Our View-Transferring misery to transfer students wrong

Every year the Cal State Long Beach campus population grows by the hundreds and while enormous tuition increases have been tossed down our throats to combat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget cuts, students are still going to pay more for less.

In an attempt to curb campus growth, CSULB has decided to turn away new applicants for the 2009-10 academic year, as reported last week in the Daily Forty-Niner.

With the exception of engineering and nursing majors, CSULB will cut transfer student enrollment excessively while favoring high school applicants.

It seems education once again will be placed on hold for some.

Transfer students make up a large population of this campus and denying students who have worked hard to reach the university is, for lack of a better description, wrong.

There was a larger-than-normal influx of high school graduates applying to our university this year. The same Forty-Niner article outlines reasons for this boost, from other California universities tightening admissions requirements to student financial shortfalls.

But why should transfer students have to carry the unfair burdens of being blocked from an already overcrowded campus? It’s all about the money.

Freshmen promise four years of tuition while transfer students average two years. That means only two years’ worth of buying “I Heart The Beach” sweatshirts. High school students bring an entire four-year possibility of tapping into mom and dad’s wallets.

The harsh reality of the educational business is once again slapping us in the face.

It seems this system is focusing on making the biggest buck and not on educating the community. Many transfer students will be stuck in college limbo without a clear view of graduating until who knows when.

Schwarzenegger plans on signing the state budget into action this week, more than 80 days beyond the due date.

The spending plan provides more for education and social services than the previous year, but cutbacks are unavoidable, according to the Los Angeles Times.

There are more students on this campus than last year. All these students are paying higher fees and the educational system has been allotted more money than the year before. How does this justify denying a particular set of students the right to a university education?

Transfer students usually start at community colleges because of financial limits, or may not be academically ready for a university. The students who are not ready for university learning are often from high schools that are providing inadequate prep education. The university’s proposed cutback action is only going to make it tougher for transfers to make it to the university level.

Denying more transfer students is only going to add to the problems of an unequally educated society; the uneducated comprising the majority of families who start out with a disadvantage.

When the CSU Board of Trustees sold us out by prematurely voting to increase undergraduate student fees by a whopping 10 percent — with the same lies that have doubled fees since 2001 — it was in response to the governor’s proposed cuts. By increasing fees, the CSU system acted preemptively to supplement the resources that would be limited by Schwarzenegger’s threatened slashes.

However, because those cuts were not ultimately approved, it seems the increases should have created more classes and made more room for students. Instead, we get less.

California has nearly a quarter of a million fewer people working this year as unemployment teeters at almost 8 percent. As a community and as a nation we have much to gain from educating those who wish to continue their schooling. It is in our best interest to pool all of our resources to allow for this to happen.

But it seems that at The Beach, “Graduation starts today,” unless you’re a transfer student who has nowhere to transfer your pain.