With several impacted majors, and other departments applying for that status, SF State will embark on a plan to study campus-wide impaction status over the coming year; a move that could make it harder for future students to get in and help those admitted get the classes they need, school administrators said.

“Declaring impaction campus-wide is a complex decision that requires serious analysis. A campus committee is being established to study the issue,” said Jo Volkert, associate vice president of enrollment management via e-mail.

More than 1,000 students were still waitlisted for classes as the add deadline passed last month while the university is experiencing its largest freshmen class ever, according to school data. Without impaction status, SF State must admit anyone who meets the standards determined by the CSU system.

“If a student applies within a given time frame and basically meets our criteria for admission … we have to take you,” SF State President Robert Corrigan said during a recent discussion with journalism students. “We should take you. There is not an alternative to us.”

Seven other CSU universities – CSU Long Beach, CalPoly Pomona, CalPoly San Luis Obispo, CSU Bakersfield, CSU Fullerton, San Diego State University, and the California Maritime Academy – are currently impacted. As a result, they can turn away otherwise applicable students because the school itself is then “authorized to apply high[er] admissions criteria,” said CSU Long Beach Vice Provost David Dowell. For instance, transfers to CSULB with 63 or more units must have a 2.4 minimum GPA instead of the CSU-standard minimum of 2.0. In addition, CSULB closed off the spring semester to transfers and new freshman applicants.

“By virtue of the title of being impacted it allows us to create additional admissions criteria above and beyond ... [and] delimits the number of students who would eligible to apply,” Dowell said.

SF State hasn’t experienced growth as rapidly as CSULB, but as Dowell pointed out, the generation of baby boomers’ kids is turning 18-years-old, and those teens are applying for college.

The earliest SF State may enforce impaction standards if it meets the criteria would be fall 2010.

“Requests for impaction status must be submitted in April 2009 for impaction to be in effect for the fall 2010 admission cycle that begins on Oct. 1, 2009,” Volkert wrote in an e-mail.

Until then, four departments at SF State are impacted: nursing, social work, apparel design and interior design. In order to be impacted, a department has to appeal to the CSU chancellor and show that their impaction is affecting the graduation rates of its students.

As the school works on the study, individual programs are devising their own ways to deal with overcrowding. The impacted nursing department is possibly looking to raise its already heightened GPA minimum for admittance, three other departments are impacted and others, such as the journalism department, have applied for impaction but have been denied.

Some programs have raised their admissions standards. For example, the design departments require portfolios, and the nursing department, which admits only 80 students to its baccalaureate program a year, looks not only at a student’s GPA but previous work in health services, language skills and multicultural community experience, said Professor Karen Johnson-Brennan, of the nursing department.

“In recent years we have had over 1,000 applications. We always have several hundred more people who are eligible,” said Johnson-Brennan who joined the department 30 years ago when it was already deemed impacted. The nursing department held a vote recently on whether or note to raise the minimum GPA in prerequisite courses from 2.8 to 3.0, although a decision has not yet been made. But Brennan said she’s vote to raise it even higher because “in reality you need at least a 3.7, so if you’re not somewhere near there, don’t bother applying.”

“It’s almost harder now to become a nurse than a doctor because the requirements are so high,” Dowell said.

“[The CSU has] twenty-three campuses, with 460,00 students, and a birth rate, particularly in the southern part of the state, which is increasing,” Corrigan said of the growing need for available education. “So it becomes almost a moral issue to some extent. If not us, who?”