Due to increasing numbers of applicants to Fresno State over the past several years, some departments are planning to increase their minimum eligibility requirements for specific majors for fall 2016.

“The university is looking at several things,” admissions and records director Tina Bedall said. “This time last year, we were pursuing what’s called program impaction.” Impaction allowed certain programs to change their eligibility criteria.

Fresno State has been impacted since 2009, which meant it received more applications from qualified applicants than it had capacity to admit.

“So for years, what we did was we gave our local students the minimum admission requirements, and we raised the non-local (admission requirements),” Bedall said. “But over the years — about the last five years — because we continued to grow with applications at about 5 percent (per year) we were receiving so many applications at the local level and admitting them with just the minimum requirements — we were almost shutting out all non-local students in order to meet our targets.”

Certain programs in agriculture and engineering are considering raising their minimum eligibility requirements, Bedall said.

“Fresno State has been an open access university all its 105 years of existence,” said Dr. Ram Nunna, dean of the Lyles College of Engineering. “This is pretty much the first time that we’ve gotten to this impaction discussion, from a programmatic perspective.

“Just in engineering,” Nunna said, “in 2009, we had 1,378 enrolled students in our college. In fall 2015, when we began we had 1,714 students, that is almost a 25 percent increase in enrollment over just a five-year, six-year period.”

“That was significant because all these students — we had to support them for labs, we had to support them with classes,” Nunna said. “It’s a significant challenge and opportunity for growth.”

Fresno State received a total of 26,023 applications for fall 2016, an increase from the 25,685 applications received in 2015.

Fresno State’s growth in applications has been in line with the growth of applications throughout the CSU system overall, which had over 830,000 applications from more than 311,000 students for next Fall.

“Every campus is different, but most CSU campuses received an increase in applications from 2015 to 2016,” CSU spokeswoman Elizabeth Chapin said.

The program impaction proposal was approved by CSU officials in March 2015, Bedall said.

In the past, a 2.0 GPA was the minimum a first-time local applicant needed get admitted to Fresno State, in combination with specific SAT or ACE test scores. ­A 3.0 GPA was the minimum needed with any test scores. The GPA and test scores are used to calculate an eligibility index score for the CSU system.

The mechanical engineering department more than doubled in size from 207 students in fall 2010 to 517 students in fall 2015.

The capacity issues will result in raised eligibility requirements for the mechanical engineering program, Nunna said.

To deal with the demand, the engineering department has hired 24 full time, tenure-track faculty since 2008 and hopes to hire eight more in the near future, Nunna said.

Though certain program’s eligibility requirements may increase, the Lyles College of Engineering is attempting to remain as open access as possible and understands that the CSU eligibility index, which is calculated with GPA and test scores, has its limits. ­

“We are working on a program which we hope to unfold next year to be a transitory program for those who demonstrate potential through other means — they can still come to Fresno State, be part of this transitory period for brief period and then fully quality to be admitted to engineering,” Nunna said.

The record number of applications are expected to remain an issue throughout the CSU system going forward.

“Even though the CSU is receiving more applications than ever, facilities issues, space and funding limitations have forced the university system to turn away between 25,000 to 32,000 fully qualified applicants each year,” Chapin said.
“The good thing is a lot of people want to come here,” Beddall said. “Unfortunately, the number of applications we get, we certainly can’t accommodate ­— we just don’t have enough space to accommodate everybody.”