Colleges Hope Revived Off-Campus Courses Will Increase Enrollment

Hoping to boost enrollment to ensure their state funding, Ventura County’s community colleges are pinning their future on past successes with plans to revive off-campus courses at sites from Ojai to Newbury Park.

The programs--many of which were axed during budget cuts in the early 1990s--are aimed at recapturing lost students before the state reduces funding to the district.

The district has until 1998 to regain the equivalent of 1,000 full-time students lost during a four-year enrollment slump, or it stands to lose $2.1 million in state funds.

Although one trustee has questioned how the district would pay rent on all the new sites, Chancellor Philip Westin told the board this week that there was no other path to financial stability.

Estimating the cost of the expanded programs at $750,000, Westin said: “Our choice is fairly simple. We either generate the students and find $750,000 to do so or we lose $2.1 million if we don’t.”

The total district budget is $62.4 million through June 30, the end of the school year.

Trustee Timothy Hirschberg dismissed concerns over the price of reviving and expanding old programs.

“We can get most of these classrooms for nominal fees in terms of rents, so I don’t see any added expenses,” he said. “The cost will be more than offset.” And college presidents said they were confident that when they return to the board next month with estimated figures for their plans, the plans will be approved.

Ventura College President Larry Calderon announced the most ambitious goals at Tuesday’s meeting, telling trustees that his college could attract the equivalent of 150 full-time students by this fall with 70 new courses.

Calderon’s plan includes reviving classes once offered in Ojai through local schools and expanding course offerings at the college’s Santa Paula Vocational Center.

In addition to reopening its Camarillo satellite campus, Oxnard College suggested it could launch an initiative to teach advanced placement classes at Oxnard and Rio Mesa high schools for college credit.

Although the high school students would not pay fees, their attendance would count toward the college’s enrollment, said Ruth Hemming, interim president of the college.

“They get the opportunity to begin a college career and we get the opportunity to teach things the high schools cannot afford to teach,” she said.

Plans at Moorpark College include reinstituting evening classes in general education topics at Newbury Park High School and adding similar courses at Westlake and Simi Valley high schools.

The college hopes to attract the equivalent of 132 full-time students with about 40 new off-campus courses this fall, said President Jim Walker. This would be the same as about 525 part-time students each taking one, three-unit course.

In addition to expanding their outreach efforts, each of the three colleges says it would add an extra summer session in the period between the end of the spring semester and the regular start of summer classes. In the case of Ventura College, it would be a four-week session.

Ventura College plans to put two trailers on campus to create four new classrooms to accommodate the anticipated swell of students taking the new courses in the fall.

At Moorpark College, students would see the return of electives, such as computer skills and conversational language classes in Spanish, French, Italian and Japanese.

These courses, which usually attract many students who already have bachelor’s degrees, were cut when the state raised the tuition for four-year degree holders from $6 per unit to $50 in 1993.

The added premium expired this semester--tuition is now $13 per unit for all students--and the classes are back in demand, said Darlene Pacheco, Moorpark College’s vice president of instruction.

Already, enrollment districtwide has risen 5.8% this semester--the first increase in four years.

And though the district still has a long way to go to recapture all the students it lost during its slump, officials are confident they are off to a good start.

“The colleges have done very well,” said Harry Culotta, the district’s budget director. “We are well on the way to restoring the [level of students] that we need to avoid losing money.”