CSUN Enrollment Slide Forecast : Education: RAND report projects a dramatic decline by decade’s end. Expected drop in the area’s college-age students is blamed.

Cal State Northridge will face dramatic enrollment declines for the rest of the decade unless the campus can counter the effects of a big drop in the numbers of local college-age students, according to a RAND Corp. report prepared for the school’s administrators.

Although campus officials say they are gearing up to fight the downturn, RAND researchers are warning that CSUN faces a tough time retaining its enrollment in the years ahead because Los Angeles County’s population of 20- to 24-year-olds is forecast to drop 26% between 1990 and 2000.

In one optimistic scenario, the RAND report estimates that CSUN’s undergraduate enrollment could fall 17% from 19,400 last year to 16,150 by 2000, based on demographic changes alone. But if tuition rates continue to rise as they have, the drop-off could be much worse.

“If they continue business as usual, based on the demographic changes, that is what their scenario looks like. The decline they’ve seen in recent years is going to continue for awhile before it turns around,” said Dana Soloff, an analyst for the Santa Monica-based RAND organization, an independent think tank originally formed to research difficult technology and administrative issues for the Air Force.

However, CSUN officials said business as usual is far from their intentions. As a result of enrollment losses in recent years, the Northridge earthquake and RAND’s projections, campus officials already are mounting an ambitious effort to recruit and retain students.

That means that although the campus historically never had to do much recruiting, this year administrators have had to mount an unprecedented outreach effort to high schools and community colleges from San Diego to Northern California, as well as make various efforts to better satisfy current students, officials said.

Hoping to broaden its geographic reach, the campus this fall will begin a long-sought program at CSUN’s Ventura campus to offer night school classes leading to an MBA degree, and start an undergraduate business program at Santa Monica College, CSUN’s first-ever degree offering through a community college.

“We haven’t had to worry about enrollment problems in the past. So obviously the report is somewhat of a surprise to the campus,” said CSUN Provost Louanne Kennedy. However, Kennedy predicted that CSUN will succeed and actual enrollments will not fall much below current levels.

For virtually all of CSUN’s 39-year history, enrollments climbed steadily and almost effortlessly as the campus grew with the San Fernando Valley and surrounding communities, becoming one of the largest schools in the now 21-campus Cal State University system.

Spring enrollment, including graduate students, hit an all-time high of just more than 30,000 in 1991, but then began dropping. Battered by the recession, annual 10% Cal State system tuition hikes, and finally by the January, 1994, earthquake, total enrollment this spring fell to 23,642--a 21% loss from 1991.

During all those years, CSUN functioned as a commuter school, drawing in recent years more than 70% of its students from its own northern Los Angeles County and eastern Ventura County service area. But now, changing demographics in those areas are threatening to take their toll.

RAND’s report says Los Angeles County’s population of 20- to 24-year-olds will decline from 807,735 in 1990 to 600,456 by the end of the decade, sapping CSUN’s student base. In Ventura County, meanwhile, a much smaller decline is forecast, from 51,707 to 51,602, but that won’t help CSUN.

And, Soloff said, CSUN will feel that decline more sharply than some other public universities in the region because of the continuing sharp increase in the Latino population of the Valley area.

A smaller proportion of Latino students historically have gone to college than white students.

Ironically, those projections for CSUN contrast with a very different outlook for higher education statewide. Earlier this month, state officials predicted that the total demand for enrollment in the Cal State system will increase by more than 85,000 students between 1993 and 2005 due to expected increases in the state’s population.

RAND researchers prepared the CSUN report as part of their work on a two-year project the university began last fall to prepare a strategic plan mapping out its future. RAND researchers said their specific number estimates for CSUN may be revised, but the downward pressure on the college-age pool is certain.

RAND officials conceded to The Times on Friday that some of their original enrollment projection data, unbeknown to campus officials, contained an error that made CSUN’s projected declines look much worse than RAND had intended. However, the RAND numbers cited above are correct.