WOODLAND HILLS : Pierce Returns With 100 Summer Courses

After a disastrous plunge in enrollment linked to last summer’s scaled-back curriculum, Pierce College is again offering a wide range of summer classes beginning Monday.

With more than 100 courses, summer offerings at Pierce this year will be almost four times that of last summer, when Pierce administrators nearly canceled summer school because of a funding crisis.

But the move may have hurt the school even more because enrollment--which helps determine how much state funds community colleges receive--dropped 15.5% between the fall of 1992 and the fall of 1993, the college’s largest loss on record, said William Norlund, vice president of academic affairs.

“When you don’t offer summer school, it sounds like you have problems in the minds of the public,” Norlund said. “People would rather go to a school that doesn’t have problems. We feel that one of the reasons our enrollment dropped in the fall was our lack of many summer classes.”

Classes will begin two weeks earlier than usual, giving crews four weeks to repair earthquake damage to the campus library between the end of summer school July 22 and the fall semester.

Norlund said the school still has openings in some English and math classes, as well as in accounting, art, business and other subjects.