Year-round semesters a go

By Ryan May
Daily Forty-Niner

Year-round schooling is set to begin this summer at Cal State Long Beach in an attempt to distribute the total number of students by offering a third semester, said Ken Swisher, a spokesman for the Chancellor's Office.

The California State University Board of Trustees met last week to discuss year-round schooling and other methods of accommodating an influx of students expected within the next 10 years.

"We have evidence that there's a lot of students out there that, if given the opportunity to take more courses in the summer at the same cost, they would," Swisher said.

Some students said they were in favor of going to school year-round in order to graduate early. However, others said they would definitely not take classes year-round due to work schedules, financial situation or simply needing time off.
 
"I use my summers to recoup from hardcore studying," said Kelly Clark, a senior in microbiology. "By the time May comes around, I'm half dead. I need the break."

With the cost of summer classes nearly two to three times that of the fall or spring, Swisher said the state government has now begun to support students wishing to take courses during the summer.

"We need to provide incentives, not disincentives, for students to go in the summer," Swisher said. "The idea is eventually ... to have the summer look like the fall and the spring."

To help absorb the cost of adding an additional semester, the CSU system has received nearly $20 million from the state legislature, money that will be become a part of the regular operating budget in years to follow.

"We're going to have about 130,000 additional students coming into our system over the next 10 years," Swisher said. "Even if we had the money to build new buildings to accommodate them, we couldn't build them fast enough so we've got to use our existing resources better and the main way to do that is to move towards year-round operations."

There are currently about 370,000 students spread over the system's 23 campuses. With the children of the baby-boomer generation now of college age, a study released through the Chancellor's Office is reporting an expected jump in enrollment to nearly half a million by 2010.  Additionally, the report also cited a higher number of high school students attending college as a causal factor in the increase.

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