The Undergraduate Studies program has taken on the task of reducing the number of first time freshmen by declaring impaction.
CSUN, along with many other CSU’s, are enforcing new eligibility requirements for high school graduates who wish to come to CSUN for the Fall 2011 semester.
“Impacting means we have too many students so we’re going to put in rules to make the class smaller,” said Dr. Cynthia Rawitch, associate vice president of undergraduate studies.
Rawitch said the main reason for implementing impaction is that there are a very large number of freshmen in California and the budget that CSUN is given is too small to serve them all.
“We did it this fall,” Rawitch said. “It was all in an attempt to control the size of the freshman class. We (CSUN) had 5,196 freshmen for Fall 2010.”
Rawitch added CSUN is instating new measures to get that number to about 4,200 students for next fall, which would be about 1,000 fewer students than this semester.
“It only applies to freshmen,” Rawitch said. “We never have and I assume we will continue to never impact transfer students.”
She said they will impact the freshman class again next fall with a new system to ease the large numbers.
“For Fall 2011, the freshmen who live in the primary catchment we call tier one, which is primarily most of Los Angeles Unified School District and the districts that are attached to it,” Rawitch said.
The administration has put in place a new index system that uses a formula to calculate a number that is a combination of a student’s GPA with their test scores on the SAT and ACT, Rawitch said.
She added that students who are in one of those schools will have the basic requirements for admission, such as an index standing of at least 2,900. She said these students would have priority.
“Tier two is everybody else,” Rawitch said. “These have greater requirements since the index for this tier is 3,200.”
Rawitch said that if the students’ index is at least 3,200, CSUN will rank order and then will determine how many tier two students they can admit after serving tier one.
“Many of the campuses are doing this,” she said. “Some of them did this last year, this rank ordering. Many have the tier one and tier two as we do. But we looked at tier two and said if you have a certain GPA we’ll admit you, but now we’re saying if you have a certain index we’ll consider you but we’re only admitting as many as we can handle.”
Rawitch said impaction would help higher class levels because there would be fewer freshmen coming in and as a result more classes for the current and transfer students.
Michele Miano, 23, said she has seen major overcrowding that could be alleviated.
“The classes fill up very fast,” said the senior child and adolescent development major. “Faster than I would like and usually I get a later registration date since freshmen get priority registration.”
Miano said there are times when in addition to the wait list there are an additional six or seven people still trying to get into her classes.
“Every class I’ve had people are wanting to get in or trying to crash the class. Some get in, some don’t,” Miano said.
Junior Guillermo Quevedo, 33, said although they are lowering the number of students admitted, he believes current students will not see a difference for a couple years.
“In the long run it will help,” said the biology major. “But it will take a good three or four semesters for you to actually see it. I don’t expect any immediate change anytime soon.”
Quevedo said having main priority for local students would not be fair.
“It should be open to anybody in relation to them wanting to come to the university because it would diversify the university as far as having different ethnic cultures,” Quevedo said.
