CSUN University News Clippings

Budget cuts to hit hard at Sacramento State

(July 24, 2009)

By Laurel Rosenhall

Students at Sacramento State – and those who aspire to study there – will see impacts of the current budget crisis play out over the next two years.

The first thing students likely will notice is the bill: Beginning this fall, fees will be 32 percent higher than they were a year ago. California State University trustees approved a fee hike for all schools in the 23-campus system Tuesday – the second increase they’ve voted for this year.

In the spring, class sizes at California State University, Sacramento, will go up, course sections will be cut, and most new students will be turned away.

The campus will not admit about 2,000 students who would normally enroll for the first time in the spring – most of them transfer students from the nearby Los Rios community colleges, said Ed Mills, associate vice president for student affairs.

Sacramento State is making exceptions for about 300 students who will be allowed to enroll for the first time next spring, he said. They include nursing- and teaching-credential students, as well as about 150 community college transfers to whom the university had already promised admission.

By the 2010-11 school year, CSUS will be a smaller school, shrinking to 26,000 students from the 29,000 it now serves.

It’s all fallout from the state’s fiscal crisis. Facing a $584 million deficit, the California State University system is raising fees, trimming spending, asking employees to take furloughs and reducing enrollment by 40,000 over the next two years.

CSUS President Alexander Gonzalez said he’s still trying to figure out exactly how much his campus will have to cut, but he estimated it will be about 11 percent to 12 percent from its $250 million budget.

That’s assuming CSU employee labor unions agree to a two-day-a-month furlough, he said.

The system’s largest union, the California Faculty Association, is expected to announce today how its members voted on the furlough question.

“If the faculty vote not to take the furlough, then that changes the situation entirely,” Gonzalez said.

The second-largest union, the CSU Employees Union, announced on Monday that it had reached an agreement with the university to take furloughs two days a month for one year.

Campus officials have begun planning how a furlough might work at CSUS. David Wagner, vice president for human resources, said it would probably be a combination of closing the campus on some days and allowing workers to choose some floating furlough days.

He is looking at shutting the campus down for certain days that already have no classes, such as the day after Thanksgiving and the Fridays before a couple of Monday holidays.

“We’re really trying to disrupt the services to students as little as possible,” Wagner said.

The difficult part will be figuring out how to furlough professors who teach five days a week, he said.

Sheree Meyer, chairwoman of the English department, said classes have grown in the last few years – those that were at 25 students are now at 30, while classes that once had 40 students now have 45 or 50.

That means more work for professors who have to grade tests and read papers for the additional students.

With the current budget cuts, Meyer said she expects class sizes to grow even larger in the spring semester, making the idea of a furlough hard for many professors to swallow.

“Their number of students increases at the same time they’re told to reduce their work 10 percent on the basis of furlough,” Meyer said.

Joseph Sheley, provost and vice president for academic affairs, said the schedule for the fall won’t change much, but students should expect larger classes and fewer course offerings come spring.

CSUS doesn’t have many large classrooms – only three rooms accommodate more than 100 students, Sheley said. So as classes get bigger because of budget cuts, the campus will probably offer more courses online.

Internet education doesn’t cost less, Sheley said, “but it frees up space.”

“We’ve been moving in that direction already and I think it will continue,” he said.

Publication: Sacramento Bee