Admissions change more popular after five years
North County Times 2/4/07
The San Marcos campus is growing more rapidly than ever in its 17-year history, while officials at the San Diego campus said they are now able to manage growth more effectively.
At the time, critics said the new rules were unfair to North County students seeking the full-blown university experience available on the San Diego campus. But the rapid evolution of the San Marcos campus has made those complaints less persuasive, local officials said.
In January 2002, San Diego State had a booming social life with more than 30,000 students, on-campus housing, a wide variety of bachelor's degrees and a big-time athletics program. Cal State San Marcos, with only 6,000 students, had none of those things.
Since then enrollment has climbed past 9,000 students on the San Marcos campus, a 600-bed dorm complex opened in 2003 and the number of bachelor's degrees and athletic teams has sharply increased.
"People are now understanding that San Marcos has more to offer than it did when the line was drawn," said Mary Jennings-Smith, director of transfer and articulation programs at MiraCosta College in Oceanside. "As San Marcos adds more majors, the difference between the campuses will get even smaller."
Adjusting to change
Tim Hernandez, a longtime counselor at Palomar College in San Marcos, said the impact caused by the admissions boundary has been smaller than expected. He also said students are now well aware of the rules, and realize they will need better grades if they prefer the campus in San Diego over the one in San Marcos.
Jennings-Smith said the new policy initially created the impression among students that San Diego was a far superior campus because it was being selective and San Marcos was not.
"As soon as the two schools divided the county up, it had kind of a halo effect for San Diego State," she said. "But I think that is slowly changing."
Jim Blackburn, who works at the headquarters of the 23-campus California State University system in Long Beach, said system officials are happy with the results of the policy, which designates North County as the service area of the San Marcos campus and the rest of the county as the service area for the San Diego campus.
"The fact that San Marcos is growing and becoming more comprehensive has made this work," said Blackburn, the system's associate director for enrollment management. "People were angry at first like they are with any change, but the overall impact has been quite positive."
Officials from San Diego State, however, acknowledged last week that there are still many people who wish there was no admissions boundary at Highway 56.
Setting the bar
Admissions criteria for Cal State campuses are based on a complicated formula that combines grades and SAT scores into an aggregate total. A high school student's grade point average in college preparatory classes is multiplied by 800, and then added to their SAT score.
To be admitted to the San Diego campus, students living south of Highway 56 need a total of 2,900, which is the minimum admission threshold for all campuses in the Cal State system.
Since January 2002, students living elsewhere in the state, including North County, must have a total of 3,680 to be admitted to the San Diego campus.
For example, a North County student with a 3.0 grade point average and an 1,100 on the SAT would have been admitted before January 2002 thanks to an aggregate score of 3,500. Now that student falls below the bar.
In a typical year, the rule means rejection letters for about 300 North County students who would have met San Diego State's admissions criteria before January 2002, said Ethan Singer, associate vice president for academic affairs on the San Diego campus.
The San Diego campus still admits between 1,100 and 1,200 high school students from North County each year, said Singer. But about 20 percent of the 1,400 to 1,500 North County applicants are rejected because they meet the minimum Cal State requirements, but not those for the San Diego campus.
Singer said the change almost definitely affects significantly more students than 300, explaining that many students who would have been admitted under the old rules choose not to apply because they do not meet the new criteria. Singer declined to estimate how many students fall into this category.
Transfers also affected
The San Diego campus also raised the admissions bar for students transferring from Palomar and MiraCosta, the only two community colleges in North County.
The grade point average for those students increased from the 2.0 minimum used throughout the system, up to somewhere between 2.6 and 2.9 depending on the major chosen and other factors.
But the impact appears to have been negligible on the number of students from Palomar and MiraCosta transferring to the San Diego campus each year.
The number of transfers from Palomar, which hovered around 140 in the years before the new rules, have remained in that vicinity since the change. Similarly, transfers from MiraCosta, which has 12,000 students compared to Palomar's 31,000, have remained about 45 per year from 1999 through 2006.
One factor that has reduced the impact on transfers is an exception that allows North County students to get accepted to San Diego State with lower admissions criteria if the major they seek is not offered on the San Marcos campus, said Singer.
But Jennings-Smith, the transfer center director at MiraCosta, said there has been some controversy about what academic programs on the San Marcos campus amount to full-blown majors, and which amount simply to a few classes in the subject.
"I have asked them to revisit that agreement," she said.
Growing a campus
Many of the North County students who now fall below the admissions threshold at the San Diego campus end up choosing to attend the San Marcos campus, according to university system officials.
"It probably helped us build momentum, and it certainly didn't hurt," said Darren Bush, associate vice president for enrollment management services on the San Marcos campus. "But it's hard to say the size of the impact, because no one knows how many students came here specifically because of the change."
Bush also explained that much of the recent enrollment on the San Marcos campus, which has experienced a 23 percent increase in the past three years, has been the result of recruiting efforts in Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
Less than 40 percent of the freshmen applicants for fall 2007 are from San Diego County, said Bush.
"We're not relying just on the local area for our growth any more," said Bush. "Within our region, there are not enough students to fill our schools."
As enrollment on the San Marcos campus climbed from 5,739 in fall 1999 up to 8,734 in fall 2006, the percentage of students from North County remained relatively steady.
Students from North County made up about 51 percent of the campus in fall 2004 and 2005, but they fell between 46 percent and 48 percent every other year.
A better student body
While San Diego State has continued to grow despite the new rules, Singer said, much of that new growth is the result of sharply increased graduation and retention rates that he attributes to the higher admissions standards.
"San Diego State has become very academically competitive because of better student preparation," said Singer. "We want students to come into the university who are prepared to succeed."
A key part of that change is the result of a 1999 decision to hold students from outside the county to admissions standards higher than the system minimum, Singer said. Those same standards were applied to students north of Highway 56 three years later.
"We have the best remediation rates in the entire system," said Singer.
Blackburn, the enrollment official in Long Beach, said that system policy allowing campuses to set higher admissions criteria could yield similar benefits for the San Marcos campus in the long run.
San Marcos officials have said they will likely establish admissions criteria sometime before the campus reaches a projected 25,000 students two decades from now.
If San Marcos ends up being just as selective as San Diego, or even more selective, future students in North County might consider the Highway 56 boundary a significant advantage because they will still be held to the lower standards for admission at the San Marcos campus, Blackburn said.
"Twenty years from now, I doubt anyone will know about this issue," he said.