SDSU North Campus Enrollment Soars 60%

Student enrollment at San Diego State University’s North County satellite campus in San Marcos is up 60% from spring, but officials say it doesn’t reflect increasing demand as much as it does the ability to better accommodate upper-division and graduate students in North County.

Classes are held in an office and industrial park near the junction of California 78 and San Marcos Boulevard, where the university leases 32,000 square feet for classrooms, offices and support facilities--including a student store, health clinic and library.

Last spring, the university leased about 20,000 square feet. Over the summer, it increased its space by more than 50%, accommodating the increase in enrollment.

Although a precise count has not yet been taken, Dean Richard Rush estimated that 1,800 to 1,900 students attend classes in San Marcos, most part time.

Could Handle More

By comparison, last spring 1,257 part-time and full-time students attended SDSU classes in San Marcos.

The university could handle even more students if it had the space, Rush said.

“Last year’s data (based on students’ ZIP codes) indicated that there are about 4,000 North County students going to San Diego State’s main campus--and there may be even more from North County who have moved to San Diego to be closer to the campus there,” Rush said.

“Our enrollment has been artificial in a sense, because the demand is already here, and we’ve only been able to offer courses insofar as the resources have been available,” Rush said.

SDSU has purchased a 300-acre site as a permanent campus in San Marcos, with upper-divsion and graduate courses beginning in the fall of 1992 and plans for a full-service, four-year program, perhaps to begin as early as the fall of 1995.

By the year 2020, the campus--probably to be known as San Marcos State University by then--is expected to have more than 20,000 students.

The San Marcos campus now has a faculty of 122, and offers courses in 13 undergraduate majors, two credentialed programs and two master’s degrees--education and social work.

Undergraduate courses range from business, accounting and management to Spanish, sociology and liberal studies in preparation for teaching careers. Each course is also offered in San Diego. “We have no curricular innovations here but, by the same token, we offer the identical quality in San Marcos as is offered in San Diego,” Rush said.

The San Marcos campus draws almost exclusively from North County, Rush said. The students tend to be slightly older than those attending the mother campus, are undergraduates by a 2-to-1 margin and are women by a 2-to-1 margin.

The North County satellite campus opened in Vista in 1979, with relocatable trailers on a middle school campus to serve 148 students. SDSU moved its North County campus to San Marcos in 1982, where today it fully occupies three buildings.