Cal Lutheran Wants Public College Overflow : Education: Officials of Ventura County liberal arts school say many students want out of crowded campuses. A marketing plan is being prepared to attract them.

Cal Lutheran University officials say they are increasing efforts to position their private school as an option to students who might want to leave overcrowded state colleges in search of smaller, more personalized campuses.

“The competition among private colleges and universities is really intensifying,” said Dennis Johnson, the college’s vice president of enrollment and student life. “The state schools are having difficulties and this is our chance to prove ourselves as an alternative.”

The situation is leaving educators at the 32-year-old liberal arts college in Thousand Oaks with an enviable dilemma: While planning the long-range future of their still-young college, they must hurry or miss a chance at possibly the largest application flood in the past decade.

With adverse publicity mounting about crowding at the Cal State and University of California systems, some students are beginning to flee state schools for smaller, private colleges offering more personal attention, Cal Lutheran officials say.

Already, the transfer student rate at Cal Lutheran has increased slightly, from 189 transfer students last year to a projected 215 this fall.

“We would be ill-advised in relying on an outflow from the public system to increase our applicant base,” said Luther Luedtke, Cal Lutheran’s president.

“But certainly, there’s any number of their students who come here and say, ‘We think we’ve died and gone to heaven because somebody knows our name.’ ”

The Thousand Oaks university, however, would face some tough hurdles in any attempt to recruit from state universities.

“I don’t think they have great name recognition,” said Anne Cogen, the director of American College Placement Service in Encino. “They could do better.”

Cogen said she “just loves” Cal Lutheran for its small size and friendly atmosphere. But many of her San Fernando Valley clients have to be talked into considering it as a prospective college because they have never heard of it, she said.

Across the city, at the student consulting firm Maurice Salter and Associates in West Los Angeles, college counselor Vicky DeFelice said she sees Cal Lutheran mainly as an alternative to junior college.

“It’s a small school. It’s safe. It may be a bit slower paced,” she said. “I don’t think that it’s known for anything particularly.”

It is this kind of attitude that bedevils Luedtke, the energetic president who came on board barely more than a year ago this fall. The college’s profile outside Ventura County “is incomplete,” he acknowledges.

Attempting to solve this dilemma, Luedtke hired Johnson as vice president of enrollment and student relations with a directive to increase applications. Johnson moved to Thousand Oaks six weeks ago from another Lutheran college in rural Iowa.

Already, he is at work on the question of how to boost campus enrollment.

“We do want to have even more geographic diversity,” he said one afternoon last week. Currently, about 43% of the campus’ 1,800 undergraduate students come from Ventura County, with another 35% hailing from other parts of the state, university officials say. The university has about 2,900 graduate and undergraduate students combined, officials say.

The university already recruits in Arizona and New Mexico--states with strong traditions of public schooling but a small selection of independent colleges. Johnson said Cal Lutheran plans to increase its efforts in the Southwest.

But while the university steps up its campaign for students outside California, administrators are also rushing to get on top of any future student flight from nearby public institutions.

“We’re an alternative to the state schools,” Johnson said. “Students are blown away by the contrast. They get personal attention and the faculty actually know their names.”

This fall, for the first time, officials from Cal Lutheran and other private schools in the area will meet formally with local community college counselors to explain to them what their students must do to qualify for admission as juniors. The UC and Cal State systems already hold such conferences regularly, said Gil Martinez, a counselor at Oxnard College.

In addition to Johnson’s efforts, Luedtke recently organized a marketing committee to figure out what ideas to put in the flyers Johnson and his staff hand out to prospective students.

The committee has met once and already faced its biggest hurdle, said Carol Keochekian, the committee’s chairwoman and Cal Lutheran’s director of university relations.

“We’re still trying to get a clearer definition of ourselves,” she said. “The university is still pretty young and we’re changing all the time.”

Committee members embarked on two initial projects, Keochekian said. One will try to gauge local and regional perceptions of the university, she said. The other will try to define the university for itself--because, Keochekian reasons, if you don’t know who you are, you can’t sell yourself to others.

Luedtke says he sees the university poised at the beginning of a dynamic, exciting chapter in its life--one in which it will grow somewhat in size and, he hopes, greatly in academic reputation.

Some steps toward that goal are easy to take, he said. On-campus programs for visiting scholars and professionals spread the college’s name around the globe. Adding new computer technology to campus facilities helps to better prepare students for the 21st Century and encourages the image of Cal Lutheran as a progressive institution.

But he ponders the stickier questions, most importantly: Whom should the college strive to admit?

“It is a dilemma,” he said. “How to maintain the institution’s long-standing commitment to the individual, regardless of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or any other marker, and deal with a larger applicant base?”

Luedtke estimates that the university now admits two of every three applicants. He and other administrators say they like to think of Cal Lutheran as the natural college choice of many Ventura County high school students.

That is the image some students cherish as well. “I always thought, apply to Cal Lutheran because everybody gets in,” said Jeff Aschbrenner, a senior and the student body president.

“I like (the fact) that there’s all kinds of students here, from some real smart people to others who struggle a little more,” said Heather Weiss, a Cal Lutheran junior.

Yet Luedtke also has grander ambitions for the little campus in the north hills of Thousand Oaks.

“We certainly do want to become the institution of choice for high academic achievers,” he said.