Jason Nguyen, an economics junior at MiraCosta Community College,was planning to apply for spring admission at San Diego State.
Now, he will have to wait.
A new admissions plan has virtually closed off spring enrollmentexcept to a small group of specific students. In an effort to controlenrollment influxes, this new policy now limits spring admission onlyto in-service upper-division transfer students and upper-divisionnursing majors in the state.
“This policy is very unfair for students like myself,” Nguyensaid. “I’m forced to waste an entire semester when I could be takingclasses at San Diego State.”
This new policy would limit spring admission almost exclusively tolocal upper-division students from colleges such as GrossmontCommunity College and Mesa Community College.
Nursing majors were included because of a statewide shortage inCalifornia.
Students from out-of-service community colleges, including Palomarand MiraCosta, will be allowed to apply for spring admission if theirmajor is not offered at CSU San Marcos.
These two campuses were considered local schools until SDSU passedanother enrollment policy at the beginning of this semester thatrestricts the campus’ service area to below State Route 56. Studentsat these schools now fall under San Marcos’ service area.
Now, students in the San Marcos area planning to apply to SDSU forany semester will be denied and will have the option of re-directingtheir application to San Marcos without paying another fee.
Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs Ethan Singer saidthis policy would deny about 1,000 spring applicants but would allowan increase in fall admission by about 3,000 students. Last springsemester about 2,200 students were admitted into the university. Themajority of spring applicants are upper-division transfer students.
Singer said the enrollment policy was necessary to keep theadmission criteria for non-local students within reason. Otherwise,admission standards would have to be drastically raised beyond whatthe university wanted.
“Our outer-service area admission criteria has been graduallyincreasing, and we wanted to stay on that trend line and not have aspike in that,” Singer said.
In addition, the policy would prevent the university from severelylimiting Fall 2002 enrollment, Singer said.
To apply, students must have completed all their general educationrequirements and preparation for their major by Fall 2002. Studentsmust also have a total of 56 transferable units completed by the endof this summer. Local students must have a minimum grade-pointaverage of 2.0.
Transfer students must also get a “C” or better in their fourgeneral education requirements: oral communication, writtencommunication, critical thinking and quantitative reasoning by theend of Summer 2002.
Nguyen said the policy would be more fair if the university hadgiven a year’s notice so students could better prepare.
SDSU’s decision to eradicate spring enrollment made some waves oncampus. When Singer approached the University Senate about thedecision last month, several senators were angry that the governingbody of faculty, staff and students had not been contacted to giveits opinion on the change.
Since the decision needed to be made, the Senate held a specialmeeting to vote on the policy. It did not reach quorum at thatmeeting and no official opinion was given to the university beforethe decision was made.
