Palomar College Is Unfazed, Upbeat About Competitor

You might expect Palomar Community College to be looking nervously over its shoulder these days, not sure what effect the opening of a state university in San Marcos will have on it.

Palomar College, after all, has been the granddaddy of public higher education in North County, albeit primarily for college-level freshmen and sophomores.

But now that Cal State San Marcos is moving from paper to reality and is building a new campus just a couple of miles away, might Palomar be relegated to some lesser position, rejuvenating the old stigma of being a “junior college,” a “high school with ashtrays”?

Will North County’s graduating high school seniors look to the new university with a gleam in their eyes? Sure, Palomar has been the convenient way station for lower-division students who looked to finish their studies elsewhere in the pursuit of a four-year degree. But now that there’s the university opening in town, why not go directly to Cal State San Marcos for the entire scholastic stint?

Yet, Palomar College sees no need to retrench. Here’s a college where enrollment this fall--classes start Monday--is expected to exceed 24,000. Here’s a college that has satellite centers from Camp Pendleton to Borrego Springs to Rancho Penasquitos, and is negotiating to open its largest satellite center yet, in a one-time catalogue showroom fewer than 10 miles away in Escondido, to better accommodate its exploding enrollment.

Here’s a college that, like some discount department store selling everything from toys to tires to televisions, offers a one-day session titled “Fabulous Freebies and Bargains in America’s Finest City,” a 13-week course on early-American rug hooking and a semester-long class on electron microscopy.

Full-Service Program

Palomar’s curriculum mirrors the mission statement for California’s system of community colleges: Offer something for everyone, inexpensively.

By law, community colleges have to admit into their classrooms anyone who is 18 years old. There are no entrance exams, no Scholastic Aptitude Tests. You don’t even need a high school diploma.

Community colleges are part of California’s three-tiered system for public higher education. The University of California system has the strictest enrollment standards and offers doctorates as the pinnacle of academic achievement. The CSU campuses are the second tier, with more lenient

qualifications for enrollment and offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Then there are the community colleges, which accept anyone and offer only certificates (for vocational trades) and associate in arts degrees for those who have completed the equivalent of lower-division college work.

For that reason, community colleges have a rap in some circles for catering to students who wouldn’t cut the mustard at a four-year college and who saw the community college as a chance to learn, at least, how to work on an automotive engine or handle a wood lathe to get a job.

Maybe so. But then, figure this. A statistical survey by the CSU chancellor’s office shows that Palomar College students who transferred to a state university earned a grade-point average of 2.74 out of a possible 4.0 in their junior year at the university. By comparison, students who enrolled as freshmen at the state universities had an overall grade-point average of 2.63 at the end of their junior year.

The statistics suggest that Palomar does a better job of preparing students for upper-division work than do the state universities themselves.

Couple that fact with the cost of going to a community college, and Palomar’s staff and faculty think they have an appeal that can’t be beat. A full-time student at a community college will pay $100 in fees for two semesters. The same student will pay $976 in fees to attend San Diego State University, and $1,767 to attend UC San Diego.

“There are still a lot of parents out there--yuppies who maybe are UC- or Stanford-educated--who don’t think Palomar is the place for their children,” said Cynthia Poole, who heads Palomar’s counseling office. “But when we go out to the high schools in the spring and talk to seniors and their parents, a lot of them are overjoyed by what they hear about Palomar--the cost, and our achievements.”

That basic spiel is for graduating seniors to spend their first two years of college at Palomar, pay only $200 in fees, take the same core curriculum, general education courses that would be offered to lower-division students at a four-year college--courses whose units are transferable to the university--and then decide where to go for upper-division work. By that time, the student will be able to better select a university to fit his interests.

“A student might start off at San Diego State for his first two years, pay the fees, and then decide he wants to go into forestry--something that’s not offered at San Diego State. He’ll have to transfer anyway,” Poole said.

If the Palomar graduate wants to transfer to UCSD, he’s got an inside track. Under an agreement between UCSD and Palomar, lower-division students who end up with at least a 2.4 grade-point average (roughly a C+) in a prescribed set of university-quality courses are guaranteed admission as juniors to UCSD.

