California colleges grapple with drop in enrollment

might call it a college crisis a drop in enrollment Statewide the California State University system is trying to figure out how to boost enrollment after years of declining numbers CSU the largest public university system in the country says they've seen a 6 and a half% drop in the number of new enrollments since 2019 so that amounts to a little less than 28,000 fewer students Over The Last 5 Years with the three Bay Area campus is among the most affected SF state has 20% less students than the

y had in 2019 followed by Cal State East Bay which has 24 and a half% fewer and somoma which has seen 34% fewer students enrolled compared to prepandemic levels so do Lynch spoke to some students and faculty at some of those schools today about this trend to find out what's being done to try to reverse it you Fridays are typically slow at Cal State tpay but students say it wasn't always like this prior to the pandemic everything the campus at least looked a lot more alive it's just gone so down

to where on dead days like it's there's barely anyone here senior Jennifer Perfecto remembers a full and spirited campus when she was a freshman in the fall of 2019 now a study by the campaign for college opportunity shows her university has lost a quarter of its student body roughly 3,000 students since 2019 I'm from Southern California so there's a lot of more students that were coming in from different areas um in California to populate the school but now looking at it it's just really people

who are local so a lot of people from Southern California or like from further counties they're just not wanting to come here anymore researchers say that's a part of the pandemic effects students choosing to study closer to home also Educators say with the high cost of living in the Bay Area and a robust economy more students are leaving higher education to enter the workforce there is a national Trend there are less positive perceptions of higher education now than have been in the past Kathy

sandan is the president of Cal State East Bay she says the enrollment declines Force many Cal State universities to cut classes and lay off faculty members even though we're uh offering fewer sections overall at our University we're offering those that our students are most likely to need when they need them we have five to 6,000 fewer students we need fewer classes and so we have reduced our schedule of classes considerably to align with the students that we're currently enrolling San Francisc

o State University president Lyn Mahoney says to reverse the trend they're marketing to younger students about their campus and the importance of higher education we're really starting in the middle schools now before you get to that high school someone with a college degree is going to earn more in a lifetime Jennifer agreed she'll graduate with a bachelor's degree in May I'm excited um I think overall with the experience that I've had here and with the coures I was able to take I feel pretty g

ood about going into a field that I want to go in Advocates say one way to entice young people to come back is to make it cheaper and easier to attend these institutions now Cal State East Bay is cautiously optimistic about its future the president here says they're already seeing more applications for fall 2024 it's not just CSU that's seen a drop in enrollment since the pandemic the state's community colleges are actually seeing a much bigger drop off in both the total number of students and p

ercentage of their overall student body all right as we said in total the CSU system has about 28,000 fewer students this year with the state's community colleges seeing an even bigger drop of more than 277,000 less and while they have a larger student body in total than CSU the percentage of that loss is still nearly double the percentage of the state system okay so then get this as for the University of California system they've actually seen a 3% increase in the number of students during that

time