Community Colleges to Fight Drop in Attendance

Plagued by sharply declining enrollments for most of this decade, San Diego Community College District trustees are poised to make a simple decision that could attract as many as 4,000 new students to the district’s three campuses.

By merely delaying the current August starting date for classes until sometime after Labor Day, the district hopes to entice parents of young children, San Diego State University students and reluctant high school graduates into taking a course or two at community colleges.

Coupling the move with a new $121,000 marketing effort designed to lure workers out of downtown office towers to the district’s struggling flagship, nearby City College, the trustees hope that in 1987 they can turn around five years of plummeting enrollments.

“I think the early start is the major culprit in the whole thing,” said Garland Peed, chancellor of the district, which includes Mesa, Miramar and City colleges. “Here’s the family with children. Let’s say we start in August. The family’s got a problem now. What do they do with their kids? Do they get a baby sitter?

“I think we’ve said by our calendar to single parents and mothers and a large segment of our population, ‘We’re really not interested in your attending our college because if you do, you’re going to have to incur all kinds of major expense,’ ” Peed said.

Any move will have to come over the the opposition of students--who under a late-start calendar would return after a two-week Christmas break to take final exams--and faculty, who believe that classes after Christmas vacation are a waste of time.

For the past two years, the two groups have pressured the trustees into ignoring Peed’s recommendation for a shift to the late-start calendar.

But supporters of the idea believe that if parents can send their kids off to school in the morning, they will use some of their free time to attend community colleges. The average San Diego Community College District student last year was 30 years old and 43% of them have children under 18, according to a survey of 201 students by the marketing firm of Nuffer, Smith, Tucker Inc.

Community college students repeatedly mention the problem of finding day care as one of the obstacles to re-enrollment, said Lynn Neault, administrative analyst for the district. No one knows how many others would enroll if they could send their children off to public school.

The district’s calendar committee is recommending that the fall 1987 calendar coincide with the San Diego Unified School District year. The city schools have not yet selected a starting date for 1987, but it will probably be Sept. 8 or Sept. 14, a spokeswoman said.

A post-Labor Day start would also eliminate the psychological barrier--among young and old alike--against starting school at the height of the vacation season.

“I don’t think students think about going to school in August,” Neault said. “The surfing’s still pretty good then.”

But the district will not be turning up its nose at traditional students. By aligning its calendar more closely with the schedule at SDSU, which starts shortly before Labor Day, the community colleges hope to attract more students closed out of required courses at the heavily overcrowded university.

This year’s Aug. 18 start put the community colleges too far into their fall semester to draw SDSU students who were shut out of their classes. By the time an SDSU student finds out if he’s out of luck, it is in early- or mid-September--a month after community college has begun.

Overall, Peed expects a calendar change would result in a a 7% to 12% increase--2,400 to 4,200 students more than this year’s enrollment of 35,000 students. He said the figure is not out of line with gains made by other community colleges that have switched to later starting dates.

The Los Angeles Community College District reversed a five-year, 33% enrollment decline this fall; district officials attributed the improvement to a shift in the starting date from August to September, as well as adding remedial courses and heavy advertising.

Every other community college district in San Diego county showed enrollment increases this fall. Of the four, three started their semesters after Labor Day and the fourth began a week later than the San Diego district.

In fact, the San Diego district’s smallest school, Miramar College, received special permission from the trustees and the state to operate under a “flex” calendar this fall--and immediately reaped an enrollment gain of 33%.

(Unlike a typical late-start schedule, the flex calendar shaves 15 class days off the yearly schedule, allowing students to start the fall semester in September but finish before Christmas. Peed is against the flex calendar because he feels it is academically unsound to shave 15 days of the students’ schedule.)

Meanwhile, the San Diego district’s enrollment continued its precipitous slide.

Since 1982, when the three colleges moved to the August starting date, enrollment at City College has dropped from 15,147 to 12,471.

During the same time, enrollment at Mesa College fell from 20,409 to 18,003. Between 1982 and 1985, enrollment at Miramar College decreased from 4,803 to 3,834, before this year’s scheduling experiment helped bring attendance up to 4,439.

Because each year’s funding depends on the previous year’s enrollment, such declines have hurt the district’s pocketbook. Lower revenues and declining enrollment have led to hundreds of class cuts, lost jobs for the part-time teachers who offer half the district’s instruction and spiraling dissatisfaction among students.

No one claims that poor scheduling is the only reason for the district’s problem.

“It’s certainly more than one problem,” said trustee Eugene French. “You can’t pin the problem on either the start date or whatever the thing might be. It’s far broader than that, especially at City College.”

Community college enrollments across the state suffered seriously when the $50 tuition fee was first imposed in 1984. The robust economy has provided jobs for potential students, keeping them out of community colleges. And the number of high school graduates is ebbing.

City College, located off 12th Avenue downtown, is also beset by internal woes that have helped keep enrollment down, officials said.

