A Tutorial on Bringing Out CSUN’s Good Side : Giving better service to transfer students from community colleges and recruiting fewer high school seniors will help the university build on its strengths.
San Fernando Valley residents have good reason to take pride in their regional university, going back to the days when it was called San Fernando Valley State College instead of Cal State Northridge. But as far as current news coverage goes, CSUN appears to be in very, very bad shape, with high rates of student attrition and a strong emphasis upon remedial instruction in math and English.
Obviously what we have here are two different schools with the same address--let’s call them CSUN-Jekyll and CSUN-Hyde--each with different goals and constituencies.
CSUN-Jekyll (the good one) can fairly be characterized as a transfer school with a high level of cost effectiveness. In 1994, for example, CSUN awarded 6,700 degrees with an enrollment of 23,000 students. Roughly 75% of them were transfer students from the region’s excellent community colleges: Valley, Pierce, Moorpark, Mission, Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Ventura, Antelope Valley and College of the Canyons. Since these graduates (mostly four-year baccalaureate students) took an average of only 80 units at CSUN, their cost to California taxpayers was only $14,000--two-thirds of what it would have been if they had all started out at CSUN as entering freshmen.
CSUN-Jekyll’s effectiveness as a “junior-plus” transfer service school has not involved lowered academic standards for its baccalaureate majors. For example, the average entering score on a national business exam is 540 for CSUN’s business graduate students, many of whom hold bachelor’s degrees from CSUN. This suggests that CSUN graduates are still high quality, comparing favorably with Claremont (547), the University of Denver (518) and the University of Connecticut (540).
As part of a regional system that includes community colleges, CSUN-Jekyll clearly continues to produce a large number of high-quality graduates each year, thereby justifying the pride Valley residents still have in it.
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CSUN-Hyde, in contrast, can fairly be characterized as a school serving entering freshmen. As indicated by U.S. News & World Report annual surveys, the verbal scores of CSUN’s entering freshmen in the national Scholastic Aptitude Test have been dropping steadily for several years. The present score of 365 indicates that freshmen entering CSUN-Hyde are less well-equipped for college work than most community college students.
Not surprisingly, because CSUN-Hyde students must compete with mature, aggressive, well-trained community college transfer students, the degree completion rate for CSUN-Hyde students is very, very low. Six years after entering as freshmen, only about a third have graduated.
CSUN-Hyde can also be characterized as a voracious consumer of university resources. Low-quality entering freshmen require expensive guidance and remediation programs, along with the traditional accouterments of freshman/sophomore college life: fraternities, sororities, general education, student government and dormitory living--all of which call for administrative bureaucracies far more elaborate and expensive than those which keep CSUN-Jekyll alive and well.
What accounts for the difference in student success? Part of the explanation, of course, is that community colleges weed out the academically unprepared. Beyond that, transfer students tend to be several years older, more mature and more serious than their counterparts who begin their careers at CSUN.
Moreover, there is reason to think brighter students prefer a community college for the first two years of higher education: It’s a lot less expensive.
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Look at the comparative tuition. Community college costs $375 a year, as opposed to $1,880 for CSUN, including various fees. An intelligent consumer weighing costs and benefits might well start his or her college career at a neighboring community college, not at CSUN.
If this theory is correct, then as CSUN tuition rises (another 10% anticipated for next year), the quality of CSUN entering freshmen is bound to deteriorate and the costs of dealing with these students is bound to rise.
Given the high cost and low effectiveness of CSUN-Hyde, our California legislators might simply abolish all freshman and sophomore courses in the California State University system, as was proposed a couple of years ago by Richard Moore, then president of Santa Monica College. CSUN would then become a school for juniors and seniors, primarily commuters, rather than a traditional four-year college.
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If CSUN faculty, administration and students wish to avoid the Moore alternative (and many do), they should recognize CSUN-Jekyll as a basic position of strength and adopt the following two-element policy.
* Give better service to transfer students . Since transfer students for the most part work at jobs during the day (and pay taxes), this means shifting resources to evening classes and reducing general-education requirements. It also means a better liaison with neighboring community colleges, especially with programs that serve mature working students.
* Do less recruiting of at-risk entering freshmen. CSUN recruits aggressively in high schools, far more so than in community colleges. Aggressive recruiting is likely to attract some students who are simply not ready for college. As has been pointed out, academically weak CSUN entering freshmen, even with remedial help, are bound to have difficulty competing on the CSUN-Jekyll level against community college transfers.
If these students are encouraged to start at neighboring community colleges, their chances for ultimate academic success will be far better. And CSUN-Hyde will gradually wither away--unlamented.
