Cal Poly and budget woes

Parents Forum
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<p>New enrollment to drop by more than 20 percent at Poly because of budget cuts
Unlike many other colleges, Cal Poly applicants apply to specific majors rather than seeking general admission — resulting in some majors being more competitive than others.</p>

<p>Engineering is one of the more competitive majors at Cal Poly; the number of applicants increased by 14.1 percent this year to 7,791 students.</p>

<p>“We had 400 engineering applicants — each with a perfect 4.0 (grade-point average) — turned away for admission this fall,” Maraviglia said in a statement.
<a href="http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/314507.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/314507.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>IMO rather than reducing programs they should increase student fees to cover the gap. According to my quick calculation (but maybe I'm missing something), accommodating the $9.9M budget decrease by increased fees among 16,600 students (4150 freshman UGs X 4 years) would only be about $600 per year. If it was divided up between the number of students indicated on CalPoly's website (19,777), it'd be about $500.</p>

<p>I'm sure something's missing from the simple equations above but still, I'd rather see a fee increase rather than a cut in programs. That goes for the UCs as well. Even with the increase these schools would still be a good deal IMO.</p>