Enrollment Boom Taxes Community Colleges

Monday was the first day of class at the county’s three community colleges, and enrollment that increased to about 26,000 students meant bigger headaches than usual, including closed classes and parking crunches.

About 10,600 students descended upon Moorpark College for the first day of classes Monday, turning the neighborhood into an extension of the campus parking lot.

Many students spent a good deal of time searching for a parking space. Some parked as far as a mile from campus.

“I was late to my first class,” said second-year student Brian Siegel. He drove through every student parking lot on campus--twice--before heading into a neighborhood where one resident let him park on his property.

Rachel Wasserman, a second-year student, said the parking problem will probably last for three weeks, because students tend to arrive on campus at the same time. As some students switch to night classes, drop certain classes, or drop out of school altogether, on-campus space will become more available.

“[Now] you have to park really far away,” Wasserman said.

Enrollment figures from last Friday, the most recent available, show 25,984 full- and part-time students enrolled in Ventura County’s three community colleges. Moorpark has 10,904 students, while Ventura has 9,762 and Oxnard 5,318. Overall enrollment at the three colleges is up more than 2% from last year’s 25,415 students, said district spokeswoman Barbara Buttner.

Buttner said the high number of students at Moorpark reflects steady growth in the area. While swelling numbers--and the state money that comes with each weekly log of full-time student hours--make administrators gleeful, the popularity of the schools can sometimes be a real pain.

With shortages in general subjects, many students at the colleges discovered they will have to take night classes or wait until next semester.

Adam Finley, a first-year Moorpark College student, will have to take English from 7 to 10 p.m. each Tuesday, along with his schedule of day classes.

“My schedule is messed up,” he said. “It’s going to be annoying after awhile.”

“I only got into two classes, speech and math,” said Moorpark College student Jennifer Morris of Thousand Oaks. “Everything else is closed.”

When she tried registering by phone at the end of July, a taped recording announced the English and sociology classes she wanted to take were closed. She tried about six other classes, such as psychology and philosophy, to no avail.

“My mom was freaking out,” she said. “She had wanted me to go to a four-year school anyway. When she found out I was only taking two classes this semester, she called Pt. Loma Nazarene College [in San Diego] and Southern California College [in Costa Mesa] to see if they would take me. They said I could still get in.”

In the meantime, she is still maneuvering to remain at Moorpark. She has dropped notes in professors’ mailboxes, promising to work hard if they let her in class.

Mike Scotto of Thousand Oaks had similar frustrations. He said he punched in every English class on the Moorpark College phone system registration line. Nothing worked. Everything was full.

Scotto did get into one psychology class and one film class, but they’re both at night.

“It’s disappointing when you hear your friends saying they’ll meet each other in class the next day and I’m like, ‘Has anybody got a class at night?’ ” he said, adding that he’ll probably deliver pizzas during the day.

Sid Adler, Moorpark’s dean of humanities, said class closings follow a pattern.

“Enrollment soars in the fall, so classes close,” he said. “And then it dips back down in the spring, sometimes so low that we have to cancel classes altogether. It’s a balancing act.”

It’s a trade-off, according to Eva Conrad, Moorpark College’s new executive vice president of student learning. If students want good instruction with small classes, she says, they have to pay the price. At a four-year school, students often sit in a class of several hundred, as opposed to 30 or 40 at a county community college, Conrad said.

Students may be able to solve their problems by waiting out the storm and taking their desired classes another year, another semester or on a Saturday, she said.

“They should sit with [an academic] counselor and lay out a total road map,” Conrad said. “There are more doors open if they just work on their overall education plan.”

Students also are encouraged to “crash” the courses they want to take--as Jennifer Morris plans to do--during the first weeks of school, even if they are listed as full. Like airlines, more people reserve spots in courses than actually take them.

Liberal arts majors aren’t the only ones in a bind.

Oxnard College’s new dental hygiene program is full, said instructor Peggy Newville. Out of a lottery pool of 50 applicants this year, the program’s 18 slots were snatched up fast, and there’s no waiting list. The next time people can apply is between January and March for the following year.

Luckily, math and science classes still were available at Ventura College, where the state invested $12.4 million in a new three-level, 60,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art facility.

The 13-classroom, 42-laboratory facility is the college’s first new teaching building in 20 years, said spokeswoman Jeanette Villanueva-Walker.