Night Degree Programs Rare at State Colleges : Education: For many working adults, only pricey private schools offer study plans to suit their schedules.

By JOHN CHANDLER

July 5, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

At age 47, struggling to earn the college degree he missed three decades ago, Stephen Goldblatt knows tough. For the past two years, he’s worked full time, helped manage two teen-age children while his wife has juggled work and classes--and still carried a full college load.

So now that he’s about to complete a special two-year program at Pierce College, what’s worrying the Woodland Hills resident? Finding a university where a student with a 9-to-5 job can complete a four-year bachelor’s degree without going into serious debt.

Although private schools have made a big business out of running pricey but reliable night and weekend degree programs for working adults, similar offerings remain almost nonexistent at California’s public universities, leaving the cost-conscious in a bind.

“It’s very frustrating. There is basically one choice--private--and that’s expensive,” said Goldblatt, a sales manager who would like to finish a business degree at his local public university, Cal State Northridge. But the school, like others, still doesn’t offer a bachelor’s program geared to people with full-time day jobs.

Only one of the nine University of California campuses and two of the 21 Cal State University schools have such programs. But officials at CSUN, hit by the Northridge earthquake and dwindling enrollments, now say their campus may start a pilot business program by next spring.

If it does, the program could be modeled after the popular Project for Adult College Education (PACE) offered at several nearby two-year community colleges. Under the PACE schedule, working adults can complete lower-division work required by universities in 2 1/2 years by attending just one night a week and alternate Saturdays.

The proposal for a similar CSUN program is still under discussion.

William Hosek, dean of CSUN’s School of Business Administration and Economics, said students can now obtain a business degree at CSUN solely by taking traditional night classes. And he noted that the school has promised to increase the number of night courses offered.

But he conceded that night school students who want to make steady progress toward a degree must keep Monday through Thursday nights available every semester for enrollment in any courses that might arise. That is just one flaw cited by potential students in the present scheduling system.

So Hosek said he supports the concept of also creating a special business degree program scheduled specifically for working adults. Private schools have moved faster, Cal State officials said, because they can raise money for new programs through tuition, whereas Cal State’s funding is relatively fixed.

Thus, private colleges have been able to plumb the burgeoning older-student market more easily than public schools.

“Older students were once considered ‘non-traditional,’ but this is no longer an accurate characterization,” a U.S. Department of Education study concluded earlier this year. The study said students 25 and older now make up almost half of higher-education enrollments.

Older students like Goldblatt say they need flexible class schedules that accommodate their family and work obligations yet don’t take so long to complete that they might be tempted to drop out along the way.

“Basically the trend is to be more user-friendly. And it’s amazing how many public universities haven’t caught on to that. It’s a new world out there,” said David Stewart, an author and expert on adult education who just retired as an administrator with the American Council on Education.

“Universities are facing a great challenge in the next four to five years,” added Drew Allbritten, executive director of the American Assn. for Adult and Continuing Education. “How do they deliver information in a way that’s meaningful to people?”

All of the UC and Cal State schools have long offered a range of night classes. But in the rising enrollment period of the late 1980s, full-time working students enrolled in traditional campus programs often found evening classes filled. And in more recent years, lack of money has meant the schools couldn’t offer such courses consistently.

That has made obtaining a degree through a public university’s night classes a risky proposition, many students say. And that difficulty in turn helped create the demand for growing numbers of private university night programs.

Isabelle Prewitt, 28, of Reseda, who is in the PACE program at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, is another example of someone caught in the dilemma.

“My first choice would be to attend CSUN. But if I had to do that today, I don’t think I would be able to,” she said, citing its class scheduling.

Prewitt, a customer relations representative who missed college earlier to raise a family, said she likes Pepperdine University’s night business degree program in Encino. But at a cost of about $18,000 a year, she said, “The price tag is almost unreachable for the everyday person.”

In and around the San Fernando Valley, Pepperdine and at least six other accredited private institutions offer night and weekend degree programs geared specifically to full-time workers. But Pepperdine’s yearly tuition, for example, is about five times that of Cal State Northridge.

Most of the private programs allow students with prior college credit to complete a business major, the most popular, in one to three years, typically by attending two nights a week. Tuition usually ranges from $6,000 to $12,000 a year.

For employees whose companies offer tuition reimbursement, the private schools can be an attractive option. But Goldblatt doesn’t have that job benefit, and he is already facing more than $35,000 in debt from his wife’s classes at Pepperdine. So he has to choose a cheaper public school.

For now, that choice is pretty slim: a night liberal arts degree that Cal State Dominguez Hills offers through several locations, including Mission College in Sylmar, or a humanities degree at UC Santa Barbara’s Ventura center. Cal State Hayward has the only other state university program.

A degree program at Cal State Northridge would clearly be welcome by a built-in market of graduates from the Valley’s two-year colleges. The 700 PACE students at Pierce and Mission colleges, as they graduate, would provide an immediate boost to enrollments at Cal State Northridge, which hit a 24-year low of 23,600 students in the spring.

Some wonder why the public universities didn’t make their move toward the older student sooner.

“I think to some extent the Cal State system has been afraid of serving adult, non-conventional students,” said David Heifetz, director of the Dominguez Hills adult program. “People think, ‘If they had been good students, they would have been like me and graduated at age 21.’ ”

But students such as Prewitt and Goldblatt, who spent his traditional college-age years as a B-52 flight engineer in the Vietnam War, are more common than they used to be. Nationwide in 1993, only about 22% of all people 25 and older had bachelor’s degrees. And that percentage was an all-time high.

Older students have also proven themselves to be more focused than younger ones, educators say.

“Because they have all these other things going on in their lives, they’re very dedicated and very motivated,” said Carlotta Tronto, dean of academic affairs at Mission College.

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Non-Traditional Degree Programs

The following accredited universities offer non-traditional degree programs at night for working adults in and around the San Fernando Valley. UC Santa Barbara’s Ventura program is the only one offered by a nearby public university. Cal State Northridge (not listed) offers general night courses, but no specific night degree program yet.

Cal Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks

Degrees: Accounting, business administration, computer information systems and computer science.

Annual tuition: $12,800.

National University, Sherman Oaks center

Degrees: Behavioral science, business administration, computer science, interdisciplinary studies.

Annual tuition: $8,340.

Pepperdine University, Encino center

Degree: Management.

Annual tuition: $18,000.

University of La Verne, Burbank center

Degrees: Business and health services management.

Annual tuition: $7,520.