Cal State Dominguez Hills’ Enrollment Jumps for 2nd Year

For the second consecutive year, a record number of students has enrolled at Cal State Dominguez Hills, university officials said this week.

Enrollment this term jumped to 9,200 students, a 7% increase over last year’s figure of 8,800, said university spokesman Greg Klerkx. Last year, enrollment rose by 700 students, a gain of about 8% from the previous term and the second-highest in the Cal State system.

Final figures for this term throughout the system will not be available for several weeks but Cal State officials said Dominguez Hills’ increase is significant.

Klerkx said the gain was “fabulous. It’s more than we could have hoped for.”

Dominguez Hills officials attribute much of the growth to a more aggressive university outreach program in area high schools and community colleges and to enrollment by students turned away because of cutbacks at other Cal State schools, Klerkx said.

The enrollment gain is expected to boost state funding to the university, allowing the school to create additional faculty positions when the next fiscal budget is prepared, Klerkx said. Last year’s enrollment increase allowed the university to hire 32 full-time faculty members.

“We were able to hire them into areas where we hadn’t hired in almost a decade,” said university President Robert Detweiler.

The university expects to add about 20 to 25 full-time faculty members with this year’s increase, Detweiler said. There are now about 250 full-time faculty members.

The enrollment increase has also created a livelier campus, Detweiler said. There is more involvement in student government and in fraternities and sororities on the campus, he said.

“I think it has improved morale overall,” Detweiler said. “We feel great in regard to our future.”

Although other Cal State schools may experience budget cuts next year because of possible reductions in state funding tied to enrollment, Dominguez Hills “should not only be able to maintain status quo but possibly add programs and services,” Klerkx said.

Most of the new students at Dominguez Hills are transfers, but the university also experienced an increase in freshman enrollment, school officials said.

“We’ve had a good, solid freshman class come in, which is what most schools strive for,” Klerkx said.

During the four-year period from 1982 to 1986, enrollment declined by 16% at the college. Detweiler took over as university president in August, 1989, and said he hoped to increase enrollment by 3% annually. Officials at the school and with the Cal State system said at the time that Detweiler was inheriting a campus that had failed to establish a strong identity for itself with the South Bay communities it serves.

The recent enrollment gain “reflects very positively on Detweiler’s recruitment efforts,” said Colleen Bentley-Adler, a spokeswoman for the chancellor’s office. “My understanding is that he’s been working very hard with community colleges in the area and that’s . . . important, because that is where we are able to recruit many of our under-represented ethnic students.”

The student population at Dominguez Hills is the most ethnically diverse in the Cal State system, according to school officials. Students from ethnic groups that are under-represented in the university system make up 60% of the enrollment at Dominguez Hills, Detweiler said.

“I think people are recognizing Dominguez Hills more now as an opportunity for higher education,” Klerkx said.