Cal State Campus Halfway to Goal

Three months before the official opening of Cal State Channel Islands, Ventura County’s first four-year public college has admitted half the students it needs to fill its inaugural classes and is ramping up efforts to attract more.

Because not all the students who are admitted will ultimately attend the school, CSUCI is actually further from meeting its enrollment target than the number of acceptance letters suggests, an official said. If Channel Islands enrolls 70% of the students it admits, a figure that is fairly typical for a Cal State campus, that means it has so far filled only about 260 of the available slots, said Greg Sawyer, vice president for student affairs.

“There is no doubt that we are not where we want to be at this point,” said Sawyer, who likened the situation to a track meet. “The runner to watch isn’t the first one to get the baton, but the one who closes the distance during the last leg of the race.”

Although CSUCI is not scheduled to welcome its first freshmen until fall 2003, 372 upper-division students--the vast majority of them transfers from the county’s three community colleges--have been accepted for next term. The new university is set up to accommodate 750 students this fall, said Linda MacMichael, director of admissions and records.

According to Sawyer, Channel Islands faculty and staff members will hold recruitment drives at the community colleges and local shopping malls. The university is also running ads in movie theaters throughout Ventura and Santa Barbara counties to remind prospective enrollees that the campus is getting off the ground, he said.

“As an institution, we are hitting it and we are hitting it hard,” he said. “We are trying to sell a vision, and sometimes it’s hard to sell a new idea.”

University officials also will open a phone bank Monday in an effort to retain students who have expressed interest in CSUCI. Both students who have already been admitted and another 360 or so who applied but are missing transcripts or other vital information will be called and given orientation information and offers of help, Sawyer said.

He said the phone center and the recruitment drives could help the university reel in some eligible students who may be assuming it is too late to apply for the fall. The application deadline has already passed for some other Cal State campuses, including Cal State Northridge and Cal State Long Beach, and Channel Islands has asked those schools to refer any disappointed callers its way.

Nearly 97% of the students who have been accepted by Channel Islands would be transfers from community colleges: about 175 from Ventura College, about 125 from Moorpark College and about 60 from Oxnard College, MacMichael said.

Olivia Menchaca, who directs the transfer center at Oxnard College, said the new university may be having trouble attracting students because it is still offering only eight majors plus a teaching credential program. Menchaca said she recently counseled a student who was interested in attending Channel Islands because it was close to home, but decided against it because the school will not initially offer an accounting program.

“I think students are excited they are going to have a new campus in their backyard, but it may not be meeting their needs right now,” she said. “It’s just going to take some time for our new state campus to blossom.”

Asneth Cota, director of Ventura College’s transfer center, said outreach events such as an “instant admissions day” that Channel Islands plans to host at Ventura College on May 28 could pay off. “Some of these kids may have applied elsewhere and gotten turned down, so we’ll be reaching them at a very good time,” she said.

Sawyer said that until recently Channel Islands did not have the staff to do extensive outreach. He dismissed the notion that the new university is getting a late start in its recruitment efforts. The kind of students Channel Islands hopes to attract--community college transfers and nontraditional students such as working mothers--often do not decide on the next step in their academic careers until late spring or summer, he said.

“The very traditional way of recruiting, where everyone puts on the gas real quick at the beginning of the year, doesn’t work when students are making those kinds of decisions later on,” he said, adding that there is no possibility that classes will be reduced. “If we maintain the kind of progress we have had over the last two weeks, we will be at our numbers [by the fall] or very, very close.”

The experience of Cal State Monterey Bay, which opened in 1995, could be useful in gauging what will happen to Channel Islands. During its first semester in operation, Monterey Bay had an enrollment of 654. By its second year, it enrolled 1,256 students.

In any event, the first crop of Channel Islands students will remain outnumbered on their 670-acre campus by about 1,500 Cal State Northridge students who are attending CSUN’s Ventura County satellite school. That situation is expected to change in the next few years as Northridge phases out its course offerings, said Dan Wakelee, associate director of admissions at CSUN’s Channel Islands site.

For the fall semester, for example, CSUN stopped admitting new students in its most popular majors--business, liberal studies and teaching credential programs--since Channel Islands will be offering them. In all, Northridge expects to admit about 140 to 150 new students to its Channel Islands satellite in the fall, Wakelee said.

In the meantime, Channel Islands is using its low enrollment as a marketing tool. In a message to prospective students on its Web site (www.csuci.edu), the school is touted as feeling “like a private university, with smaller class sizes and accessible faculty.”