Graduates Take an Incomplete on Their Commencement Day

Cal State Fullerton will have the biggest commencement in its history Sunday, but senior Jay Tomes, 23, won’t be there to pick up his diploma.

“I’m not going because graduation’s not that important,” Tomes said. “My ties to the school haven’t been that close . . . I haven’t been involved that much in campus activities. I don’t have a sense of belonging like I did in high school.”

Tomes, a psychology major who lives a mile from Cal State, said he goes on campus only to attend classes and spends much of the rest of his time working at a drug-rehabilitation hospital and with friends who don’t attend the school.

“I’ll probably spend (graduation) day relaxing,” Tomes said.

Like Tomes, about half of all the spring graduates at Orange County’s 11 colleges and universities won’t be attending their commencements this spring, and local administrators say they are concerned by that trend. To increase student participation, some colleges have radically transformed traditional graduations by eliminating commencement speakers, providing free meals or offering free baby-sitting.

Just 20 years ago, almost all students attended their college commencements, administrators said. The reasons for the turnaround--which have led to expected turnouts of only about 40% at the county’s eight community colleges--are varied.

Community colleges have large contingents of older, part-time students who would rather work or be with their families than attend commencements, administrators said, and many community college students don’t consider their associate degrees as important as bachelor’s degrees from four-year institutions.

“I didn’t feel this particular ritual meant anything to me,” said Ellen Goldman, who didn’t attend graduation ceremonies at Irvine Valley Community College May 21.

Goldman, 30, said she was a “returning adult student” who didn’t believe that getting a two-year college degree was any more “fantastic than cleaning the house and taking care of my son every day.”

“It’s not a big hurdle that I’ve overcome,” said Goldman, who plans to go on to Cal State Long Beach. “It’s not like I’ve gotten my B.A., M.A. or Ph.D. I’ve just completed my general education requirements so that I can go to a four-year university.”

To attract graduates to their commencements, colleges have tried to make their ceremonies more informal and to place more emphasis on the graduates themselves. Nearly half of the county’s 11 colleges have discarded traditional commencement speakers in recent years; some don’t have speakers at all, and some call on popular professors rather than politicians or civic leaders.

“We used to have outside commencement speakers, but the chancellor (Jack Peltason) feels that graduates never remember what their commencement speakers said--or even who they were,” said Barbara Davidson, UC Irvine’s commencement coordinator.

Lucy M. Keele, a Cal State Fullerton professor of speech communication, said: “More and more commencements are not using speakers. One year there’ll be a poet; another year there’ll be a musical performance, and sometimes the speaker will represent an outstanding faculty member. But these aren’t commencement speakers in the traditional sense--people who’re prominent in politics, business or something like that.”

Penny Hughes, student government president at Saddleback College, said: “Graduation ceremonies are for students, and the commencement speaker should be someone that they know and want to listen to for a few minutes.”

At Saddleback, Hughes and other student government officers picked the speaker. This spring’s Rancho Santiago graduates chose their commencement speaker by popular vote. Students at both colleges chose popular instructors.

At most of the other colleges in the county that still schedule commencement speakers, students have joined faculty members and administrators on committees that pick them.

UCI’s Davidson said the best way to attract students to commencements is to make the students themselves the center of the ceremony. That is why most of UCI’s three-hour commencement consists of 2,000 graduates walking on stage and receiving their diplomas from college officials.

Davidson said this has helped UCI to lure 85% of its seniors to commencements. At the county’s two other four-year colleges, Cal State Fullerton and Chapman, the participation rate is 65%. College spokesmen said they did not know why the participation varied so much at the three institutions.

To increase the turnout at Chapman, commencement coordinator Carol Howansky said, free baby-sitting services and continental breakfasts are provided for graduates and their guests.

Because of these innovations, student participation in graduations at Chapman has increased about 5%. And Howansky, who has handled commencements at the Orange institution since 1981, is constantly coming up with ideas to increase the turnout.

“After each graduation, I sit down and write down a list of things we need to try to improve,” Howansky said. “Sometimes it’s nothing more than roping off a special area where parents can stand and take pictures of their sons or daughters as they get their diplomas. But obviously it makes a difference, because every year we get 25 or 30 more students to walk through commencement.”