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California State University

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The California State University (CSU) is one of three public higher education systems in the state of California; the others are the University of California system and the California Community College System. It is incorporated as The Trustees of the California State University.

The CSU system is composed of 23 campuses and has 414,000 students supported by 44,000 faculty members and staff. It is the largest system of postsecondary education in the United States that does not include community colleges.

The CSU prepares about 60 percent of the teachers in the state, 40 percent of the engineering graduates, and more graduates in business, agriculture, communications, health, education and public administration than all other California universities and colleges combined. Altogether, about half the bachelors degrees and a third of the master's degrees awarded annually in California are from the CSU.

Since 1961 more than 2 million alumni have received a bachelor's, and master's degrees from the university system. It offers more than 1,800 degree programs in some 240-subject areas.

California State University, Fullerton is its largest campus in terms of student body population with 35,040 students in the Fall of 2005.

Contents

History

Today's California State University system is the direct descendant of the California State Normal School, a normal school established by the California Legislature on May 2, 1862. The California State Normal School was itself derived from the City of San Francisco's Minns Evening Normal School (now, San José State University), a Normal School that educated San Francisco teachers in association with that city's high school system. A second California State Normal School campus was created in Los Angeles in 1882.

In 1887, the California legislature dropped the word "California" from the name of the San Jose and Los Angeles schools, renaming them "State Normal Schools." Later Chico (1887), San Diego (1897), and other schools became part of the State Normal School system. In 1919, the State Normal School at Los Angeles became the Southern Branch of the University of California (now the University of California, Los Angeles). In 1921, the State Normal Schools became the State Teachers Colleges. By this time most of the campuses became identified by their city names plus the word "state" (e.g, "San Jose State," "San Diego State," "San Francisco State").

In 1935, the State Teachers Colleges became the California State Colleges and were administered by the California State Department of Education in Sacramento. The Donahoe Higher Education Act of 1960 gave the system greater autonomy from the State of California.

In 1972 the system became The California State University and Colleges, and all of the campuses were renamed with the words "California State University" in their names. At some of the older campuses, alumni successfully lobbied the California Legislature to revert the schools back to their pre-1972 names: San Jose State, San Diego State, San Francisco State, etc. In 1982, the CSU system dropped the word "colleges" from its name.

Today the campuses of the CSU include comprehensive and polytechnic universities and the only Maritime Academy in the western United States that receives aid from the federal Maritime Administration.

Images

Image:Tower Hall and MDA.JPG|San Jose State University (SJSU) Image:Csupomona.jpg|Cal Poly Pomona Image:Sdsumain.jpg|San Diego State University (SDSU)

Governance

Responsibility for the California State University is vested in the Board of Trustees, whose members are appointed by the Governor of the State of California. The Trustees appoint the Chancellor, who is the chief executive officer of the system, and the Presidents, who are the chief executive officers of their respective campuses.

The Academic Senate of the California State University, made up of elected representatives of the faculty from each campus, recommends academic policy to the Board of Trustees through the Chancellor.

Chancellors of the CSU

Endowment

The California State University's permanent, collective endowment has grown to $678 million U.S. dollars as of the close of the 2004-2005 academic year. In addition, each of the 23 campuses of the CSU raise their own funds through donations and other external funding, and each campus controls its own separate endowment funds not counted in the above collective endowment amount. [Link to CSU Endowment & Fundraising webpage]

Campuses

The CSU is composed of the following 23 campuses listed here by order of the year founded:

Laboratories

Former Campuses

Differences between the CSU and UC systems

Both university systems are California publicly funded higher education institutions.

According to the California Master Plan for Higher Education (1960), both university systems may confer Bachelors or Master's degrees as well as professional certifications, however only the University of California has the authority to issue Ph.D degree (Doctor of Philosophy) and professional degrees in the fields of law, medicine, veterinary, and dentistry. As a result of recent legislation (SB 724), the California State University may now offer the Ed.D degree (also known as the Doctor of Education or "education doctorate degree") to its graduate students as well as certain types of professional doctorate degrees (for instance, audiology, etc.). Additionally, the California State University offers Ph.D degree (Doctor of Philosophy) as a "joint degree" in combination with other institutions of higher education, including "joint degrees" with the University of California and accredited private universities. This is why, for instance, San Diego State can qualify as a "Research University with high research activity" [(Carnegie Foundation link)] by offering 16 doctoral degrees.

The California State University (CSU) attempt is to accept applicants from the top 1/3 of California high schools. The University of California (UC) attempts to accept the top 12.5%. In an effort to maintain a 60/40 ratio of upper division students to lower division students and to encourage students to attend a California community college first, both university systems give priority to California community college transfer students. The state, which funds all three institutions, encourages this because the cost of educating a student through a community college is less.

While historically the requirements for admission to the CSU have been less stringent, due to changing demographics, campuses such as San Luis Obispo, Pomona, San Diego, Long Beach, and Humboldt have been forced to turn away students who would otherwise be CSU-eligible. In addition to the above campuses, Chico, Fullerton, Northridge, San Marcos, and Sonoma are considered impacted. This means more students apply to these universities than the campuses can accommodate. Because of this these campuses have higher admission standards than the CSU minimum. Unlike UC, Cal State admissions are based more on GPA and SAT/ACT scores than other factors such as admission essays.

There are 23 CSU campuses and 10 UC campuses representing 414,000 and 191,000 students respectively. The cost of CSU tuition is approximately half that of UC. Thus, the CSU system has been commonly referred to by California residents as "The People's University."

See also

External links

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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