Despite a steady increase in undergraduate enrollment at CSUN, undergraduate class sizes still remain relatively small, with 58 percent of undergraduate lecture courses enrolling 15 to 49 students, according to the Office of Institutional Research.
“(The university) takes pride in the amount of contact between faculty and students in class and during office hours,” said Cynthia Rawitch, associate vice president of undergraduate studies.
With more than 33,000 students enrolled in the Fall 2005 semester, CSUN ranks as the third-largest CSU, behind the Fullerton and Long Beach campuses respectively, according to the California State University Web site.
The average undergraduate class sizes at CSUN have been equivalent to the average class sizes at other large-population campuses, said Bettina Huber, director of Institutional Research.
Approximately 22,000 of the students enrolled in Fall 2005 were full-time equivalent students seeking an undergraduate degree, according to the Office of Institutional Research.
“The largest UC campus is larger than the largest CSU campus,” Rawitch said. “As a whole, there are more students enrolled in the CSU system. Our classes are much smaller.”
UCLA had approximately 24,000 full-time equivalent students enrolled in Fall 2005, said Lauren Bartlett of UCLA’s Office of Analysis and Information Management.
Class size remains one of the top qualities CSUN has to offer prospective students, with the average undergraduate class size at 30 students, said Cynthia Martinez, recruiter and financial aid representative for Student Outreach and Recruitment Services.
“(Class size) is a question that always comes up when I give a high school presentation,” Martinez said. “Students always want to know if they’ll be sitting in an auditorium and I tell them for the most part, no.”
Martinez, who received a bachelor’s degree in health science at CSUN, said she could only recall having two classes with 50 students during her entire undergraduate career.
“I had classes with 10 to 15 students,” Martinez said.
Ninety-one percent of undergraduate classes offered at CSUN are lecture courses and only 2 percent of these types of courses have more than 100 students enrolled, Huber said.
Rawitch said one reason CSUN has smaller class sizes is that the university has a limited amount of space to hold larger groups of students.
“There is no physical room to make (class sizes) bigger,” Rawitch said, adding that larger classrooms have a maximum number of lecture hours that can be taught per week.
The Noski and Johnson auditoriums are the only large lecture halls that CSUN has to house more than 100 students at a time.