The Nuffer, Smith, Tucker study found that students are dissatisfied with a severe parking shortage, shabby equipment, inadequate security, poor communication with teachers and a lack of classes during evening hours.

Lee Noel, an Iowa-based consultant hired to examine the college’s weaknesses, found that it does a poor job of recruiting students and retaining them once they enroll.

Until recently, for example, there was only one phone line available to callers seeking admissions information, and they could expect gruff treatment when they did get through, he found. The number of phone lines has been expanded to four.

This fall, sharp conflict between the faculty and the trustees--and particularly the faculty and Peed--led to a bitter and well-publicized campaign by teachers to unseat trustees Dan Grady and Louise Dyer in the November election. Both faculty-supported candidates lost, despite the aid of $114,000 raised by the teachers.

The trustees will not make a final decision on the calendar change until late January or early February, although three of the five--Dyer, French and Richard Johnston--said in interviews that they favor the idea.

Trustee Charles Reid said that he will vote against the change, and trustee Dan Grady said he is undecided. But a simple majority of the five-member board is all that is needed for the change.

A ‘yea’ vote would reverse the trustees’ decisions of the past two years, when they overruled Peed’s recommendation for a late start under heavy pressure from students and faculty members.

For the third year in a row, students are gathering petitions protesting the change.

“You’re going to feel obligated to spend your two weeks (of vacation) cramming for finals,” said Kacey Wiles, president of the Student Political Action Network. “To me it makes it too difficult. I don’t know if it’s all psychological.”

Wiles said that it is “better academically” to take finals before Christmas. “You kind of build up this momentum. And then it’s like finals are done and you can just relax.”

Vahe Akashian, a Mesa College chemistry professor and the California Teachers Assn. representative on the calendar committee, also fought the late-start initiative for the third consecutive year. The three faculty senates at the three colleges voted to oppose it again this year.

In a survey last year, Akashian said that he found “that there was no apparent correlations between starting early and losing enrollment, and believe it or not, the trend across the country seems to be toward early start.”

“The faculty mostly feel that the time when you come back after Christmas is a wasted time, an educationally wasted time,” he added.

Peed suggested that some faculty favor the late start, and that the opposition is largely organized by the teachers union. Teachers who are against the move don’t want to give up their long Christmas vacation, which is about 4 weeks long, he said.

Countered Akashian: “If Mr. Peed says that, and if he really believes that, I think he is being unjust, unfair and totally out of touch with reality.”

In a survey of students two years ago, Akashian found that nearly 95% of the 8,200 who responded opposed the late start. But the Nuffer, Smith, Tucker survey of 201 students showed that 49% wanted to start the fall term after Labor Day, 35% opposed it and 16% had no preference or couldn’t decide.

Akashian conceded that he is not fighting the late-start calendar as strenuously as in the past because the faculty do not seem to be as strongly opposed. Faculty groups have been among the loudest in calling for increased enrollment to stem the continuing cycle of class cuts.

At City College, administrators are hoping to raise enrollment 3% this month through a new promotional campaign that began in the last few weeks.

Recognizing for the first time that many people are not aware of the courses City College has to offer, the district’s public relations department sent about 175,000 class schedules to homes in the City College region. Radio spots are airing, and posters bearing the slogan “You don’t have to go far to go further,” have been distributed to 4,000 downtown companies that employ more than 25 people.

That approach has yielded 40 response cards a day for the past week from people seeking information about City College’s wide variety of courses, said Janet Schwalm, communications supervisor for the district.

“We’re trying to broaden our market, to reach that working student who may not be aware that City College is right up the hill from downtown,” Schwalm said.

“I’m looking for the aspiring managerial type. I’m looking for the secretary who wants to upgrade her skills. I’m looking for the person who needs to upgrade their language skills, their math skills,” said trustee Richard Johnston.

The district has tried promotional campaigns before, but they were largely “shotgun” approaches to short-term problems, Schwalm said. This year’s $121,000 effort, funded by lottery money, will continue through next June, when the district will for the first time do more than send letters to high school graduates.

“We’re going to offer free T-shirts if they visit the school,” Schwalm said. “Something that’s more directed and personal.”

A direct mail campaign will be used. The district has also joined a consortium of county community college districts to pool funds for advertising.

Noel, perhaps the nation’s top higher education marketing consultant, has been hired to help solve City College’s internal problems. He intends to tell the district to market itself as a private company.

“Ninety-two percent of colleges and universities in America are committing the classical marketing error, which is they are trying to sell their degrees, their courses and their programs,” he said. “That would be like Revlon trying to sell their customers by promoting lipstick, mascara and blush.

“What (Revlon) promotes is youth, glamour, beauty, romance, self-esteem. They aren’t selling cosmetics. They are selling futures. They’re selling hope.

“That’s what higher education has to sell. They have the opportunity to sell better futures, better lives, better jobs, better incomes.”