College Crowd Finding Campuses Jammed

UCLA freshmen are being shoehorned three to a dorm room built for two, San Diego State has turned away thousands of qualified students, and community college students are clawing their way into overcrowded classes they need.

With enrollments rising for the fifth straight year, these are just the early signs of a tidal wave of 714,750 additional students expected to land on California’s public college and university campuses by 2010, according to an official forecast to be released today.

“Enrollments are actually growing faster than we predicted,” said Warren Fox, executive director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission. “That’s because of the booming economy and more students are taking college prep courses than ever before.”

The last time the state faced such a surge of students was in the 1960s, when the baby boom generation was heading off to college. Now, it’s the boomers’ children, though things are different.

Unlike the first wave, Latinos will make up the largest proportion--38%--of the new enrollment demand, the commission reports. White students, by comparison, will make up 29% of this growth, Asian Americans 24% and African Americans 6%.

In another departure from the past, California’s public colleges and universities report they are sorely unprepared to absorb this 36% surge in enrollment, from just under 2 million in the fall of 1998 to more than 2.7 million in 2010. That raises fears among college educators that California may no longer keep its 40-year promise to provide a college education to all high school graduates who seek one.

“It’s going to be difficult to accommodate all of these students,” said Richard C. Atkinson, president of the nine-campus University of California. “It’ll take a lot of funding from the state, the cooperation of our faculty and still be a strain on our campuses.”

The California Citizens Commission on Higher Education will hold a “Summit on Tidal Wave II” in Sacramento on Wednesday, the culmination of a three-year campaign to persuade state lawmakers of “the coming crisis in higher education.”

The theme of such sessions is familiar: The state needs to get busy, and quickly. The legislative analyst’s office, meanwhile, tries to deflate such forecasts as a hyped ploy for more tax dollars.

But Fox points out that his commission, the state’s principal planning agency for higher education, was, if anything, too conservative in its last forecast--issued in 1994. Given that more students are signing up for classes than anticipated, Fox no longer thinks there will be a wave of merely 445,000 extra students by 2005. Now he projects it will reach 569,000 extra students by 2005 and 714,750 by 2010.

To provide classrooms for all these students, Fox said, the state needs to spend about $1.5 billion each year over the next decade for renovation and new construction. Instead, the state is spending less than half that: about $600 million a year through 2002. After that, the money from the last bond issue runs out.

California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed is pushing for his 22-campus system to switch to year-round operations to help provide classes for a projected 42% increase, or 117,000 undergraduate students.

“There isn’t going to be any other way to service this many students,” he said. “We’re talking about adding 12,000 students a year, every year. That’s like adding a complete new university a year for the next 10 years.”

He points out that San Diego State had to turn away “several thousand qualified students” because it simply couldn’t handle any more. Cal State Long Beach is nearing capacity, but the system has some newer campuses, at San Marcos, Monterey Bay and Channel Islands near Camarillo, that have plenty of room for expansion.

The University of California plans to open a campus near Merced. But that campus will be able to handle only about 5,000 of the 50,750 additional undergraduates expected to enter the university by 2010.

Most of the growth will have to take place at UC’s campuses at Riverside, San Diego, Irvine and to some extent Santa Cruz, said Sandra Smith, assistant vice president for planning.

“UCLA is pretty maxed out,” she said. So is UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Barbara faces constraints by its sensitive location and the California Coastal Commission.

But the campuses with smaller growth potential will have to do more “on the margins,” she said, such as holding more classes during the summer and at off-campus centers. Furthermore, Smith said, UC hopes to encourage more students to spend their junior year abroad to free up space domestically.

The commission projects that an additional 18,131 graduate students will enroll in UC and Cal State programs.

The bulk of the tidal wave, 529,000, will end up at California’s 107 community colleges. These colleges do not turn away students as do four-year universities. The choke point comes during registration, when some students get classes they want and others find all the classes already full.

Community college Chancellor Thomas J. Nussbaum says the system will have to become more creative as the student population rises: more summer school offerings, turning high schools into de facto college campuses after hours, and arranging for other off-campus centers to hold classes in the evenings and on weekends.

If students are not accommodated, Nussbaum fears consequences greater than disappointed students. “The impact of any failure is huge in a multiracial state,” he said recently. “Disproportionately, this will have an effect on people of color.”

Moreover, he believes that a college education provides more than job skills; it teaches young adults about participating in a democracy, and greater tolerance for other people and differing views.

“If these kids don’t have a place to go, I worry about the glue that holds our society together,” Nussbaum said. “You will get more gangs and crime and intolerance and hate.”

Economists worry about the impact on the California economy should these students not get a college education.

Rand Corp., the Santa Monica-based public policy institute, recently urged state leaders to spend an extra $9 billion a year to increase the college graduation rates of blacks and Latinos to the rates exhibited by whites and Asian Americans.

For every dollar invested in such a program, concluded the Rand study titled “Closing the Education Gap,” California would make $1.90 through a combination of extra taxes from higher skilled workers and reduced costs of welfare and the criminal justice system.

The Legislature this year gave Cal State an extra $14 million and UC an extra $34 million to reach into the public schools and groom underprivileged students for college.

The commission’s enrollment projections have been adjusted for such outreach programs, Fox said, figuring that they will begin to show a significant difference by 2008.

“That’s why we assume slight increases among Latinos going to college,” he said. “There will still be underrepresentation [at the university] of Latinos and African Americans, but less. It’s a tidal wave of students of color.”

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Tsunami of Students

Higher education experts forecast that a tidal wave of 714,750 extra students will crash through the gates of California’s community colleges and public universities over the next decade. State officials aren’t sure how they can live up to California’s long-standing promise of providing a college education to everyone who seeks one.

Estimated fall enrollment at California colleges and universities, in millions

1998: 1,998,374*

2010: 2,713,127

*Actual number

Note: Figures include undergraduate and graduate students.

Source: California Postsecondary Education Commission