More and more students are trying to get into Cal Poly as the university received a record number of undergraduate applications this year.
Cal Poly received 30,786 undergraduate applications for the fall 2006 quarter, a 12 percent rise from last year. This is the 12th straight year in which Cal Poly has set a record for applications.
“I think students recognize the unique nature of this campus,” James Maraviglia, assistant vice president of admissions, recruitment and financial aid said. “I believe students know the value of a degree from Cal Poly.”
Cal Poly has been going high-tech in the past few years in order to recruit, using customizable Web pages and targeted e-mail to reach prospective students. Each major has a personalized video e-mail that is sent out to students interested in each area.
“A 10th grader can basically be engaged in a relationship with people at Cal Poly before even stepping foot on the campus,” Maraviglia said.
The center of the hightech recruiting process is a VIP page, a customizable Web page connected to calpoly.edu. The page sends prospects information and a viewbook that is a stylized tour through Cal Poly.
The viewbook was launched in the fall of 2003. In early 2004, it took first place in the Internet/World Wide Web category in the 19th Annual Admissions Advertising Awards, which is done by Admissions Marketing Report, a monthly magazine about admissions.
“Through an integrated effort involving the entire campus, over 90 percent of our fall applicants have either established a virtual relationship with Cal Poly or visited the university in person, or both,” Maraviglia said.
Cal Poly extended its campus tours last March to accommodate thousands of expected students, according to a Cal Poly press release.
Students will know by early March if they made the cut or not. Last year, Cal Poly received 27,063 undergraduate applications, but only selected 9,880 according to the fall 2004 school census.
Cal Poly is not the only CSU seeing such high numbers; San Diego State also hit a record this year with 52,000 undergraduate applications, according to a press release from the school.
Online applications for the entire CSU system, the largest higher education program in the United States with 400,000 students, rose five percent this year. Overall the system is seeing more applicants, but it is not an even rise across all campuses; eight or nine campuses are actually struggling to meet enrollment Maraviglia said. “The fact of the matter is there are a lot less college-bound students now,” Maraviglia said.
At Cal Poly the applications were spread relatively evenly across the majors, Maraviglia said.