Tightening eligibility requirements would allow CSUs to meet promise of providing education

The California State University’s recently announced admissions policy of letting in nonresident students while freezing in-state admission raises concerns about the direction taken by the CSU system in the wake of financial cutbacks.

For spring 2013, the CSU system will deny admission to all California residents except those who have received an Associate Degree for Transfer at a community college, and only allow enrollment for undergraduate programs at 10 of its 23 campuses.

At the same time, however, the university will allow nonresidents to enroll on a regular basis, causing some to question the logic of a state institution imposing a penalty on Californians because of their residency.

But perhaps the root of the problem lies in the university’s founding documents, which commit it to promising admission to a greater number of California students than it can afford to enroll.

If the university were to even slightly tighten the qualifications for resident admissions, it could more permanently ensure its financial stability and its service to the state.

According to the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, the California State University system was intended to serve California students who graduated in the top third of their high school class.

That policy now guarantees a spot at a CSU to any applicant with a 3.0 grade point average, or a GPA above 2.0 with a corresponding minimum SAT score.

With the California taxpayer subsidizing student tuition, the idea was that all qualified Californians should have access to the university.

Since the 2008 recession, however, cuts to state funding have increasingly hindered the university’s fulfillment of this promise.

Within the last few years, the university has been forced to save money through measures that include increasing class sizes, neglecting maintenance and laying off administrative personnel, said Erik Fallis, a CSU spokesman.

But, even before the recession, the CSU system had more full-time students than the state had the capacity to fund. In the 2008-09 academic year, 357,223 full-time students were enrolled in the system, about 42,000 more than it was financially capable of supporting.

Though the number of full-time students has since fallen to around 340,000 in 2011-12, available funding has decreased even more quickly, to the point where, for the past school year, there were about 65,000 more students enrolled than the university’s revenue could ideally support.

That the university could not limit admissions and push enrollment to a more financially sustainable range has forced the administration into a catch-22 decision: either make unsustainable cuts to its infrastructure or freeze in-state admissions.

Letting in out-of-state students while blocking in-state enrollment could free up enough university revenue to subsidize the infrastructure available to in-state students, said Sylvia Hurtado, a professor and director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.

And yet, in spring 2011, only 1,330 out-of-state students enrolled in the entire CSU system.

If these numbers indicate anything, the additional $372 per unit each out-of-state student pays wouldn’t cover the $1.6 billion university shortfall for in-state educational costs.

With the state poised to cut another $250 million worth of funding from the CSU should Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax initiative fail in the November elections, it only seems wise for the CSU system to re-evaluate the number of students it admits.

The CSU was intended to have a lax admissions policy compared to the UC, and if it were to decide to limit admissions to only the top 30 or 27 percent of high school students, it could remain accessible while enabling for sustainable enrollment levels to be potentially reached within a decade.

Though the admit rate at a more specialized campus like Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is already at a competitive 32 percent, admission rates at major campuses like CSU Northridge and San Francisco State are in the 60 to 75 percent range. A slight reduction in the number of eligible students would reduce but not seriously restrict access to these campuses.

In fact, by reducing its total pool of eligible students (who can personally designate which campus to apply to), the university might be able to accept the top 30 percent or so students.

Likewise, a restrained admissions policy will not necessarily lead to less ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in the student body. When the state spends less money subsidizing tuition, it has more to spare on Cal Grants and other need-dependent forms of financial aid.

Most importantly, by instituting lasting change, the university would make good on the Master Plan for Higher Education promise to provide educational and professional training for the benefit of the state of California.

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