Cal State San Marcos is moving toward establishing a fourth academic division that would concentrate on health, and, within three years, offer a degree in nursing, a field that university officials say needs more skilled practitioners.

The expansion is detailed in the university's so-called academic blueprint, which outlines the direction of the university through the academic year 2010-11, when about 5,000 students are expected to increase the current enrollment to around 13,000.

Said David Barsky, one of the 11 members of the blueprint committee and an academic affairs official, "It (the blueprint) basically tells us where we're going.

"The thing that's exciting to me about this," said Barsky, "is that there seems to be general buy-in. ... We've reached the point where it's time to enter another exciting growth period."

The blueprint projects that nearly half the students on campus in 2010 will be majoring in new programs outlined in the plan, which calls for offering a master's degree in nursing as part of the new division, tentatively dubbed the College of Health and Human Services.

Additionally, the new college would offer undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work, physical therapy and, along with the College of Business Administration, a four-year degree in health-care management.

In 2004, the blueprint calls for adding undergraduate majors in mass media, biochemistry, physical education and kinesiology, as well as a master's program in education that focuses on middle school students, those in grades six through eight.

New concentrations in speech therapy, biotechnology and computer information systems are to begin in 2005, according to the blueprint, and in 2006, the plan calls for adding majors in history, philosophy and environmental science.

The blueprint won the unanimous endorsement last month of the Academic Senate, the body that governs teachers. While it has been evolving slowly, the blueprint got a boost when Provost Robert Sheath joined the university two years ago as the chief academic officer.

"You might say," Sheath said Wednesday, "that this is the major phase of our planning."

In interviews Wednesday, officials said the blueprint, though the product of at least a dozen drafts and compromises among competing interests on the campus, has gained consensus. They also said it will continue to be reviewed as a kind of "living document."

Much of it still requires approval from the board of trustees of the 23-campus CSU system and, as San Marcos' Sheath said, efforts to raise money to fill gaps left by the state funding.

Among majors to be added in the next four years would be physical therapy, arts and technology, child development and music. New master's degrees would include public administration, a combined biochemistry and biotechnology, human development and physical therapy.