VENTURA : UC Satellite Campus Attracts Students

While 200 students at UC Santa Barbara sit in a Philosophy 100A lecture, Gerard Thurston, a Ventura police officer, watches the class on a large television screen at the university’s satellite campus in Ventura.

Three days a week, Thurston and 25 other students go to the UCSB Ventura Center on Maple Street near the Buenaventura Fashion Center to watch the class on a 40-inch screen. A microphone linkup bridges the 30 miles between students and teacher.

Thurston, 31, is working toward a psychology degree at the only satellite campus in the University of California system that allows students to earn a degree off campus.

Rose Hayden-Smith, the center’s director, sees the mission of the satellite office as filling the gap in the county that results from the absence of a four-year public university.

The center caters to county residents who do not have the time to commute to the main UC Santa Barbara campus or other four-year institutions in the Los Angeles Basin. “Considering that most of the students work full time, they’re married and they have families, this is the only way they can get” University of California degrees, Hayden-Smith said.

“There are a lot of people each year who would not be able to get a UCSB degree if this program weren’t here,” she said. “They don’t have the time to drive to Santa Barbara every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”

Three out of four courses offered at the center are taught on-site by UC professors who commute from UC Santa Barbara. Televised classes make up the remaining 25% of the center’s curriculum.

Smaller class sizes can give Ventura students a great advantage over their colleagues in Santa Barbara.

For instance, Walter Capps, a popular religious studies professor, teaches a course at the Santa Barbara campus that routinely draws 850 students, filling the school’s largest lecture hall. The class is so popular that it is also televised to the community on cable in Santa Barbara.

But this spring, Capps taught the same course at the Ventura center to 47 students.

Although Capps clearly enjoys his popularity, he said he appreciated the flexibility of teaching a smaller group. “It is satisfying because we are able to go into a topic in greater intellectual depth,” Capps said. “We have the opportunity to take almost as much time as we need to make a point clear.”

Capps said he also appreciated the maturity of the Ventura class, as compared to the young students he lectures to in Santa Barbara. “They have a lot of experience and that does contribute quite a bit to our discussions.”

Most of the center’s 200 students seeking degrees have transferred from Ventura Community College. Some also attend courses at UC Santa Barbara and many of them commuted to the main campus before discovering they could take classes in Ventura, Hayden-Smith said.