SDSU’s Tight Spot

For students trying to make it through overcrowded San Diego State University, the attributes of patience and persistence have become as important as scholarship and industry.

SDSU students have become kindred spirits with residents of the City of Moscow who accept as a normal part of life waiting in long lines to buy food or other necessary consumer items. At San Diego State, the lines are to enroll in classes, use the athletic facilities or receive care in the Health Center. In the library, books are crammed on and around the shelves, and there are 3,000 chairs when the demand is for 5,000. It has become increasingly difficult for a student to graduate in four years because of the difficulty getting into required classes.

To keep the overcrowded conditions from progressing from irritating to oppressing, the university has limited enrollment in certain subjects, such as business administration, nursing, electrical engineering, aeronautical engineering and telecommunications and film.

But university officials are considering going a step further next year and closing off access to SDSU by students who want to transfer during their freshman or sophomore years from community colleges or other four-year colleges and universities. We think that would be a mistake.

Before telling California students, especially those who begin their college careers in the state’s community college system, that they cannot attend schools for which they are academically qualified, SDSU should be sure it has made every effort to accommodate as many students as absolutely possible.

Just as the public school system has no choice but to find ways to take as many students as show up, the California State Universities should employ imaginative ideas to push upward their student-population limits. This may mean holding classes in off-campus sites or having more classes at unattractive early morning or late evening hours. It also will mean continued long lines in the cafeteria, difficulty finding parking places and frustration with filled-up classes.

And as SDSU’s main campus becomes more intolerably crowded, the political pressure should build to quickly expand its new North County campus, scheduled to open in 1992 with upper-division classes only, to a full, four-year university.