Geography enrollments nationally sank to their lowest levels in the last
quarter century (~3,000 bachelor degrees) in 1988 and then rebounded to their
highest levels ever in the mid 1990s (~4,000), before sagging back, though not
quite as hard, by 2000 (~3,500). Geology followed a somewhat similar pattern,
only more extreme and lagged from ours a couple years or so.
PPT
2 The trend in the California State University system since 1992 is
roughly similar to national trends. Geography peaked in the CSU in 1992 at
not quite 1,200 bachelor's degrees granted and then slumped to roughly 825 by
2002, with a small rebound since then (to about 850). CSU geology peaked at
roughly 925 in 1994 and dropped fully 43% to 525 in 2004. In California at
least, and possibly elsewhere in the country, geography and geology
enrollments may be affected by their varying appeal to a relatively declining
demographic: the white middle class population, who tend to go camping
en
famille, where their kids pick up an interest in the earth that is later
fostered in college.
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3 Geography and geology at California State University seemed to reflect
national and state trends, both declining since their peaks in the early
1990s, with geography declining more precipitously until about 2000. At that
point, the two departments diverge, with geography strongly rebounding even
past its 1992 high point by 2005. Geology is still sagging. At this point, I
don't know whether geology is simply following geography the way it has
nationally or statewide or whether geography really has hit on a formula for
growth.
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4 A possible clue is seen in the diversity of the two majors. Geography
has become markedly less dominated by non-Hispanic white students (46% of
majors in Fall 2005) and more reflective of campus demographics (about 34%
non-Hispanic white) since about 2001, which coïncides roughly with the
beginning of the increase in enrollments. We are somehow finally learning how
to appeal to underrepresented students, and their influx is augmenting our
major numbers.
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5 Geography is quite interested in this phenomenon and is trying to figure
out why it's growing, so that we can continue doing whatever it is we are
doing. We informally ask our new majors where they come from, so that we can
cultivate those sources. Our majors typically declare as juniors, and
community college transfers are a large segment of the new majors.
We have also become quite concerned about the advising going on in the
Academic Advising department, which handles all advising for lower division
students until they declare a major. We have also identified other advising
streams on campus, which route students to our general education courses.
Geography is certainly not alone in trying to figure out its enrollment
numbers and, unlike most other places I've been, CSULB geography has struck up
a number of win-win collaborations with other departments.
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6 Top among our sources of new and potential majors are the many local
community colleges in Southern California. Geography is very much a
late-bloomer kind of major, so we recognize that we are very dependent on
whatever is going on in the community colleges and that it is in our interest
to deepen ties with them, the more so since so many minority students start
college there. As we've gotten more familiar with the situations of
geographers there, we have learned that they are often housed in departments
alone or with only one or two other tenured or tenure-track geographers. They
very much enjoy events that bring them together. Many of them hold Ph.D.s or
have an interest in doing research, but their institutions do not reward such
activity, may not have the resources to encourage it, and certainly don't have
the equipment and facilities necessary. And it is difficult for them to
engage in it if they must forego income-earning opportunities, such as summer
teaching.
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7 So, we at The Beach have been working on establishing a geography
community. We have repeatedly offered to make talks in community college
classes, sometimes as parts of their Geography Awareness Week/GIS Day events,
and some of them have taken us up on it.
We also make sure to invite community college geography facuty and students to
our own special events, notably Geography Awareness Week/GIS Day, which has
long been a major event for our department. For the last three years, we have
hosted a Geography Community College Luncheon at the end of Geography
Awareness Week, and, besides the socializing, this has become a bit of a
working luncheon, with sharing of labs and other class materials.
In Spring 2001, we held a GIS Articulation Workshop as there were a lot of
resentments building up in the community colleges about the inability of the
CSUs to articulate their lower division GIS courses with our upper division
GIS courses. We were able to explain how articulation is a process
established in conformity with State laws: We cannot articulate the classes.
We do, however, waive students who've completed GIS programs at the local
community colleges out of our upper division principles course and let them go
directly into our advanced applications and programming oriented GIS courses.
The students get the units and they get waived out of a requirement but the
classes don't "articulate" as such. Similarly, we explained that it would
help their students if they took basic statistics at the community colleges,
so that we can waive them out of our lower division stats class. This
workshop really cleared the air, and it encouraged us to create a required
lower division introduction to GIS, cartography, and remote sensing course,
which we now can and do articulate with their basic courses.
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8 Another initiative for deepening ties among our institutions is my
active recruitment of tenured faculty at the community colleges to moonlight
as adjuncts in our department. This gets experienced instructors into our
classes where they can help us recruit our own students into geography, since
so many of them are so successful at marketing geography to their own
students. It also creates weekly interactions among all our faculty, which
facilitates communication and heads off misunderstandings, such as the flap
over GIS articulation.
A very important initiative, one that speaks both to interaction with
community college geographers and the diversification of the geography major
is the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project. GDEP will be discussed in a
little more detail later, but it was an interdisciplinary research
collaboration among community college and CSULB faculty and a wonderful field
and lab experience for their students.
