Faculty Senate addresses growing campus population

Andres De Leon

The Sacramento State Faculty Senate discussed the spring 2015 university student enrollment at its weekly meeting Thursday.

As of February 20, there are a total of 27,696 students enrolled. Just over 2,500 students are undergraduates and about 2,600 students are graduate students. The statistics are based on the college year, which started summer 2014 and ended this spring semester.

The majority of enrolled students are California residents.

Ed Mills, vice president for Student Academic Affairs said the 2014-2015 annualized resident target count for full-time enrolled students was 22,085. President Alexander Gonzalez allowed Sac State to exceed that target by 4 percent.

Mills said Sac State is trending to be a desired campus in terms of transfer students wanting to enroll.

“We continue to be a very desirable campus in the CSU,” Mills said. “Even though in the last four or five years the number of high school graduates have had a little bit of a dip. Of transfer students, 62 percent of them came from outside the area.”

Many of the transfer students wanting to attend Sac State are from Southern California. Colleges from that area have surpassed the amount of students they can handle, resulting in difficulty for students to get classes.

“Some of the CSUs in the south have outgrown really quickly in the last few years: Northridge or Fullerton, Northridge over 38,000 students this year,” Mills said. “You might guess that their class sections and faculty and classrooms didn’t grow that fast. So students down there are struggling to get courses, and transfer students especially have begun shopping CSUs to see where there appears to be more opportunity for them, and we are getting tremendous interest, especially from Southern California and in the Bay Area, from transfers students.”

However, that does not mean that students who live in the Sacramento area are missing out on an education at Sac State.

“When you look at in area, we don’t have anybody in the waiting list in the area,” Mills said. “If they meet the minimum standards, we admit them.”

During the open forum, the Information Resource and Technology Center announced that it would be offering a $55,000 to $110,000 position for a computer refresh technician.

Faculty Senate member Jeff Dym questioned why a technician position is being offered when faculty are still in need of computers.

“IRT currently has a job advertised for $55,000 to $110,000 for a computer refresh technician,” Dym said. “At $55,000, the lowest rate for this salary, that’s 55 computers or electronics that are not being distributed.”

Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Jim Prince spoke about the concern.

“Computer refresh was actually an idea that originated in Academic Affairs,” Prince said. “Academic Affairs is funding the refresh IRT is consolidating, and it has taken far longer than we wished.”

Prince said Academic Affairs is moving forward with the computer refresh program and that the the department will put $1,000 towards new machines on average, per college.