To Reduce Enrollment, Cal State Northridge Makes Admission Tougher

Cal State Northridge today proposed a 1 percent reduction in the entering undergraduate classes for each of the next four years.

Stricter academic standards for non-local incoming freshmen, undergraduate transfer students and graduate students were put forth by the school today. About 300 students per year would be turned away, the university’s Carmen Ramos Chandler told City News Service.

The increased burden would make test scores, transcripts and other admission criteria harder for students outside the school’s local service area, mostly the San Fernando Valley, and for local students seeking to major in popular subjects.

Those subjects are kinesiology, music, psychology and cinema and television arts. CSUN President Dianne F. Harrison called the reduction “impaction.”

“We are seeking to use impaction as an enrollment management tool carefully and judicially,” Harrison said. It would start in 2016, if approved by the California State University Board of Trustees..

Enrollment at the school has grown from 35,198 in 2009 to over 40,000 this year. The statewide CSU system is undergoing similar growing pains, and a CSUN spokeswoman said Northridge is one of the last of the statewide system to implement enrollment restrictions.

A legal notice published by the school, and obtained today by CNS, shows that the university seeks to grant enrollment preferences to students in its local area. CSUN would allow students from that local area to enter CSUN under existing admission criteria.

However, in-state students from outside the local area would face tougher standards.

The local area would include students in the districts served by 17 community college districts, including the high schools served by those colleges.

CSUN also proposes to trim some high schools from its local service area, including those in the Alhambra and South Pasadena school districts and the East District of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Those schools are in the Cal State Los Angeles local area, and traditionally we have looked the other way” in the admission process, Chandler told City News Service. “The enrollment changes means we can no longer do that.”

Ventura County students would be directed to Cal State Channel Islands.

The university scheduled three public hearings to take comment on the plan:

-- 6-7 p.m. March 5 at the CSUN campus, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge;

-- 6-7 p.m. March 9 at Glendale Community College, 1500 N. Verdugo Road; and

-- 6-7 p.m. March 11 at Moorpark College, 7075 Campus Road, Moorpark.

A fourth meeting will be held March 10 at a location to be determined, Chandler said.

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