Blitz is on for college recruits
Sacramento Bee 2/14/07
It was more than a friendly gesture. They called by the hundreds, one of nine rounds of phone calls that the student workers in telemarketer headsets will make four days a week to applicants and future students throughout the year.
"We know everybody's looking at other schools -- and they're blunt about it," said Kylie Webb, 22, a senior.
Webb is one of 10 "student ambassadors" who place the nudging phone calls, lead campus tours, answer e-mails from prospective students and blog about the school on the Sacramento State Web site.
It's part of a ramped up recruitment effort, along with an advertising blitz and larger presence at college fairs across California, to boost a campus enrollment of 28,000 -- and accompanying state money.
Demographic researchers say the high school-age population in California is flattening, which concerns public schools relying on the state's booming population to keep the funds flowing. California's kindergarten-12 enrollment growth peaked in 1990 at nearly 4 percent, the highest rate since the 1960s.
The state Department of Finance is projecting an average annual increase of 0.2 percent over the next decade.
Sacramento State now finds itself competing with local private universities, in which students can get the classes they want and their degrees quicker, and with the University of California, Davis, that is targeting local qualified students.
University Provost Joe Sheley, who is in charge of untangling a stagnating campus budget, said the school was "just fine with being relatively passive" in terms of drumming up students. They would simply "come through the doors," he said.
But Sheley said the applicant pool of local high school and community college students can't be taken for granted any longer.
In 2014, the college-age population of 18- to 24-year olds -- around 3.7 million today -- will begin declining, according to projections by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.
"The tidal wave's over," said LAO budget expert Steve Boilard, referring to a surging college population in the late 1990s that was expected to overwhelm the state's universities. It turned out to be more of a modest bulge, Boilard said.
Students need a C average to get into California State University, Sacramento. Those students are now being targeted more energetically by fellow CSU schools in Chico, Fresno, San Jose, Sonoma and San Francisco.
There's continued pressure from expanding satellite campuses of the University of Phoenix, Chapman University and National University -- more expensive private schools that can promise a faster degree, especially in high-demand programs such as education and nursing.
UC Davis, which has more selective admission requirements, is casting a wider net and captured a record-breaking freshman class this year.
"A good hunk of them or a good percentage would have come here, but they now flow to the UCs because they're ... aggressively going after them," said Sheley, who got a bachelor's degree from Sacramento State in 1969.
In the past year, the university began buying radio ads on rock stations from Redding to Stockton. The school is sponsoring links on Google and Yahoo search pages, and is advertising on Facebook and MySpace.
"Obviously, any kid who's talking about going to college is into that, and if we aren't, we're way behind," Sheley said. "It isn't a fad -- it's a serious issue for us."
The LAO's Boilard said more students might bring more money, but also bring a bigger workload for faculty.
"The fact that there is this enrollment chase suggests," Boilard said, "that schools can add students without much cost and therefore pocket the difference."
Some Sacramento State faculty members suggest that the administration's focus is misplaced, saying the university should invest in offering more classes to attract -- and keep -- students instead of recruiting more of them.
Getting a degree in four years is a rarity at a California State University. Only 61 percent of students who maintained a full-time courseload in their first, second and third years graduated within five years from a CSU school, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. At the University of California, 89 percent of full-time students graduated within five years.
"This advertising for recruiting students is nonsense," said Sylvia Navari, a social work professor for more than 20 years. "If students can't get their classes, they're going to drop out. ... They can get through a Phoenix and a National much more quickly. Sac State at this particular point in time cannot deliver the classes the students need."
The expanding University of Phoenix has more than 40 campuses in California and gets about 8 percent of all community college transfer students. About 13 percent head to UC. CSU still gets 54 percent of them.
National University and Chapman University, with more than 20 campuses each in California, also are seeing the state's community college students head there instead of the public university systems.
The private schools say they're not competing as much as they are offering an alternative to working adults with more night and weekend classes.
"The availability of our classes is much greater than a state school, particularly Sac State," said Mary Emery-Sherman, associate regional dean of National University in Sacramento. "If a student needs to go through a program quickly because they have a job waiting on the other end, they'll come here."