[ PPT 3 ] Meanwhile, environmental studies and environmental science programs climbed from their low point of 976 in F/92 to their high point of 1,274 in F/00. Their major enrollments have dipped a bit since then, showing 1,254 as of F/04.

[ PPT 4 ] By adding up all earth and environmentally conscious undergraduate majors together, peak enrollments among all three majors hit 3,084 in F/03 and then slid down 15% to 2,636 by F/04, which is the trough in the data set so far. Within that generally slipping picture, environmental studies and science programs are growing, geography is slipping roughly in tandem with the whole, while geology is dropping like a rock as environmental studies and science takes off.

[ PPT 5 ] Geography can be compared with the other earth and environmental fields, but it can also be compared with Anthropology, a discipline with which it shares the natural science/social science split. [ PPT 6 ] Adding these two diverse fields' enrollments together, we see that the collective enrollments are holding pretty steadily somewhere between 2,100 and 2,300. Within that collective, geography is declining and anthropology is taking up the slack proportionately. [ PPT 7 ] The overall picture is a little disheartening. Disaggregating it by campus, however, provides a little room for optimism. A few departments have experienced a little to a lot of growth in the last five years: my own department at Long Beach has grown 70% from F/00 to F/04 (and has actually more than doubled from S/01 to S/05), while the Humboldt department has increased 12%, the Los Angeles department has grown by 9%, and Sacramento has grown by 1%. All other departments are declining, most from 15-35% in the last 5 years.

Everyone mentioned the critical rôle of excellent lower-division teaching. Every department seemed to have at least one star instructor, sometimes a part-timer and sometimes a tenured or probationary faculty member, who enjoyed a bit of a cult following through word-of-mouth. This reputation brought general education students into the department's courses, and this allowed the opportunity to recruit majors.

Everyone commented that they enjoyed pretty good relations with their deans and the rest of their campus administrations. This helped the departments maintain their faculty lines after retirements and, thus, their FTES and opportunity to recruit majors.

The chairs all noted that they were a bit entrepreneurial, too. They see the ôtle of the chair as noticing and publicizing the accomplishments of their faculty and their students, particularly through internal newsletters, conversations with their deans, participating in major fairs, and the occasional external press-release for a department event

All chairs commented that their faculty got along with little to no factionalization among them. They could pull together as a unit and avoid becoming a problem for the administration.

Two of the departments are bachelor's granting departments only, and they felt that perhaps the lack of a graduate program forced them to focus more on the undergraduates, who then responded to the attention and mentoring to become geography majors. Two of the others, including mine, have large graduate programs and thought that the presence of graduate students helped them maintain their upper division major courses, so that the undergraduates could get through in a timely manner. They also feel that the graduate program was intellectually stimulating to them and that that might have made their undergraduate programs more vital. In other words, the presence of a graduate program has unclear effects on the health of the undergraduate program.

What I didn't do was specifically query the departments that are having problems in maintaining their enrollments. It is possible that most or all of them are doing things no differently than the growing programs, to no avail, which would be critical information to have. If there really is a difference between the growing and the declining programs, however, then maybe the declining programs can identify a few things to try to see if they make a difference.

Given the situations of our cognate disciplines, it seems that we might try making common cause with them to grow the number of students who are interested in the earth and its stewards. If we can collaborate with them, rather than compete with them, maybe there will be enough new students to share around. On our campus, Geography, Geology, and Anthropology collaborate on a number of research and grant projects, which has substantially eroded the old rivalries among the programs to the point that I find myself worrying about the fate of geology! We have held common workshops on jobs in our fields for Earth Science Week. We are trying to coördinate our GE offerings to channel our students into one another's GE classes.

[ PPT 8 ] I'd like to spend a little time looking at the state of the cognate disciplines on my own campus, because I think there may be a portent there for every department in California. Geology and Geography both experienced a drop in majors since 1992. The Geology decline was slower and less variable, while Geography really skidded pretty steeply from 1992 to 2000. At that point, Geography began to grow, while Geology began what looks like a slightly steeper decline.

[ PPT 9 ] With respect to Geography and Anthropology, the totals for majors in both fields increased erratically from 1992 to the present. Geography, however, was declining pretty steeply from 1992 to 2000, at which point it began to take off and nearly catch up with the more slowly growing Anthropology.

