[ Golden Gater Online - October 23, 1997 ]
Andreas Tzortzis
Staff writer
A newly enforced policy designed to slow the flow of transfer students into the California State University system is having little effect at SF State, faculty and administrators say.
The mandate was enacted in 1989 but was not enforced until this semester. It requires upper-division students transferring from community colleges and other schools into the CSU system to complete basic English and math requirements before they are admitted, according to Leroy Morishita, executive director of Budget Planning and Resource Management. Next year, it will require students transferring from community colleges to complete four lower-division requirements: math, English, critical thinking, and speech.
But while the policy may have reduced the number of students transferring to SF State, it has not made it any easier for students who are already here to get into the highly impacted general-education English and quantitative reasoning courses.
"We wish," said Jo Keroes, acting chair of the English department. Keroes estimated that, on average, English classes admit five students more than the university allows to occupy each classroom.
"There is a huge backlog already. We have very old people who started here when they were very young," she said.
SF State began enforcing the policy this year after the CSU Board of Trustees demanded it, according to Morishita. But Keroes thinks the system might be using it in an effort to stave off Tidal Wave II, the massive student enrollment increase expected at the turn of the century.
"There is a pressure to streamline things," she said. "It's a way of coping with this new wave of students."
Morishita said the enforcement isn't an effort to transform CSU campuses into four-year
rather than two-year transfer schools, nor is it meant to dispel the view of SF State as a
commuter school.
However, a 1996 report by the Commission on University Strategic Planning, SF State's plan for the next century, recommends that more first-year students be recruited in order to "increase the size of the lower student population and maintain an effective balance of native and transfer students."
Carl Jew, a transfer student and coordinator at the City College of San Francisco, says his campus has never ignored the policy. And Keith McAllister, chair of the math department, estimated that nearly 1000 students come to SF State from City College every year, and almost all of them adhered to the mandate.
"The (transfer) counselors have been teaching according to the policy," Jew said.
McAllister said the school has added five sections in the math department to ensure there are enough classes for students to complete their requirements.
"We don't object to (SF) State doing it," he said. "It makes sense to enforce the policy, otherwise don't have it."
But some community college students were taking advantage of the lack of enforcement, according to Jew.
"They were finding that they could get in without the required English and math classes," said Jew. "They had a loophole."
Loophole or not, Morishita doesn't expect the policy to slow down business in SF State's math and English departments. The lower number of transfer students will help the math and English departments deal with the backlog they're experiencing, he said, but won't last long.
"We're looking at a one- or two-year hiatus (from large numbers of student transfers)," Morishita said. "But at the end of that, we will probably have more than we did in the fall of 1996."
[ Golden Gater - October 23, 1997 ]