PPT
9 The lower division and undeclared major advising system became a target
of our attention, since our campus has been so much more diverse than our
major. We had all heard horror stories about advisors giving students bad
advice about certain majors (one of the worst being discouraging minority
students from taking math, which then set them behind when, through general
education, they discovered a love for a science field). In May 2005, Paul
Laris, our undergraduate advisor, and I met with Academic Advising to tell
them more about geography as a discipline, as a career preparation for
students, and how we would love to have our new majors prepared in basic
general education to do well in geography. We left a lot of advising
materials and I created a web collection of materials for them. They said I
was the only department chair who had ever taken the time to talk with them
and that they really appreciated it and would advise more students to take our
GE courses. They made good on that promise: We were nearly inundated with
enrollment in our large lecture courses (one class was expected to have 120
students and wound up with 225!).
PPT
10 Our campus also has a wonderful advising program called the
Learning Alliance,
which tries to create a small liberal arts college experience within our
enormous urban comprehensive commuter school. The Learning Alliance recruits
first semester freshman students to participate, with the inducement of
enrollment priority in certain classes they need. Students are put into a
variety of learning communities, all of which basically entail pairing courses
with social science or physical science content with courses in written
communication. Assignments in the writing course are about the content in the
other course, which requires instructors to collaborate. Geography faculty
love participating in these learning communities and the Learning Alliance
loves the Geography faculty who have participated, so they always prioritize
one of our courses for these learning communities. This ensures hefty
enrollments for us and, since the students are self-selecting, their
performance exceeds those of normal froshies. This has been a regular supply
of new majors. Campus-wide, the Learning Alliance has approximately doubled
retention rates and graduation rates for participating students.
PPT
11 Geography works with other similar departments to address many common
concerns, such as diversifying our majors, helping supervise our graduate
students, sharing research equipment and facilities, and codesigning the new
Environmental Science and Policy major in a way that grows the number of
students interested in the environment without hurting the traditional
environmental disciplines. ES&P students are encouraged to double major, and
quite a few do so with geography.
PPT
12 Perhaps our most successful such collaboration was the
Geoscience Diversity Enhancement
Project of 2001 through 2004. Faculty in physical geography, geology, and
archaeology at CSULB established summer research programs and then recruited
community college and, later, high school faculty to work as partners in these
projects. The community college faculty's summer salaries were paid through
NSF, so that allowed many of them to dispense with summer teaching. Each of
them nominated a student from an underrepresented group, who had shown
interest and aptitude in one of these three collaborating geosciences.
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The students were paid for two months of full-time work as research assistants
in the field and lab, which gave many of them their first real interaction
with relatively "natural" sites all over Southern California, sort of the
Yosemite experience they never got as kids.
PPT
14 GDEP was a total win-win all around. Some 29 students participated, as
did 30 CSULB faculty and graduate students and faculty at five local community
colleges and five local high schools. Part of our team was David Whitney in
the Psychology Department, who served as project assessor (and, indeed, full
participant observer). He found that all students reported greater self-
confidence and increased educational ambitions: All wanted to go to graduate
school! The community college and high school faculty got to engage in
research projects, reported using more hands-on field and lab components in
their classes, and felt they had a much better grasp of career prospects in
geography, geology, and archaeology and how students should prepare for them.
The CSULB faculty reported much better understanding of the kinds of pressures
facing poorer students, especially minority students, and that that might
affect how well they reach out to such students in their regular classrooms.
As GDEP evolved, the interactions across disciplinary boundaries led to a
number of interdisciplinary projects and these interdisciplinary projects
often took on a community service quality. The whole group remain friends,
which has blunted the natural tendency of departments to compete with one
another.
PPT
15 In our discussions within GDEP and within the Geography Department, we
feel that we have become more effective at communicating with students who may
have had drastically different upbringings, which may be one reason geography
majors are becoming more diverse, as are anthropology students. Geology is
not diversifying, but that may be just a small sample effect, as geology has
only about a quarter to a third of the majors of anthropology or geography. I
would say Geography has more aggressively courted the community colleges than
have the other two departments, and it bears remembering that minority
students and students in poverty are far likelier to start their college
careers in the community colleges.
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Working with the community colleges can both increase the number of majors as
well as the diversity of the students in our major. Indeed, the whiter a
geoscience major is, the less likely it is to rebound or exceed its 1990s peak
enrollment!
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We cannot confine our appeal to what is a declining demographic in California
and other parts of the country. We need more students, and one way to grow
our majors is to tap into the interests of underrepresented students.
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I wish to acknowledge the support of NSF GEO 01-19891, which funded the
Geoscience Diversity Enhancement
Project. The CSULB Department of Geography website is
https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/geography/.
This document is maintained by: Christine M. Rodrigue
First placed on web: 03/11/06
Last Updated: 03/11/06