Bill Stacy, president of Cal State San Marcos, said a similar arrangement will be offered between the new university and Palomar, so the two campuses will be seen as cousins, not competitors.

“I’ve already got a lot of respect for Palomar,” said Stacy, a one-time speech instructor who came from Southeast Missouri State University to be president of Cal State San Marcos two months ago.

“I can remember being a debate coach and going to a competition at Pepperdine. Palomar was there, too, and they really beat up on some schools from the Big Ten. They’ve been darned good in intercollegiate debate, even against full, four-year universities.”

Palomar has received national notice, too, for its renowned nursing education program, Stacy said.

“You don’t have to be a Cal State campus to be the best at what you do,” he said.

Stacy and his Palomar counterpart, George Boggs, said they expect in the years ahead to share students who will attend both schools concurrently, depending on how their class and work schedules mesh.

“We’re going to see students attend both places, rather than exclusively one or the other,” said Boggs, as noteworthy for his soft-spoken ways as he is for his cowboy boots.

“We’ve got some work to do, to figure what courses we’ll provide to feed into their majors,” he said. “But I also expect they’ll be sending students over here for courses that will be preparatory to their majors--classes that maybe we can offer at more convenient times, with good instructors and at reasonable fees.”

Boggs conceded that he was concerned, when Cal State San Marcos was on the drawing boards, that the new university would drain students who otherwise would attend Palomar. For that reason, Boggs was one of those who recommended--and state officials agreed--that Cal State San Marcos not enroll freshmen and sophomores until 1995.

Apprehension Relaxed

But Boggs has since rethought his position, reflecting on his days as an instructor and administrator at Butte Community College, not far from Cal State Chico.

“We found that Chico brought a lot of students into the region and that, once there, a lot of those students enrolled at Butte as well. There’s a certain synergism that we expect to experience here, as well.”

For its part, Palomar is continuing to grow rapidly, despite a slump in enrollment in the early 1980s, experienced throughout California’s 106 community colleges, brought on in part by an expiration of GI Bill benefits and the institution of fees, however modest.

At Palomar, enrollment dipped from 20,000 to 15,000. By the end of the coming school year, Palomar might eclipse 25,000 students, Boggs said.

The average student at Palomar is 30 years old; there are more women than men on campus. Only about 16% of the students come directly to Palomar from high school; conversely, about 6% of the students are 65 or older--drawn by such courses as “Be Alive as Long as You Live.”

Most students are returning to school after several years’ absence from a classroom. Many are retired military personnel; many are women leaving the home front for the first time because they need to enter the work force. Others are simply in pursuit of personal enrichment.

As many students take night courses as day courses. Two-thirds of the students attend part time; the typical student who gets his A.A. degree from Palomar has taken 5 1/2 years to finish work that could be accomplished full-time in two years.

Nearly 10% of Palomar’s students already have bachelor’s degrees and have returned to Palomar to further their education in different areas, or for specialized work. Last year, counselor Poole said, three students with doctoral degrees returned to Palomar so they could get their A.A. degrees, which, in their professions, meant pay bonuses because it was yet another academic degree to add to their scholastic pedigree.

58 Degrees Available

All told, Palomar offers 58 A.A. degrees, in subjects from accounting to welding technology. But campus boosters say Palomar’s contribution to the community goes beyond the campus setting, which is filled to the brim and which, on weekday mid-mornings, finds every available classroom occupied.

A full 30% of Palomar’s students don’t even go to the campus; they attend courses at the seven satellite centers, including 3,000 students who attend Palomar classes in the evening at Mt. Carmel High School in Rancho Penasquitos. One student recently earned her A.A. degree from Palomar without ever stepping foot on the main campus in San Marcos until graduation day.

“We have a 2,500-square-mile service area,” said Bill Flynn, dean of community education. “A lot of people can’t get to us, so we try to get to them.”

Like other community colleges, Palomar is able to quickly put together special-interest courses to meet specific requests. When someone complained about trouble in mastering his home video camera, Palomar put together a special, one-day course on the subject, taught by the college’s television production instructor.

