty members said they mistakenly believed enrollment was down this year because it was easier to find a parking space.

Some people argue that SDSU is merely big--not critically overcrowded--and that lines and space shortages are inevitable when so many people want to use the same buildings at the same time. They are quick to add that students who enroll at SDSU from throughout the country are willing to trade crowding for the diversity and opportunities that a major campus offers.

“The school was crowded when I came here,” said Jacobs, the student government president. The recent increase “is a drop in the bucket,” he said. “The strain on the facilities was there when we were at 32,000.”

Others, like Patrick, say the pace of life has quickened in recent years.

“For each incremental body added to a campus, there’s more than a one-body impact,” he said. “It’s a critical-mass phenomenon. One extra person in the elevator can make everyone in the elevator feel uncomfortable.”

Few dispute that the ultimate example of SDSU’s crowding is the scramble for classes at the beginning of each semester, the process known as “crashing” that has become a way of life at the university.

If mail registration fails to gain a student admittance to the needed courses, he stands in line during “walk through” registration. After that, the only hope is to attend the class and hope to persuade an instructor to choose him if enrolled students drop out.

For popular classes and courses that everyone must take to graduate, students find nightmarish crowds sitting on floors and standing in doorways--even when teachers say they will admit no crashers.

“You have to work (instructors) psychologically,” said Gerard Linsmeier, sounding like a veteran in just his first semester at SDSU. “Make ‘em know you’re the one who’s most interested in the course. The key is to manipulate the teachers to want to accept you.”

When the Dale Carnegie philosophy doesn’t work, another approach may. “Another strategy is to just sit in the class and be stubborn,” Jacobs said. “Take the first exam.”

When all else fails, there is treachery. Roommates have been known to sign up each other for classes, thereby reducing the number of classes each has to crash. Others claim to have solicited a professor’s signature to drop a course, then changed the form so it shows permission to add the class.

Students and faculty acknowledge that, at a school the size of SDSU, crashing was inevitable even before the current overcrowding. Some students will always want to change courses after the semester has begun.

And some faculty members say that, if students were able--or willing--to take classes at unpopular times, they might not spend as many semesters at SDSU and the space crunch throughout the day would be lessened.

“Students want to go to school in the morning,” said Achison, the management department chairman. “And they would like to go to school two days a week. I can’t blame them. But if they want to get through, they’re going to have to be more flexible.”

Students fought to get into 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. sections of a business ethics class this semester, but there were vacancies in the 7:40 p.m. section, Achison said. The same situation exists for a course called Business Strategy and Integration, which is usually taken during the final semester.

“A number of students tell me that they’re going to have to come back next semester and take the course,” Achison said. “But I have two sections that have a number of openings. They tell me, for whatever reasons, that they cannot or choose not to take those sections.”

The College of Arts and Letters opened 69 sections of English 100 this fall in an effort to satisfy the clamor for a course that every student must take. Today, there are empty spaces in many of the sections.

“Frankly, it’s interesting to see how enrollments drop way, way off as you get to late afternoon,” said Branan, the Arts and Letters College associate dean. “And it’s almost impossible to hold a class on Friday afternoon.”

As SDSU continues to attract more part-time students, many of whom are working to put themselves through school, such dilemmas will continue. In the meantime, overcrowded classes are a reality in some departments.

In Achison’s business strategy and integration course, for example, 25 students would be the optimum number.

“We’re running 40 in those sections,” he said. “It’s 60% higher than it should be. It means the faculty member tends to cut down the number of assignments. It allows students to hide in the classroom.”

“The overcrowding is part of the reason that (instructors) don’t have time to be involved in other ways on the campus,” said Fred Hornbeck, president of the faculty senate. “If you’re spending six hours instead of four hours reading papers, then it’s two hours that aren’t spent on something else.

“It prevents one the pleasure of getting to know students, in an intellectual sense. That’s gone when you have 35,000 students and the kind of student-faculty ratio we have here.”

SDSU’s overall student-faculty ratio is 19.39 to 1, but the figure varies from 11.4 to 1 in the College of Education to 24.2 to 1 in the Business Administration and the Arts and Letters colleges.

In some required courses, demand simply exceeds supply, said Marilyn Boxer, dean of the Arts and Letters college. For sophomores, who are the the bottom of the priority list, that is especially true. It’s not uncommon for them to be denied admittance to every class they sign up for, meaning the entire semester depends on their ability to crash classes, students said.

“I do believe that if we were able to offer more, smaller classes, the students could get a better education,” Boxer said.

But most people at SDSU said that the school still offers a high-quality education, and the clamor for admission to the school supports that belief.

“We’re a victim of our own success,” said Patrick, the health services director. “SDSU has a good reputation. The students know it’s a good deal. Kids know that if they figure the system out, they can get a good education.”