CSUN Pursues Contract With Private School

In a highly unorthodox move to generate outside funds, Cal State Northridge officials are negotiating with a for-profit, private school that wants to establish its own academic program on the campus, even though a similar program is already offered there.

EF International Language Schools, whose parent company is based in Sweden, is seeking to lease half a dormitory and about a half-dozen classrooms beginning this fall for its English as a Second Language courses. Under a proposed five-year contract, the private school, which hopes to begin operations with 75 to 85 students from abroad, will pay CSUN between $600,000 and $850,000 a year.

The contract excludes CSUN, which has its own ESL program with about 100 students, from having any say over the faculty hired by the company or the content of the private courses. The company will, however, have to state in its materials that CSUN is not running the private program.

Officials of the Cal State University system, of which CSUN is a part, said they knew of no such private programs on their 21 campuses.

But CSUN President Blenda Wilson supports the deal and said it could be approved within the next few weeks. EF already has permission from campus officials to begin advertising its CSUN-based program.

“It has attractiveness for educational reasons, and attracting international students,” Wilson said.

She also pointed out that alliances between public and private institutions are becoming more common. “There’s more discussion in higher education about partnerships and entrepreneurial agreements.”

Educators interviewed last week said it’s not unprecedented for a private company to operate a program at a public university. But none had ever heard of a university allowing a private company to establish a program the public school already offers.

“I’m very surprised to hear it,” said Rhona Genzel, who is on staff at the Rochester Institute of Technology and is president of the American Assn. of Intensive English Programs.

CSUN officials said a major reason they are pursuing the EF deal is to cope with annual, multimillion-dollar deficits caused by a disastrous dormitory project.

“These are extraordinary times,” said Ronald Kopita, CSUN’s vice president for student affairs. “We’ve been encouraged by the chancellor’s office to be entrepreneurial and to deal with a difficult financial situation the best we can. That’s what we’re doing.”

Critics, however, fear that students in foreign countries will get the mistaken impression that the private program is sanctioned by CSUN. They also argue that the EF program will drain students and revenue from CSUN’s own foreign students program, offsetting any financial gain.

“Why should we be offering two English as a Second Language programs on our campus going after the same markets, the same students?” asked James O’Donnell, dean of CSUN’s office of continuing education, which has run the campus’s program for foreign students since 1978.

O’Donnell said that EF, which currently has eight programs in the United States and is well-known overseas, could drain about $1 million in revenue from CSUN’s program in the first couple of years, erasing most of the campus’s prospective profits.

Wilson countered that there is room for a second program on campus. “I think there is a huge demand for language training,” she said. “EF International does not have a lock on the market. I have every confidence our program meets a need in the market that is not exhausted.”

Critics also cited past problems with EF. Michael Steadman, director of CSUN’s own ESL program for foreign students, said CSUN officials sent a warning letter to EF in the early 1980s after discovering the company had been improperly marketing one of its programs as being associated with CSUN.

Officials at San Francisco State University, another Cal State school, said that in the late 1980s EF threatened to sue them when a proposed alliance was rejected. The deal, like the one proposed for CSUN, had been supported by university housing officials, said Jo Volker, associate dean of the College of Extended Learning at San Francisco State.

But academic leaders, who also had their own on-campus program, didn’t like it and their opinion won out. “At San Francisco,” Volker said, “an academic ‘no’ means ‘no.’ ”

Volker added that, although EF threatened to sue, no legal action was ever taken.

Current CSUN and company officials said they were not familiar with the details of those incidents. But they said their future dealings should be mutually beneficial. “I have complete confidence our relationship with CSUN will progress ethically,” said company Vice President Ann Metropulos.

Metropulos said that EF has been seeking a site for a Los Angeles-area operation since ending its program last year at tiny Brooks College in Long Beach.

“There’s a demand around the world for Los Angeles. And EF has students who are interested in spending a year in L. A.,” Metropulos said.

The company, which has about 30 offices around the world, calls its nine-month program an Academic Year Abroad. The package includes English language and American culture classes, plus housing and food services, for about $10,000.

If the EF program at CSUN is approved, company and campus officials said, it could eventually be expanded to occupy up to two entire dormitories of CSUN’s 15-building University Park Apartments.