“We might get a call from a local industry saying they want a specific course for their management staff in, say, business communications,” Flynn said. “So we’ll tailor-make the package to meet the needs of that company, find an appropriate instructor, and offer it to them when they want it, where they want it and cost it out so it’s competitive to the private marketplace. It may not be a college credit course, but it meets their specific needs.”

It was that kind of logic that led Palomar to offer, for instance, three separate three-session courses on how to master the tricky computer word-processing software “WordPerfect.”

More Than Just Campus Life

Palomar’s resources go beyond the classroom. Consider:

* Its 44,000-square-foot, three-story library, housing a collection of nearly 120,000 books and more than 900 periodicals and papers, making it the largest research library in North County. The library is open to the public, and about 4,000 non-student residents hold library cards.

* Its 47-acre hiking-trail system, featuring an 8-acre landscaped arboretum with more than 500 types of trees, shrubs, flowers and grasses. A separate cactus garden is nearby.

* Its acclaimed Boehm Art Gallery, where the works of younger contemporary artists have won critical exposure that has landed them more prominent showings elsewhere.

* Its planetarium, which offers free public shows and lectures on Wednesday nights, and is available for special shows and elementary school field trips so children can view a re-creation of the night sky projected onto its domed ceiling.

* A Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome, built in 1958, which houses 3,000 people for unbroken views of concerts, speakers, graduation ceremonies and basketball games.

* A 400-seat performing arts theater and discussion, in conjunction with the city of San Marcos, which has $700,000 burning a hole in its pocket--for a community amphitheater in a hillside bowl on the campus’ back side.

“For years, Palomar College was out on its own, doing as it pleased, ignoring the city and itself ignored by the city,” said San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau. “The college seemed to complicate all our problems, especially with traffic.”

“But things have turned around in the past few years--maybe the coming of the new university had something to do with that,” Thibadeau said. “The amphitheater is an example of that. We’ve been looking for a site for years, but, quite frankly, we never looked to the college for help, and they never offered. But now they’ve come to us with a proposal: They’ll offer the space, and we would pay to develop, maintain and operate it. There’s a new spirit of cooperation between the two of us.”

Boggs, who joined Palomar in 1985, is also credited with smoothing what had been a rocky relationship between the faculty and staff with the former administration. Boggs, a chemist by background, said his first marching orders from college trustees were to “heal wounds” between the administration and the college’s employees, brought on by growing distrust between the two in earlier years.

Today, Palomar’s faculty still is not represented by a collective bargaining unit, preferring instead to delegate faculty members to meet with the president in negotiations.

If Boggs has been embroiled in any controversy, it may well have been his decision to give coaches a stipend for their work, over and above the pay they receive as instructors, even though some of their instructional time is reassigned to coaching duties.

A faculty and staff task force formed by Boggs recommended to him that the coaches not receive an additional stipend, but he nonetheless recommended the stipend to the college’s trustees, and they agreed.

Problems at a Minimum

“There’s some concern on campus that George might have violated the collegiality that has worked pretty well since he came here,” said one longtime faculty member. “But still, in my meetings with other community college faculty members around the state, it sounds like we’ve got the fewest problems of any in terms of working with our administration.”

Boggs deflects the criticism that he is less open to faculty and staff participation than he once was.

“Collegiality means the administration and the board have an obligation to take seriously the recommendations of our task forces and committees,” he said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t still disagree.”

Overall, it appears that morale on campus is healthy, especially among the faculty, if not the students who will begin the daily scramble for parking spaces Monday.

“We’re here because we want to teach, and we’re allowed to teach,” said Pat Schwerdtfeger, president of the faculty senate and an instructor of speech and religious studies.

“The faculty at (San Diego) State and UCSD generally have larger classes. Many of them are taught by graduate assistants, and the professors are often focusing on research and on getting published,” he said.

“But here, I can teach. I’ve got 25 to 30 students in a class, and I can actually get to know them personally. They’ve got my full attention. It’s fun for them, and it’s fun for me.”