Students Face Harsh Reality of Budget Cuts : Education: CSUN’s class crunch is more severe than ever, with some waiting lists growing longer than class rosters. The fall semester began last week.

Adding to the normal confusion marking the first week of school at Cal State Northridge was a sense of panic among students who discovered that “crashing” needed courses was going to be next to impossible.

“I’ve been trying to add econ, English, something; I’ve only got one class so far,” Shannon Sebastian, a Granada Hills sophomore and pre-business major, said early last week. “But they’re all full, and the waiting lists have 25 to 30 people.”

For many courses, the number of students on waiting lists was larger than the number already enrolled. Most instructors gave what few openings they had to students closest to graduation and others did not bother with waiting lists at all, frustrated with state budget cuts that have prompted CSUN officials to cancel 843 of 5,780 classes scheduled for the fall semester.

But while CSUN’s class crunch is more severe than in past years, it is not new. It has become, in fact, a complex problem that is now as much a part of campus life as book bags and cram sessions.

Even before the current round of 8.8% state cuts to higher education, CSUN was criticized for failing to meet demand for required courses.

That is because enrollment at CSUN has remained about the same while the number of course offerings has been reduced due to budget cuts. Even with the school’s new computerized telephone registration system, students who cannot get classes before the semester begins must still scramble to find instructors who will add them to course rosters.

An enrollment decline of about 4% for this fall semester has provided little relief from the 15% cut in the number of fall classes. The result has been the tightest squeeze ever for students.

Adding a Catch-22 element to the problem is the fact that large reductions in the number of students at CSUN would trigger even further budget reductions, since the school’s share from the state is based on enrollment.

Before the problem can be solved, CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz said the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson must decide whether the California State University system can continue to carry out its mission of quality, affordable education while continuing to cut funding for the 20-campus system.

“The debate will be over the numbers of students versus the quality of education,” Munitz said Friday. “But there is a point at which the quality issue renders the access issue hypocritical. It’s like saying everybody in the country gets a car, but they have no wheels.”

At CSUN, those discussions are already being held informally among faculty members and administrators.

“There are critical decisions to be made about what our priorities are, about what students we should accept, whether our primary responsibility is to transfer students with AA degrees or incoming freshman,” said Don Cameron, CSUN executive assistant to the vice president for academic affairs.

In the spring semester, for the first time, the campus will only admit transfer students who have completed their general education requirements. No freshmen will be admitted until next fall.

But those steps will probably not be enough to solve the overcrowding problem at CSUN.

“There has to be a fundamental downsizing if the resources are not there,” said Carolyn Ellner, dean of the School of Education. “But it can’t be done in two weeks or two months as the Legislature has done. We have to make plans and do it in a sensible way.”

A series of extraordinary measures--including borrowing money from spring semester budgets, early retirements and volunteer instructors--have allowed for greater numbers of students to get classes and have forestalled layoffs of tenured and tenure-track instructors.

But many worry about what will happen in the spring and in coming years.

“When you face what you believe is a temporary crisis, you can crank it up to 115% of capacity,” said William Hosek, dean of the School of Business Administration and Economics. “But you can’t do it for the long run.”

In past years, the class crunch was similar but not as severe.

An evaluation team from the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges in its February, 1991, report noted that 30% of CSUN students who file for graduation do not complete their requirements in the semester they had planned to finish.

The association’s report warned that CSUN jeopardizes its academic reputation “when hundreds of students are turned away each semester from general education courses. . . . Although students may eventually be admitted to such courses, their progress toward educational goals can be set back by rejection for several semesters from needed or desired courses.”

That much is apparent to business major Greg Eckhardt, 19, who said in frustration last week: “It was a lot easier to get classes a year ago.”

Illustrating Eckhardt’s problems is the fact that 2,502 of 2,529 seats in fall undergraduate economics classes were filled through telephone registration five days before classes began. The remaining 27 seats--now long gone--were scattered among two upper-division classes in macroeconomic theory and labor economics.

In management science last week, 135 students signed waiting lists for 10 classes that hold 350, department chairman Richard Gunther said. That means 38% more students want a seat than are available, compared with unmet demand of about 14% last year, department records show.

“It’s going to delay graduation for a lot of people,” Gunther said.

The story is about the same in every academic department on campus.

“A lot of people have been asking for refunds because they couldn’t get any classes,” said Rafael Gonzalez, the clerk at CSUN’s refund window. “Some are pretty upset about it.”

Teachers do not have it so easy, either. Faculty members are in most cases teaching larger numbers of students or additional classes.

Philip Handler, dean of CSUN’s School of the Arts, said his academic departments have surpassed enrollment limits.

“We are at 104% of our enrollment target, and we did that by moving a couple of classes to the theater and with faculty volunteering to teach more students,” Handler said. “But it can’t go on indefinitely.”

Pleas from students to enroll in overbooked classes prompted some instructors to follow their hearts rather than the rules.

“I’m teaching a humanities class with a maximum enrollment of 27 but they’ve enrolled 35 and I added 18 more,” said Louise Lewis, CSUN’s faculty president. “That’s about double the number it’s supposed to be.”

Philosophy instructor and local teachers union president Will Forthman said, “I take on students who must graduate because I just don’t have the heart to say, ‘Wait another semester.’ ”

Besides taking in more students, at least 12 of CSUN’s $60,000-a-year-and-up professors who are planning to retire this year have volunteered to teach fall classes for free to help the school survive its current budget woes.

But Forthman and others warn that despite such heroic efforts, the overcrowding at CSUN should not be allowed to continue. They say that if voters do not want increases in the share of taxes to state universities, then fewer students should be allowed to enroll.

“One problem of always adding more water is that the soup gets thinner and thinner before people are aware of it, just as declining quality in education is not always apparent,” Forthman said. “But not letting students enroll is very visible, and it says to taxpayers, ‘Look, you have to decide what to do because it is very expensive to educate people.’ ”

The difference in quality becomes evident as instructors assign fewer writing assignments or complicated problem-solving assignments, and discussion seminars of a dozen students are converted into larger lecture courses.

Most on campus say they hope that incoming president Blenda J. Wilson, who begins work Tuesday, will strive quickly to solve campus overcrowding problems. She may decide, for example, to eliminate some courses of study, change graduation requirements or continue to shrink admissions.

But many faculty and administrators, such as music department chairman Jerry Luedders, say they strongly oppose reducing the numbers of students who are eligible for a public university education.

“The largest single impact of the state budget is the continuing movement to limit education, and most of my colleagues are concerned about student access,” Luedders said. “But at some point you run out of options, if for no other reason than you are out of chairs.”