Planned Campus Not Viewed as Threat to Local Colleges

Ventura County’s three community colleges could experience initial drops in enrollment when a Cal State campus opens near Camarillo, but the long-term benefits would far outweigh any loss of students, a college district official said Tuesday.

The long-planned public university, scheduled to be built on 260 acres the state agreed to buy last week, would keep students in school longer, said Timothy D. Hirschberg, president of the Ventura County Community College District board.

“The average community college student is 25,” said Hirschberg, whose district oversees community colleges in Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura. “They are older and more rooted in the community, so it’s harder for them to move to continue with their higher education.

“Having a Cal State four-year university right here in our own neighborhood will help every community college student realize their educational dream,” he said.

Cal State officials announced last week that they settled a long-simmering dispute with Mohseni Ranch, owners of about 200 acres of lemon groves outside Camarillo that state planners had targeted for a public university.

Mohseni Ranch’s 200 acres and another 60 acres of vegetable crops will be sold to the state university system this spring to house the campus, which will serve more than 15,000 full-time students when it is completed.

It was the latest in a series of locations for a proposed campus that state officials have targeted since the early 1960s.

Cal State leaders have said that although there is enough money saved to purchase the 260 acres, funds to build the university must come from a bond proposal that will be placed on the 1996 California primary ballot. If the money is approved, the first students could attend classes there by 1999, officials said.

An educator at UC Santa Barbara said there would be little competition between a Cal State campus in Ventura County and his university’s local facility.

“Our program in Ventura has always been designed to serve the upper division and graduate population, not to become a full-service undergraduate and graduate program,” said John Maxwell, a dean at UCSB, which operates a Ventura off-campus center. “We’re not in any way in the same kind of business that Cal State is in.”

About 150 degree-bound students are enrolled at UCSB’s Ventura campus, down slightly in recent years, Maxwell said. But thousands of working professionals take courses offered by the center to enhance their careers, he said.

“We are very clearly a sub-unit of UCSB and intend to remain so,” Maxwell said.

Administrators of Ventura County’s private colleges also said a local Cal State campus would offer more opportunities to students. The private school officials said they fill a different community need than do public universities.

“We don’t really see ourselves in competition with CSU, but rather as colleagues who are committed to providing higher education services to the county,” said Pamela Jolicoeur, vice president of academic affairs at Cal Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

“Students that come here are seeking the small-college, residential atmosphere that distinguishes us from the state university,” she said.

More than 2,800 students attend classes at Cal Lutheran, which opened its first classrooms in 1961.

Dorothy John, director of the Oxnard campus of the private University of La Verne, predicted that any new public university would benefit other institutions.

“The more information and publicity there is in this county (about a public university) is good for all of us,” said John, who oversees almost 400 students at three off-campus centers in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

“I’ve lived here since 1951,” John said. “I’ve watched and waited for this thing to come for years and years. It’s a really positive thing.”

Escrow is scheduled to close on the Cal State land deal before April 1.