CSUN Forced to Turn Away Spring-Semester Applicants

Faced with a ballooning student enrollment, Cal State Northridge and four sister campuses have stopped accepting undergraduate admissions applications for the spring semester--barely a month into the fall term.

Education experts speculate the surprise increase in enrollment springs from an improving state economy and the second straight year that fees have been frozen at Cal State University campuses.

“CSU, over the period when its enrollments declined [in the early 1990s], increased its tuition about 100%. And that was at a time of recession,” said Patrick Callan, executive director of the nonprofit California Higher Education Policy Center. “We’re naturally seeing some rebounds in enrollment.”

While hailed by educators, the rebound in student demand has caught the schools off guard. As many as 2,000 students could be turned away from Cal State Northridge for the spring semester, campus officials said. Usually, applications for spring enrollment are accepted until January.

“We’re doing this because we have too many students and too little money,” CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson said. “We’re trying to maintain a quality program and not go back to the time in the late 1980s when students couldn’t get classes” because of record-high enrollments.

Fearing that advance warning of the cutoff would provoke a last-minute stampede on the admissions counter, CSUN officials announced Tuesday they had quit taking applications the night before.

Students whose applications are postmarked later than Oct. 14 will receive a letter saying the university is closed to new students. They will automatically be considered for admission next fall.

The application period for graduate students seeking admission for the spring semester remains open.

The rekindled demand comes two years after CSUN officials saw a spectacular drop in enrollment after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. By 1995, Cal State tuition had doubled to about $1,600 a year.

CSUN officials battling the image of a campus in ruins undertook an ambitious recruitment campaign. They did not expect to have enrollment return to pre-earthquake levels for several years, so they hired faculty and scheduled classrooms accordingly.

Instead, student enrollment this fall surpassed the figures just before the earthquake--the equivalent of 19,562 full-time students. Several thousand more actually attend the campus, some as part-time students.

Fall enrollment is above projections made during campus budget sessions last spring, but still below CSUN’s all-time high of 31,575, reached in 1988.

Even with the early halt to spring semester admissions, university officials expect to serve at least 300 more full-time students than they had initially planned.

“What we tried to do was look at short-term disappointment versus long-term disappointment,” said Ron Kopita, CSUN vice president for student affairs. “When the university was at 31,000 and the school didn’t have resources to serve 31,000, the papers were filled with stories of students who were complaining that they were unable to get their classes, who had to stand in long lines, who were unable to get services outside the classroom. We are determined not to let that happen again.”

Four other Cal State University schools--Humboldt, Monterey Bay, San Diego and San Luis Obispo--experienced similar leaps in enrollment this fall. All four schools stopped accepting applications for spring semester admission two weeks ago.

Cal State schools are expected to see continued growth in the number of students for the next several years, said Colleen Bentley-Adler of the Cal State University chancellor’s office.

By the turn of the century, the largest influx of students since the baby boom--a group dubbed Tidal Wave II by educators--will begin college.