Chancellor's Column

Chancellor Gallego was invited to address a California State University enrollment management task force in Los Angeles earlier this year. These are excerpts from his remarks.

Thank you for the opportunity to express my views on California State University enrollment management, particularly as it relates to the impact on community college students in San Diego County.

One of the most important issues for community college students is the need for a predictable, longer-term policy on admission to San Diego State University. The policy should cover at least three to four years to allow students to plan their education, and for counselors to be able to articulate a consistent plan. To do anything short of that would be chaotic and frustrating for students and parents.

As you are well aware—and as the San Diego Union-Tribune reported—aside from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, no campus in the CSU system turned down a CSU-eligible student until San Diego State started doing so last year. As a matter of fairness and equity, I believe the people who live in the San Diego region ought to have the same access to their local CSU campus as those who live in Los Angeles, San Francisco and communities throughout California. If San Francisco residents attending their local community colleges are able to transfer to San Francisco State with a 2.0 GPA, then residents of San Diego and Imperial counties should be able to transfer from their local community colleges to SDSU with the same GPA.

We need to have an admissions policy for transfers that can be applied countywide. The current San Diego State admissions policy has different requirements for community college students from different colleges within the county. In one case, the policy even has different requirements for students within the same college district.

The closest CSU campus to all three of the SDCCD colleges is San Diego State. Yet Miramar students are expected to meet different, higher performance levels and requirements for admission to SDSU than students from the other colleges, unless they can substantiate a hardship that would prevent them from attending CSU San Marcos. At the very least, the transfer admissions standards should be the same for all colleges within a district.

In support of the university’s enrollment management efforts, [we] strongly support community colleges as the primary vehicle for remediation. However, this should not happen at the expense of our primary functions of university transfer, workforce training and economic development.

In fact, an enrollment management approach would be to have the universities reduce the number of lower division students and expand upper division. Community colleges could take on an expanded role for lower division while the universities concentrate on what they do best: upper division and research. This change would help ensure that CSU- and UC-eligible students can be accommodated at their nearest public university.

The current master plan for higher education provides transfer opportunities for community college students who maintain at least a 2.0 GPA and complete 56 transferable units. We would like to have that policy continue, but with a minor modification. We propose for San Diego and Imperial counties that students must complete 60 transferable units and maintain at least a 2.0 GPA.

We believe that increasing the transfer units to a total of 60 will help ensure that transfer students who do not complete a four-year degree program–whether for financial, family or other personal reasons–will at least have an associate degree to improve their employment opportunities.

Finally, both the CSU and University of California should include in outreach efforts the promotion of community colleges as excellent vehicles for admission to public universities.

We need to expand transfer agreements and minimize the complexities of articulation in both course and program. This will help ensure that community colleges will in fact be a vital part of the three-system effort to improve access to higher education and the completion of a four-year degree.