West L.A. Gives It Old College Try : Education: Some frowned on the West Los Angeles College president’s marketing techniques. But its once-lagging enrollment is growing.

Linda Thor has a dream.

“My goal is to create a parking problem on this campus,” says Thor, president of West Los Angeles College.

She isn’t kidding.

Half-empty parking lots are the mark of a college that needs more students, and the unorthodox administrator is doing everything she can to attract and keep students, including using marketing techniques more often associated with the sale of soap than colleges.

Thor, 40, was named acting president of the Westside campus in March, 1986, with a mandate from the board of trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District to stop the school’s enrollment erosion. The student body had shrunk from 11,600 in 1980 to just 6,400 in 1986. The trustees made their wishes clear. Boost enrollment 20% by September, 1986, they said.

In the course of talking to community leaders and high school principals in the area, Thor discovered that West, as it is called on campus, was thought to have an image problem. She also found that nobody knew quite what the school’s image was. Formerly in public relations (a fact that made her a controversial choice for the job), Thor felt the school needed to find out just how it was perceived before it could hope to increase its appeal. With a grant of $17,000 from the district office, the college hired a San Francisco consulting firm to conduct an “image study.”

That first study revealed that 77% of area residents and others surveyed knew little or nothing about the school. That was not a complete surprise. Unlike highly visible Santa Monica College, its chief rival for students, West is the college that’s hard to find, hidden away on 70 pastoral acres in the hills above Culver City. Nor is there much there, edifice-wise, once you arrive. The school, which never completed its original building program, has no auditorium, student union or gymnasium, although two major buildings are in the design phase.

The study also showed that the school was thought to be “boring” and not the kind of place a serious student would want to go. West, which has major programs in aircraft maintenance and travel and tourism, has far fewer academic courses than Santa Monica and sees far fewer students--only 5%--transfer to four-year colleges.

Finally, the campus was thought to be unsafe. In fact, Thor points out, it has the best security record of the nine colleges in the district.

After consulting with faculty, students and staff, the administrator decided to put a major portion of the school’s advertising and recruitment budget into letting the community know the college existed. A booklet describing campus services and course offerings was bulk-mailed to 225,000 residents of the widely divergent Westside communities the school draws students from, including Beverly Hills and Baldwin Hills. On the cover was a color photograph of the campus at its most comely. Inside, information about how safe the campus is was prominently displayed, as were photos of smiling staff and alumni.

Thor recalls that there was some initial grumbling by a few of the faculty about the appropriateness of a college’s using the strategies of the marketplace. Fortunately for her, the mailing (along with other programs and activities based on the study) did the assigned job. By the trustees’ deadline of September, enrollment was up 34% over the previous fall. This year enrollment is 9,200.

Thor, who was named permanent president in 1987 (at 37 she was the youngest community college president in the state), continues to have faith in surveys and other marketing techniques as an aid to recruitment. Since that first image study, close analysis of enrollment information and other data has also helped the college fine-tune its programs and services, Thor says.

“This is very much a campus for working adults,” Thor said, explaining that 80% of the students are enrolled part time, and more attend at night than during the day. The college has instituted a program called PACE (Project for Adult College Education) that allows working students to earn 12 units of college credit a semester by taking courses one night a week, watching instructional TV for two hours a week and attending six Saturday programs.

The students’ orientation toward evening classes prompted the school to add early evening classes (held from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m.) to the existing pattern of classes from 7 to 10 p.m. Now students can take two courses an evening.

Thor says the skew toward evening also caused the administration to re-think its food service. In the past, the college had a traditional cafeteria that only served food from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. “It was losing $30,000 a year,” she said. Convinced that another configuration was needed, the college tore out the cafeteria and replaced it with vending machines that are accessible whenever students are on campus. The vending machines are making $30,000 a year.

“Looking at who was coming in the door told us what kind of college we are and where our priorities should be,” Thor said.

The college has also responded to the fact that it has the highest female to male ratio in the district (62% of the students are women) by instituting evening day care four nights a week. Children can be left until 10 p.m.

Last spring the college hired a consulting firm to study the demographics of the student body even more closely. That analysis produced profiles of two statistically typical West students. “Profile A,” as the report calls her, is a black woman in her 20s who goes to school during the day and perhaps at night as well, with the intention of transferring to a college that gives a baccalaureate. “Profile B” is a white woman in her 30s who may already have a baccalaureate degree. She attends at night, either for job training or to prepare to transfer.

Banking on the likelihood that other people fitting these descriptions might like the school, the college now tries to speak directly to both types of women in advertising and promotional materials. It makes a pitch to Profile A in spots on black radio stations and tries to reach Profile B in spots on KSURF. It also tries to anticipate and alleviate concerns these students are likely to have. Because safety is a concern for virtually all women, the school has also begun hiring students from its officer-training program to serve as uniformed security “cadets” on campus, supplementing the regular guards.

The mailing describing class offerings now includes short autobiographical essays by typical graduates, such as Jeanne Breunig (a Profile B who graduated in 1984), who speaks to returnees’ fears when she writes: “It was scary at first, but the instructors made me feel so comfortable. . . . They recognized the hardships of women with families who were returning to school and, by their attitude, they seemed to be saying, ‘I know what you’re going through and you’re doing a wonderful job!”’ Breunig is, of course, smiling in the accompanying photograph.

The study also pinpointed the neighborhoods (by ZIP code) that produce most of the students that fit each profile--many of the Profile A students come from Baldwin Hills, while West Los Angeles and Culver City send most of the Profile B students.

The consulting firm that did the study identified neighborhoods with similar demographics as areas of high recruitment potential and suggested that the college target them for mailings that emphasize the likely interests and concerns of both types of students. Exposition Park has been identified as a rich hunting ground for Profile A students, neighborhoods in West Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Pacific Palisades and elsewhere as a good place to seek Profile B students.

The college no longer does mass mailings. Now that it knows who it is looking for, targeted mailings are more economical, Thor says.

Problems--or “challenges,” as the public-relations-conscious administration likes to call them--remain. For reasons that are not really understood, the college attracts the highest percentage of black students (48%) in the district. White students who live in the area prefer Santa Monica College. West wants to keep its black students, but find out more about why so many white students go elsewhere.

“Santa Monica has a marvelous reputation,” Thor said. “I try not to be paranoid about Santa Monica College, but to help this institution finds its niche.”

The college is also trying to get a better handle on why its semester-to-semester retention rate is poor. “Red flagging” students at high risk of dropping out and then offering them special help has been proposed.

West is still the college where there’s always room to park, but Thor is hopeful that it will change. On the first day of school last fall, she recalls, there was a genuine traffic jam on campus. “I almost got out of my car and cheered.”