Enrollments Keep Rising at Colleges

Enrollments are up at California’s public colleges for the third straight year, the result of a rebounding economy and the demographic phenomenon dubbed “Tidal Wave II,” in which the children of baby boomers are entering the ranks of higher education.

Although the increases appear modest on paper--4.3% in community colleges, 4% at Cal State campuses, and only 1% for the elite University of California--administrators are scrambling to accommodate the influx by building parking lots and shuffling offices to open up classroom space.

Early figures show that in community colleges--the traditional point of entry for immigrants and first-in-the-family college students--more than 60,000 more students have enrolled this fall than last fall.

Even with such rising numbers, however, enrollments are still below the levels of the early 1990s, when a lack of state education dollars and packed classrooms led some students to sue because they couldn’t get the courses they needed or graduate within four years. Then fees went up, the economy soured and the number of students plummeted.

But enrollments now continue to increase at each of the three public systems that are designed to offer a higher education to any Californian who wants one. Applications at many private universities are also up, some at record highs.

Although several factors are at work--from a healthy economy to two years of tuition freezes at the public institutions--one reason stands out for its potential long-term ramifications.

“This is the beginning of Tidal Wave II,” said CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz, the state’s most persistent voice of warning on the topic. “Pick your metaphor: the tip of the iceberg, the first line on the graph. And we’re bursting at the seams now on many of our campuses.”

At some schools there isn’t enough money to hire enough professors to teach enough classes to accommodate all the new students.

At Cal State Northridge, a commuter school that in the past has had difficulty filling campus housing, the fall semester began with 135 students on a waiting list.

Finding a parking place at Cal State Northridge--an often exasperating task since the 1994 Northridge earthquake devastated the campus--is more difficult than ever, returning students say.

At Cal State San Marcos, where this fall’s 4,647 students represent a 10% increase over last year, many classrooms are booked from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., and many support services offices have been moved off campus.

At Cal State San Diego, officials may take the controversial step of limiting next fall’s enrollment by retooling an application process that has remained largely unchanged for more than three decades. Changes could include raising minimum test scores and giving preference to local applicants.

“We’re extremely aware of the delicateness of this,” said San Diego spokesman Rick Moore. “We’re very, very carefully and gingerly experimenting with the process.”

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Under California’s Master Plan for Higher Education, adopted in 1960, the top 12.5% of high school graduates have been eligible for admission to the research-focused UC schools, the top 33.3% for the teaching schools of Cal State. Everyone else is guaranteed a spot in the community college system.

“California has put its entire higher education system in a mode where anybody who wants to can get in,” Moore said. “And we’re coming to a time where that may no longer be possible.”

Although Cal State officials are worried about the higher numbers, there is still room to grow at some of the newer campuses, including the recently built Monterey Bay. And another campus, Cal State Channel Islands, is proposed for Camarillo.

It is the community colleges, some observers say, that face the most difficulty adapting.

In the Los Angeles Community College District, the largest community college district in the country, eight of the district’s nine campuses are under orders to eliminate budget deficits, forcing them to cut courses, limit library hours and trim other programs.

Meanwhile, the students keep coming--preliminary figures show that fall enrollments are 9% higher than last year, a remarkable increase under almost any circumstances, officials say. But the growth comes even as the state is enjoying a healthy economy, a condition that historically has caused many community college students to leave the classroom for the workplace.

The University of California is shouldering the least burden. And that will probably continue because it is the most expensive and exclusive of the public systems--and thus accepts the fewest students.

Two UC campuses, Riverside and Santa Cruz, are several thousand students short of capacity--Riverside in large part because the city’s reputation as a hot, smoggy place to live has caused students to put it at the bottom of their list of preferred campuses, and Santa Cruz because it has offered an alternative-style education, UC spokesman Terry Colvin said.

With a 10th campus planned for the Merced area, “our current projections show us being able to accommodate all [qualified] students who want to attend the University of California well into the early part of the next century,” Colvin said.

While educators agree that a primary reason for rising enrollments is the coming of age of the “grandchildren of GIs,” as they were dubbed by former UC Chancellor Clark Kerr--who also coined the phrase “Tidal Wave II”--they say it is not the sole cause. California’s rebounding economy is playing a pivotal role.

A strong marketplace often drives down community college enrollments, but it typically boosts numbers at four-year schools, where fewer students work and more attend classes full-time. All three California systems are enjoying their second straight year of robust budgets. At the same time, tuition has been frozen.

Another reason for the increase, observers say, is that so many students were forced out of state colleges during the recession and dramatic tuition increases of the early ‘90s--a drop of 22,000 students occurred in the Cal State system alone between 1992 and 1993. Now a natural rebound is occurring.

“One would expect enrollments to be rising, partly because of Tidal Wave II, and partly because of . . . artificially depressed enrollments [of the early ‘90s],” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank based in San Jose.

California’s private universities also seem to be feeling the early effects of Tidal Wave II. But they also may be getting students who once might have attended the state’s public colleges, at least before those campuses were hit with the crunch of the early ‘90s.

“Families who would have once only looked at public schools are now looking at privates,” said Joseph Allen, dean of administration and finance at USC, who spent two decades with the UC system. “I think that has to do with cost--with the kind of aggressive financial aid packages the privates are offering--and the availability of classes, the ability to graduate in four years.”

A record 21,000 students applied for this fall’s 2,800 freshman slots at USC, Allen said. The year before, 16,000 applied for about the same number of openings.

Pepperdine had 4,509 applicants for this fall’s 703 openings, contrasted with 3,796 the year before.

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At Stanford University, Chelsea Clinton was among the 16,842 applicants--500 more than the year before--for 1,660 openings.

Of course, private schools can dictate how many students they’ll actually admit. In the public sector, a school such as Cal State Northridge found itself enrolling more students than it was budgeted for last fall--forcing officials to reshuffle spending plans and start looking for new revenues.

“There isn’t enough money to go around no matter how good the economy is,” said Munitz, who is stepping down this winter to take over the Getty Trust. Either the public needs to reconsider the property tax-limiting Proposition 13 “or they have to rethink the balance between K-12, higher education, health and welfare, and corrections. [And] I have seen no evidence in the past couple of years that that is going to happen.”

California is not the only state affected by the coming of age of the baby boomers’ babies. It is among 23 states--mostly the so-called “growth states” of the West and Southwest--that are expected to have 30% or more high school graduates over the next decade, according to the National Education Assn.

But in the case of California, the figure is 54%.

Said Christine Maitland of the National Education Assn.: “As usual, California is especially hard-hit.”