I had thought that Geography's growth might have had something to do with the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project, in which we had collaborated with Geology and with Anthropology to increase the interest of underrepresented students in the geosciences. That assumption was questioned by examination of Geology's fate at CSULB.

I then looked into the diversity of the three majors, which, after all, was the whole point of GDEP. I examined the relationship between the percentage of majors who were non-Hispanic white and the number of majors in each of the three departments. I had data from the campus Institutional Research Office from F/97 to F/04. In all three cases, Geography [ PPT 10 ] , Geology [ PPT 11 ] , and Anthropology [ PPT 12 ], there is an inverse relationship between the percentage of majors who are non-Hispanic white and the number of majors. I then combined data from all three departments and the two years of data from our new Environmental Science and Policy major. To make the data suitable for comparison, I represented each program's enrollments in terms of the percentage of their maximum enrollment over the 8 years of data. Whichever semester saw the program's peak enrollment was set to 100. I then combined the data on percentage of majors who are non-Hispanic white and this index of enrollment size relative to peak enrollments [ PPT 13 ] . With 26 data points in the combined data set, the inverse relationship between the dominance of white students and the relative numbers of majors emerges as a significant factor driving the number of majors. [ PPT 14 ] , with a correlation co-efficient of 0.50 and a regression co- efficient of 0.25, a relationship significant at the 0.01 level (that is, random selection could have created an association as strong as this in fewer than 1% of samples that could have been drawn).

One take-away message is that geography and its cognate fields need to work on diversifying their majors and appealing to new kinds of students. Geography and geology, especially, tend to be disproportionately white, even on minority-dominated campuses. Potential majors may have picked up an interest in the earth on middle-class family vacations to Yosemite or Grand Canyon, an interest further piqued in college GE classes. But the demographics of California are changing dramatically, and the earth and environmental sciences will continue declining if they continue to be dominated by a declining demographic.

Our campus tried to approach this problem by partnering with local community colleges and high schools and collaborating to create summer research internships for underrepresented students in these feeder schools, the Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Project, which Suzanne Wechsler described at this meeting. GDEP has built a community of trust, respect, friendships, and ongoing research among the three departments and their partners and created an exciting and often life-transforming experience for the approximately 30 student research assistants. For Geography, it really bore fruit: Our majors went from 76% non-Hispanic white in F/97 to 74% in F/00 (just before GDEP began) to 67% in F/04 at the conclusion of GDEP. For Anthropology, those numbers went from 59% in F/97 to 54% in F/00 to 50% in F/04. Geology, however, for some reason showed an opposite trend, going from 78% in F/97 to 60% in F/00 and then back up to 77% in F/04. None of us know quite what to make of this, but I think we may be seeing statistical small-sample effects here. At CSULB, Geology has only one third of the majors that Geography does and only one fourth the majors that Anthropology has.

So, cautiously interpreting the GDEP outcomes, it would seem a good investment of energy for geography departments to work on diversifying their major base, concentrating on their lower division GE courses and, if feasible, the local community colleges, where a disproportionate number of underrepresented and poorer students start their college careers. Getting kids in the field and working in our labs and actually participating meaningfully in some kind of research project can give minority kids the "Yosemite" experience that may not have been part of their childhoods. Informing them (and their parents) of the jobs available to geography majors is also critical, and GDEP made "Jobs in Geoscience" a key part of the program. Many of the new demographics in college are the first generation through college, and they are under parental pressure to major in something that will get them a good job after graduation, and parents and students may see geography as a frivolous and unemployable major. We are working hard to confront that misperception, and a GDEP-type program gives you several weeks to break through that conditioning. Many of the GDEP research assistants did go on to major in one of the participating majors, and we've had a couple who continued to major in engineering or business but chose to minor in geography.

For more information about GDEP, here is the URL for the project, including links to assessment materials presented in various conferences: https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/geography/gdep/ This talk will be on my web site, so here's that URL, too: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/. The viewgraphs shown during the presentation are available as a PowerPoint slide show at https://cla.csulb.edu/departments/geography/assessment/cgs05.ppt. And our own department is described at http://www.csulb.edu/geography. The California State Universities Chancellor's Office data, on which the bulk of this analysis was based, can be found at http://www.calstate.edu/as/stat_reports/degree.shtml. The CSULB data on ethnicity and numbers of majors came from the CSULB Office of Institutional Research, http://daf.csulb.edu/offices/ima/institutionalresearch/ondemand/index.html.